Legendary Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen was an avowed pacifist. Yet he ended up entertaining Israeli troops on the frontlines of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as described in Matti Friedman’s new book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.

Later, Cohen described the experience: “We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs. Or they would give us a jeep and we would go down the road towards the front and wherever we saw a few soldiers waiting for a helicopter or something like that we would sing a few songs. And maybe back at the airbase we would do a little concert, maybe with amplifiers. It was very informal, and you know, very intense.”