Oct. 8, 1973. On Tel Saki, a lofty hill in the southern Golan Heights, a handful of Israeli soldiers are busy counting the bodies of their fallen comrades. Of the 32 fatalities from the armor and Nahal units, Dan Almagor recognized more than 20 of them.
Almagor was a 20-year-old paratrooper at the time, born in Romania and raised in the Tel Aviv suburban city of Giv'atayim. He was given the task of identifying his dead friends and inserting little notes with their names on them into their shirt pockets. Since Almagor had specialized in explosives, he was also asked to make sure that the bodies were not booby-trapped. Syrian forces were camped a few hundred meters away, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued to push them off the Golan. Smoke clouds still rose from the hill.