Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  NIGHT WITH A FULL MOON. My first night flight.

  Tsutsik, my instructor, took the controls, and off we went. We flew around the training areas. The air about us was full of light and shining; moonlight spilled over all like milk and lit the world white. I could see fields below us, brooks, canals, and trees. The roofs of the houses in the villages shone under the starred, almost pale blue skies. “What a night!” said my instructor with a growl like a bear.

  “Bright as day,” I said.

  “Let me show you something!”

  He jammed the throttle forward, and the Harvard roared with all nine cylinders of its radial engine. Six hundred horsepower accelerated us to maximum dive speed; then Tsutsik pulled up hard. G-force crushed our asses into the creaking seats. The fat, round nose rose up and up into the yellowish sky, and stopped with the propeller pointing right at the Milky Way. As we lost momentum the engine coughed, and sparks from the exhaust pipe spattered near my right leg. The smell of gas filled the cockpit. Then at zero airspeed the Harvard stopped in the air and stood still vertically, its tail pointed at the ground. After a moment of hesitation, the chubby trainer shook and fell back on its tail and then rolled sideways in a perfect stall turn. The airspeed indicator vibrated, revived. The nose now pointed at the ground. The engine coughed and backfired. A blinding stream of fire wound around and slid in through the canopy’s slots, licking and burning my face.

  “What a beautiful night, huh?” Tsutsik gleefully said with a howl. I happily agreed. The skin on my face burned a little, but I loved it.

  Back from the first night flight, in our rooms, we all had difficulty falling asleep. We gathered in Goldie’s room. A jabber of voices, impressions, chattering, laughing. Oh, what a night!

  “Is there anybody here who didn’t get an acrobatics lesson?” inquired ZBB. Nobody answered. If someone wasn’t lucky enough, he didn’t say. We were men enough to guard our instructors’ dignity and our own.

  TWO WEEKS PASSED. We went out for a second night, this time dark, with no moon. We were to practice takeoffs and landings. The rear seat was manned by Assaf, a famous fighter pilot, superior flight instructor, and the leader of the IAF’s aerobatic team. We started up, and made our way cautiously onto the darkened taxiing strip. Finally we got permission to line up on the runway, a path of black void between two rows of kerosene lamps along it. The Harvard raced forward, became airborne, and the two rows of lights disappeared behind us. We closed the canopies over our heads, and the aircraft sank into the darkness like a sea of black ink. Only the constellations of the settlements’ lights glowed in the empty darkness streaming under our aircraft’s belly, punctuating points on the dark background not unlike the heavenly constellations that shone from space. It was hard to discern the horizon and difficult to stay oriented. A frightening experience for a rookie.

  Assaf was “sitting on my controls” and guiding me. He taught me patiently how to combine outside vision with the instrument readings. He handled the ship with a gentle affection that for many years after I strove to imitate.

  Finally we finished circling and got ready for the first landing, but then, “A Harvard has landed badly, and is upside down on the runway,” the radio informed. “Enter a holding pattern,” Assaf instructed me, then explained, “Just circle the field.”

  I did as he said. The backseat went silent. Once around, twice around. Boring.

  “Hey, tower, how long is this going to take?”

  “Stand by, checking.”

  On the third go-round Assaf took an interest in my performance in the course. “How are you doing?”

  “So-so,” I answered, concentrating on the turn-and-bank indicator.

  “Good,” the team leader volunteered. “Come on, show me a barrel roll.”

  And from here to there I got one of the best lessons ever in acrobatic series performance, together with all the exercises. Assaf was flying the aircraft smoothly and precisely. He worked on my handling, and taught me to change the pressure on the pedals gently from one foot to the other, together with changes in airspeed and engine power. “Close your eyes,” he told me in the vertical climbs, and I learned how to avoid the blinding bursts of fire from the exhaust pipe. On the third practice run I could already keep the aircraft looping in a straight line parallel to the row of the kerosene torches along the runway. On the fourth, I succeeded in rolling it in a vertical dive, with the nose pointed directly at the cluster of fire trucks blinking in the darkness around the turned-over aircraft.

  After midnight, when we were leaving after a meal of cold, oily sunny-side-up eggs, Assaf turned at the dining room door to tell me conscientiously, “Listen, Spector. Whatever you saw tonight, well, it’s not regulation. Don’t do that stuff in the future.”

  “Of course not, sir,” I said with my best innocent, blue-eyed gaze. “Night acrobatics just aren’t done.”

  NIGHT NAVIGATION CLASS. In the beginning we circled the country under the supervision of our instructors, but we were waiting impatiently for the next stage, solo navigation. We already had a secret plan involving what we would do when we could work unsupervised. The program was exciting. We developed it in complete secrecy. Finally the plan was ready down to the last detail, and written down. We approved it in a secret meeting in the barracks.

  This was the program: We would take off from Tel Nof one after another, five minutes apart, and go north. The first “practice station” would be half an hour later, over Mount Tabor in the Galilee. There, everyone would do acrobatics for five minutes. That done, each one would clear out and navigate west. The next station would be over the small beach town of Atlit, on the Mediterranean coast. There we would form pairs, each odd number waiting, circling, for the next one behind him. When they met, take another five minutes for a mock dogfight. When that was over, they should separate and return home the same way they came, and say nothing to anybody.

  And as in every well-planned operational scheme, we put in our plan all the necessary topics, such as “communications,” “concealment,” and “deception.” Regarding communications, the whole operation was to be done under strict radio silence, except for the mandatory reports each aircraft had to make to traffic control on the way. All the acrobatics, dogfights, and departures would be executed without uttering a word on the radio.

  We still had no idea what a dogfight really was, least of all how to do it at night, and so everybody began to imagine tricks to surprise and beat his opponent. This night flight was going to outdo anything our commanders and instructors ever dreamed of.

  Goldie, our leader, summarized it. “This operation must be top secret, before its execution and after it. Is that clear to everybody?” It was clear to all of us. But Goldie didn’t settle for that. “Let’s see some hands!” We all raised our hands and took an oath not to reveal anything to anybody outside the room. We were already ripe soldiers; we created our liars’ club.

  A COLD, DARK NIGHT, February 11, 1960. Our canopies were covered with dew. Twenty Harvard trainers started up at five-minute intervals. Each took off at the same interval and headed north. In every aircraft an air cadet sat alone with his map in his left hand under the dim red cockpit light, passing alone over the dark land. Only one instructor was on duty in the squadron ready room, just in case. Terribly bored, he sat close to the kerosene stove, warming his hands and joking with the clerk, yawning and looking at his watch, waiting for the last aircraft to land so he could close up shop and get to bed.

  I don’t remember much about Mount Tabor. I was one of the later arrivals, and when I got there it was pretty late. I recall there was some mist down there, and the mountain’s round top protruded from its white veils. The night was so dark that I probably passed on doing acrobatics. But I am not sure; maybe my memory is fooling me. Was I really brave? Did I lift my propeller and aim it right at the cold diamonds of Orion’s belt, shining like torches over the mountain? Who knows? Perhaps I didn’t do that and only rocked my wings a little, if only to keep m
y self-respect. I’m not sure.

  In any case, if I didn’t accomplish great feats over Tabor that night, others did. Yakir no doubt did much more. Yakir was brave as a wildcat and flew like a devil. Yakir the innocent, who in the first week of flight school wrote a song and even composed its music: “To the sky we yearn, there to soar among the clouds,” he would sing in a high-pitched, sentimental voice. “There we shall defend our country from all its enemies!” The same Yakir who suddenly demanded that we erect a memorial stone for the fallen in our class (tonight we were going to lose the second one), and was silenced only when ZBB said maliciously, “Yakir, you turkey. Tomorrow you yourself will be history.” We looked at each other and shivered.

  I REMEMBER ATLIT perfectly.

  As planned, I circled, holding a left turn over the beach at two thousand feet, waiting for Brutus, the next guy after me. The town under me was dark except for a few streetlamps, and I was looking into the darkness around me. Suddenly something emerged, flying right at me, felt rather than seen. Startled, I broke right. A stream of sparks poured into the air nearby as from a grindstone, issuing from a point in the middle of nothing and spilling out to space. It immediately vanished. I heard two clicks on the radio. I answered with a click of my own. The burnished sea beneath me glistened dimly in the pale starlight. A great fear came over me and I turned and fled Atlit, racing south along the beach toward home.

  When I finally shut down my engine and ran back to the ready room in the freezing night air, the search had already begun. The officer on duty counted us once and twice, talking nervously on the phone. Somebody was overdue. Who?

  Our commander, Maj. Harry Barak, arrived from home, his big mustache wispy and the pleasant smile gone. Then other men arrived, and the ready room of the basic training squadron filled with noisy people. It was late when the last of us landed, the last engine coughed and choked in the line, and silence enveloped all. We cadets wandered about on the outside balcony, freezing, waiting. Finally somebody noticed us, and sent us to our rooms to get some sleep.

  As we marched on the wet asphalt, Brutus nudged me with his elbow. “I fucked you over, eh?”

  “What are you talking about, Brutus?” I asked. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “For by wise deceit shall thou make thy war,” he answered me with his brutal sense of humor. “When you grow up, you will learn to switch your lights off at night, and you will not be seen. Why are you opening your baby blues at me?”

  IN THE MORNING, we were called to the ready room.

  We already knew that Khativa was missing. Outside, it was raining. All of us, all the Harvard squadron’s instructors and students, were pressed into the small briefing room, whispering.

  “Attention!”

  The air force commander, Gen. Ezer Weizman, strode in, followed by our base commander, the school commander, and many others we didn’t know. The number of big brass squeezed inside the room that morning was greater than our number. The floorboards creaked.

  Only Weizman spoke. It was evident that when he talked, others shut up.

  “Cadets, has anyone here done night acrobatics?”

  Our instructors squinted at us. Our commander, Major Harry, looked at us, his mustache twitching. Colonel Shieh, the flight school commander, kept shifting from leg to leg. We knew that death and life lay in the power of the tongue. We kept silent.

  “Sheani Junior, on your feet!” Weizman already knew our names.

  Uri got up, stretching his short, stout figure.

  “Did you do acrobatics?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Spector?”

  “Not me, sir!”

  The general turned to the instructors, to our commanders. They all shook their heads no. Some kept their eyes on the floor.

  “Is there anybody here who wants to say something?” For the first time, a tone of hesitation was heard in that energetic voice. Nobody answered.

  Weizman waved his hand: “All right. Officers, all of you, out of the room. Leave me alone with the cadets.”

  After Weizman gave us his word of honor that what we said would stay in the room forever, and that no action would be taken, we broke our silence. And the general kept his word.

  That day and in that room, we buried Air Cadet Khativa. Nothing was ever found of his body or his aircraft. Seemingly they joined the silent flotilla in which my father’s boat sails. But his parents, whom we were sent to visit all ironed and polished, were never really told why their son died.

  Chapter

  6

  Bastille Day

  Mirage 3: a supersonic jet fighter by Marcel Dassault, France. Began development in the 1950s. Can fly twice the speed of sound. Designed to serve as all-weather interceptor, in day and night, and for this end was equipped with Cyrano radar that can detect aircraft. Its armament included a pair of 30mm Defa cannons, a French air-to-air, radar-directed Matra 530 heavy missile, and two heat-seeking Shafrir missiles produced in Israel. The Mirage had three hard points to carry bombs or external fuel tanks that could be jettisoned in flight.

  The main prototype 3C flew first in October 1960; the Israeli Air Force gave it the name “Sky,” and ordered seventy-two single-seaters and four two-seater aircraft. During the 1960s the Mirage was Israel’s main fighter, operated by three squadrons: the Fighting First at Hatzor, the Bats at Tel Nof, and a third squadron at Ramat-David. After 1970, Israel developed the basic design and produced homemade versions of the Mirage—the Nesher (Eagle) and the Kfir (Young Lion).

  THE AIR FORCE WAS A GREAT PLACE, but it was not heaven. True, the majority of us could be called good guys, but there were exceptions. One of these was a classmate at flight school. Let’s call him Hal.

  Hal was a very good-looking young man, and girls were crazy about his fair hair, his oily-brown eyes, and the polite, smooth sound of his voice. In our own eyes—his fellow cadets in the class—Hal seemed simply a sycophant. The trouble was that soon other qualities, much more repulsive, were apparent in him.

  It began with his habit of disappearing in the evenings on his own business instead of working on his studies. There were many exams in flight school, and so on the morning of the test Hal would appear and suck up to people, looking for someone he could copy from. In flight school of that day, a code of honor was expected from the students. True, that code was not always observed; in one of the previous classes, students were caught stealing advance copies of tests. And there was even a case of one student who tried to cheat on a flight examination. But as a rule, people could tell right from wrong.

  Hal, on the other side, had no moral compass. He didn’t hesitate to get us all in trouble. You could try to evade him, but nothing helped. He would rub himself against you and finally take a seat next to you and begin winking. The moment the examiner left the classroom, you felt a hand on your knee or a paper ball landing between your shoulders, and Hal’s voice whispering in your ear. If you turned away from him, he might even raise his voice and demand the answers from you, calling you a coward and guilty of “betrayal of comradeship.”

  Besides being a nuisance, Hal was selfish and a liar. His word was worth exactly nothing. In short time, we all hoped that this guy would wash out of our class. Unfortunately for us, it seemed he was not going away. He flew well, as far as we knew. At least that is what he told us, bragging how he “gave lessons” to his instructor. Among the base personnel he had many, ever-changing girlfriends, and they passed around bizarre stories of how he, with his courage and wit, saved his aircraft and landed safely with a fainting flight instructor. At the end we gave him a ridiculous nickname: the Perfect Pilot. Those girls, who had many times defended him, began to tell about nasty things he had done, some financial and others uglier still.

  In short, if in the beginning we were just chuckling about “Hal’s pranks,” the more we came to know him, the more he annoyed, repelled, and shamed us. When we were still many in number, and four or five boys crowded in each room in the barracks, a v
olunteer was needed to share a room with Hal. His personality became such a social distraction, that evenings before going to sleep, you could hear in each of the rooms, discussions not of the eternal subjects among our kind of young men—girls and flying—but about “the Hal question.”

  One of the evenings we all got together to discuss this issue seriously. Hal was not there; as usual, he had disappeared after dusk.

  First there were the usual discussions, and somebody asked, “Can this guy be the image of the Israeli pilot?” This question put the argument on a higher level. Others said, “Can we trust a guy like this? Can we go to war with him?”

  Some criticized our instructors and commanders. Why couldn’t they sense what type of person they were dealing with here? And then one of us stood and said, “Enough complaining. The responsibility rests with all of us here. If class thirty-one resents Hal that much, it’s our duty to act and bring about his dismissal from the air force.”

  This idea made sense. Immediately someone volunteered to prepare a letter for all of us to sign, which would demand Hal’s removal. This letter was to be handed to the school commander the next morning. But then Zimmer got up and spoke to the other side, and his words were forceful and well argued.

  “Israel is in danger,” he said, “and pilots are needed. Fighter pilots are a rare commodity in particular, and the nation pays a high price for them.” Then he came to the point. “Hal is a pig, no question about that, but what has that to do with the defense of our country? Perhaps Hal may turn out to be the best combat pilot of us all.” Silence fell.

  “Who are you to decide to wash out a potential pilot,” Zimmer went on, “and waste a national investment?” We were stunned.

  “You’ve overstepped yourselves,” Zimmer summed up his impressive speech. “What’s happening here is like mutiny. There are flight instructors and officers here, and all of them are able and authorized people. They are the ones who determine whom to dismiss and whom to keep. Certainly not you”—he stabbed the audience with his pointed finger—“you spoiled brats!”