The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

As the sun rose, what he saw instead was an enemy soldier, on a hill, with his back to him: He’d invaded Jordan. (“I nearly started a war.”) The stretch of land beneath the hill in front of them, he saw, was ideally suited for Jordanian snipers looking to pick off Israeli soldiers. Danny turned to sneak his patrol back into Israel, but then he noticed that one of his men was missing his pack. Imagining the dressing-down he’d receive for leaving a pack in Jordan, he and his men crept around the fringes of the kill zone. “It was incredibly dangerous. I knew how stupid it was. But we would stay until we found it. Because I could hear the first question, ‘How could you leave that pack?’ That has stayed with me: the idiocy of it.” They found the pack, then left. Upon his return, his superiors admonished him, but not about the backpack. “They said, ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’”