In 1958, during a battle in the Golan Heights, Gershon was wounded when an Israeli tank accidentally ran over him. The tank caught the collar of his shirt and FOLDED HIM OVER BACKWARDS, snapping his spine.

The Syrians overran his position and began shooting the wounded Israeli soldiers. As they were about to shoot him, Gershon told me, they suddenly dropped their weapons and ran away.

Later, he said, these Syrians soldiers reported to UN officers that they had seen 'thousands of angels' around the crippled IDF officer and had, therefore, fled. He showed me documentary evidence from the UN to prove it.

As another interesting side note, despite his injuries, Gershon fought in both the Six Days' War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He was among the Israeli paratroopers who captured the Temple Mount from Jordan in 1967.

Gershon swelled with pride when he recounted being among the first Jews to set foot on Temple Mount in nearly two thousand years.

Now we return to the story at hand -- angels on the Israeli battlefield. Gershon's story of angelic warriors is not the first I'd heard -- it was merely the first time I'd heard the story first-hand from an eyewitness.

Soldiers in all of Israel's wars have reported seeing angels on the battlefield. During the Yom Kippur War, a lone Israeli soldier in the Sinai led a captured Egyptian column back to Israeli lines.

When the Egyptian officer was asked why he surrendered an entire tank column to a single Israeli soldier, the Egyptian officer replied, "One soldier? There were thousands of them."

"The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place." (Psalms 68:7)

The officer said the rest of the 'soldiers' had melted away as they approached the Israeli lines. The Israeli soldier reported that he was alone when the Egyptian commander surrendered to him. He didn't see the army of angelic warriors. The Egyptians did.

I read this account some years ago in a secular book about Israel's wars written by an Israeli military historian.