One eye is enough

Fit an autobiography into the rotation - Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life. I'm guessing most autobiographies by nature are the "story of my life" but let's not quibble with the book titles of one-eyed war heroes.

Dayan began life as a farmer and ended life as a farmer. He fit a lot of excitement in between:commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces during the Suez Crisis, Defense Minster during the Six-Day War, close friend of David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres and more.

I've always taken great interest in the history of Israel as a country, particularly its battles, wars, espionage, rescues and general Mossad bad-assery. My brother-in-law is a former Army Ranger who trained with Israeli soldiers and he said they were indeed a cut above. I can't tell you how he actually referred to them because this is a family-friendly blog, damn it.

Dayan either kept journals or had a remarkable memory in recalling events. It would have been beneficial to me, or any reader, to be more familiar with Israeli and Middle East geography as his descriptions often got in the weeds. Maps in the book helped a little, but, really, what guy reads maps?

One thing I noticed is that contrary to his Wikipedia entry, Dayan skipped over the parts about marriage infidelity and family issues. I suppose there might be a thing or two or three-hundred I would leave out of my autobiography, but there was nary the mention of anything negative about him in the book. Nobody would believe me if I wrote an autobiography and skipped over all the bad parts.

Such as:

Another son, novelist Ehud Dayan, who was cut out of his father's will, wrote a book critical of his father months after he died, mocking his military, writing, and political skills, calling him a philanderer, and accusing him of greed. In his book, Ehud accused his father even of making money from his battle with cancer. He also lamented having recited Kaddish for his father "three times too often for a man who never observed half the Ten Commandments".

Thanks, son.

Still, it was a good read. Interesting. Dayan was a very confident fella, which I suppose is what you want in a defense minister and military leader when you are being threatened by all your neighbors.

He had one of my favorite quotes too, might even make it the subhead of this blog. After losing his eye to a sniper attack, he said: "Boys, for all that's worth seeing in this wretched world, one eye is enough."

Ariel Sharon once said about Dayan:

"He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more had to be rejected; the remaining two, however, were brilliant."

Then again, maybe that should be the subhead of this blog.