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events the network showed from midnight until dawn. I was lost; I just didn’t care anymore. As we used to say in the IDF, I was
zayin nishbar
—my dick was broken. I winced, thinking about one tortured night, about a week after Latisha Patton was killed, when I was on suspension. I was so enraged at the asshole who had shot her, so infuriated that I had been prevented from tracking him down, so incensed at my own impotency, that I vowed I would never feel that kind of agony again. I pulled out my Beretta, slipped the barrel into my mouth and listened to the bittersweet, silky-smooth horns of Miles, Cannonball, and Coltrane, the plaintive piano of Bill Evans, thinking that if I was to pick the last thing I would ever hear on this earth, it might as well be the opening bars to “So What.” I’d first heard “So What” when I was discharged from the Israeli army and had descended into a similar funk. Disillusioned, angry, and confused, I had found that the cut was the only thing that gave me any comfort.
    When I was nineteen, I decided to move to Israel and volunteer for the army. I always thought of my relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust—and even my father, who had survived a concentration camp as a boy and had a string of pale blue numbers tattooed on his forearm—as victims. I wanted a different kind of Jewish identity for myself.
    For so long, the Holocaust had been the focus of my Jewish identity, the focus of my
entire
identity. Growing up, my house was a place populated by ghosts and demons. Ghosts—the dozens of murdered relatives. Demons—the Nazis who murdered them. Sometimes, lying in bed, right before falling asleep, when the duplex creaked in a Santa Ana, I could hear the screams and gasps of my relatives; sometimes, when the refrigerator slammed shut, I could hear the clanging door of a gas chamber. Sometimes, walking home from school, I would see a guy wearing a dark coat looking at me and I would panic, convinced he was a Nazi who was going to capture and torture me, and I would run home, out of breath, jump into bed, and cover my head with pillows.
    My house was a place of long, brooding silences and sudden angry eruptions. The sadness was something so palpable that I felt that I could actually touch it, like a patch of fabric. As a child, letting myself experience any emotion, was simply too painful, so I chose not to feel anything. And I didn’t. But then, some little thing would set me off in school, and I would rage in the classroom, screaming at the teacher or pummeling a student who had irritated me, or throwing pencils against the blackboard. My mother would have to come to school and pick me up at the principal’s office. When my mother later told my father what had happened, he would snort contemptuously and say, “What have you got to be upset about? When I was your age I saw my father shot in a ditch.”
    Since visions of murdered relatives had tormented my childhood, I figured that in order to purify myself as an adult, I would do some killing of my own. I flew to Tel Aviv and, naïve and idealistic, enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces. After two months of intensive Hebrew instruction and four and a half months of
Tironut
—basic training—I was selected for an elite
Tzanhanim
—paratrooper—unit. More than four hundred soldiers in my group started the brutal training. Only forty-threeearned their red berets and wings, which we were awarded after a fifty-six-mile forced march, carrying full packs, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
    I then spent eleven months with a paratrooper recon unit patrolling the border in South Lebanon, ambushing Hezbollah guerrillas trying to slip into northern Israel. One frozen dawn, my ambush was ambushed. Blood streaming down my back from a shrapnel wound, I believed I was dying. But as my blood pressure dropped precipitously, I felt a lightheaded, eerie calm. If I was going to die, this was the way I wanted to go—trying to protect the lives of