Three Days to Never Read Online Free PDF

appearing every time the spinning printhead reversed its direction across thepaper. The billing addresses were in Glendale, Santa Ana, Palm Springs…
    Lepidopt walked back into the living room and crossed to the wide front window. He put his cup down on the sill and stared down at the afternoon traffic on La Brea.
    You’re scared until the first shot.
    Lepidopt had been twenty years old in early 1967, working for a plumbing-supply company in Tel Aviv, and the idea of war had been almost inconceivable. Throughout May he had followed the news—U Thant had capitulated to Nasser’s demand that the UN peacekeepers be pulled out of the Sinai desert, which was the buffer zone between Egypt and Israel, and Egyptian forces had taken control of the Gulf of Aqaba—but everybody knew that Egyptian troops were too busy fighting in Yemen to attack Israel.
    Buses in Tel Aviv had been running irregularly because many of the drivers had been called into military service; late in May Prime Minister Eshkol had broadcast to the nation his famous “stammering speech,” in which he had sounded uncertain and scared; and every Arab radio station from Cairo to Damascus had been joyfully predicting that all the Jews would shortly be driven into the sea; but it wasn’t until his own reserve unit was called up that the young Lepidopt had believed there might actually be a war.
    He had been making a delivery to a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv, he recalled, unloading lengths of copper pipe from a truck, sweating in the morning sunlight and watching a group of young men under the corrugated steel awning of a grocery store across the street. They were huddled around a little transistor radio with its volume turned all the way up; the station was Kol Ysrael, and the voice from the radio was reading out call signs—“Open Window…Ham and Eggs…Top Hat”—and every few minutes one of the young men would jerk, and then step into the sunlight and hurry away. The voice was echoing from other radios too, and up and down the street Lepidopt saw men and women stepping out of shops, taking off aprons and locking doors; and then he heard his own call sign, and he dropped thelast armload of pipe onto the street so that he could drive the truck to the army base at Peta Tiqwa. What he remembered later was how quiet it had all been—no weeping or cheering, just the voice on the radio and the footsteps receding away on the pavement.
    Forty years old now, he stared at the Marlboro billboard over the muffler-and-tune-up shop across La Brea, and he pressed the four fingers of his scarred right hand against the sun-warmed glass.
    He had been trained in parachuting, and he had found himself abruptly reassigned to the “red berets,” the 55th Parachute Brigade under Colonel Mordecai Gur. For three days he lived in one of a row of military tents outside the Lod Airport, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and then on Sunday the third of June the brigade had boarded air-conditioned tourist buses and been driven to the Tel Nov military jet field near Rehovoth.
    The next morning he saw six of the French-built Mirage jet fighters take off to the west, the blue Star of David insignia gleaming on the silvery fuselages, and then somehow everyone knew that the war had actually begun. Egypt and Syria were certainly the enemy, and probably Jordan as well, and France and Britain and the United States would not help.
    Most of the paratroopers of the 55th were to be dropped into the desert at the southern tip of the Sinai, near the Egyptian air base at Sharm el-Sheikh; but Lepidopt had been in the hastily assembled Fourth Battalion, and they had been briefed separately from the other three battalions.
    Standing on the tarmac away from the cargo planes and the buses, Lepidopt and his companions had been told that the Fourth Battalion was to be dropped later, over the town of E-Tur on the east shore of the Gulf of Suez, there to