Amos Gitai’s Tour of Duty  Combat Fatigue  Amos Gitai was born
in Haifa on October 11, 1950, to a Bauhaus-trained architect and
the daughter of Zionist pioneers. But he was born as a filmmaker
on the same day 23 years later, when he was one of seven
soldiers in a helicopter shot down while flying rescue missions
over Syria during the Yom Kippur War.  "The cockpit exploded,"
the director recalled on an autumn afternoon in New York, when
rumblings of war in the Middle East were once again audible.
"The copilot was killed instantly, bits of blood and brains were
all mixed up with us. Flying without windows or doors, the pilot
managed to recross the lines and crash-land on the Israeli
side."  Kippur, his most recent feature, mines these harrowing
memories for a soldier's-eye view of war. Gitai, then a student
of architecture, emerged from the helicopter's ruins with light
wounds, but his internal scars were as deep as the fault lines
then opening in Israeli society.  &#145;&#145;There was a lot of
anger in me, co