Word: dan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nahal Brigade are aware of just how elusive the enemy can be. In the past three months, the reconnaissance unit has conducted 72 separate operations against terrorist targets. The group is getting faster with each mission. Immediately after receiving the midnight order to pursue the suspect in Nablus, Dan and his lieutenants began planning the raid, phoning nearby units to ask for extra vehicles, grenades and infrared light sticks to operate in the darkness. In a Spartan classroom at the Beit Lid base that functions as the unit's command center, Dan showed his troops magnified aerial images of Nablus...
While the rest of his unit unloaded its gear on the outskirts of the city, Dan went to the Tal Ara base, a rocky military outpost overlooking the city, to make a final check of the target's coordinates. Then Dan rejoined his men and gave them a pep talk. In speeches like these, he addresses his troops as "lions." Based on the accounts of the soldiers after the operation, Dan and his unit moved into the casbah at 2:30, using their preferred mode of transport--their feet. "You have to walk very, very carefully," he says. In groups...
After two hours of walking, Dan and his men reached the edge of the suspect's compound. But then the unit's well-rehearsed plan went awry. One team spotted a man running from the house and sprinted after him, only to lose sight of the figure. Seconds later, another man dashed into the darkness; a soldier gave chase and fired a warning shot in the air, but the man disappeared. Sensing that the unit's cover was now blown, Dan ordered one team to blow open the door to the house and begin clearing it. Speaking in Arabic...
After an hour-long fire fight, Dan managed to load his men into the backup vehicles and speed out of the city. It was already morning, and the unit's exhaustion was compounded by the realization that the targeted suspects had got away. At 9 a.m., the convoy pulled into the base at Beit Lid. The soldiers stumbled to their barracks to sleep; after they awoke, they would spend hours reviewing how the operation went wrong. By the afternoon, Dan had moved on. "You don't always get your target. It happens," he says, dripping with sweat from a three...
...next day Detectives E. Dan Jordan and J.A. McAlpine tracked down Farley, who initially denied involvement. They later found Sims at his home in suburban Forestdale. Sobbing, he confessed in front of his parents. Jordan, now 74 and retired, says Farley fumed, as if he considered Sims and the detectives traitors. But Jordan says he was unmoved. He had felt "demeaned--you know, having to obey Bull Connor, jailing up black children in cages. The civil rights movement was changing the way we thought about things...