Introduction
Okay, I should have known better. It had been almost IO years since the last war, and Israel goes to war about every 10 years. Somehow, I did not believe the rules applied to me. Even the first night, awakened by sirens, my principal emotion was surprise.
The Persian Gulf war began the night of 17 January 1991. Tel Aviv Bureau of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service had just switched to around-the-clock operations, and my shift ended at midnight. I was excited and I finally went to bed at l :30 a.m. At 2:30 a.m. the phone rang, and a contact at the US Embassy told me the war had begun. I spent the rest of the night talking to a friend on the phone, listening to the BBC and hoping the sounds in the night were not incoming missiles.