Could it be that some “actions at threshold” are hidden in my limbs and muscles, waiting to be activated by danger even without any command from the brain?
And then I remembered something I had seen once on a bus. An elderly man stood in the aisle, carrying two baskets of groceries. Then the driver braked, and the old man fell on his face and lay full length on the floor. The amazing thing was that his hands kept hold of his baskets. Did this senior citizen forget to prepare the “action on threshold,” cocking the mechanism letting the baskets go and grabbing the post?
And then I wondered whether there might be other kinds of automatic mechanisms hidden in our subconscious, waiting to activate themselves in moments of need. And if so, what are these actions, and how do they know when to deploy? How had this reaction, which had just saved my life, been programmed and set to execute from somewhere deep in my body? Those thoughts amazed me. I thought, “Here is a serious matter to be learned.”
While I was still moaning with pain and amazement, I heard a loud whup-whup above. A helicopter came to take me for a medical examination.
Benny Peled, the commander of Hatzor Base, was waiting for me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said, and immediately went on, “Listen to what came to my mind, sir…”
Benny listened attentively. When I was done, he patted my shoulder. “I understand. You are going to Mirages. Report tomorrow to the Fighting First; they’ll give you a private conversion course.”
“But Benny, I’m planning to be released.” All that time we lived on borrowed time, saving money for the release. I still hoped to study medicine.
“Good. First do what you are told.”
And so I also got to fly the wonderful triangle, and the anatomy book went into the trash.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO FLY the Mirage for the first time? Namely, the primordial experience of encountering a new world…
Forget it; it’s no use. This is a cliché that turns up in every aviation book ad nauseam, beginning with George Berling’s Spitfire and ending with the astronauts in their space chariots. The description is always similar: the climbing into the “strange” and “complicated” cockpit (and then the inventory list of all the instruments and knobs), and the doubts. Am I good enough for this machine? Can I control it?
Then the standard continuation: a stanza of poetry follows, complete with the sounds of engine startup, and so on till the fake climax—fake because the real thing can’t get on the page. Initially the aircraft feels like a bucking bronco, but soon enough the writer wrests control over it and they fall in mutual love, the machine becoming “a part of him.” And if you are the romantic type like Pierre Closterman, you surely won’t stop there. You will tell about your last flight, how you looped and rolled your aircraft for the last time, and the tears filled your eyes in spite of all you could do when you were listening to the growl of the engine that carried you through the blah blah blah, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, this is exactly how it was between me and Mirage No. 82. She accelerated and climbed so fast and at such a steep angle that I indeed had to fight vertigo. This aircraft’s performance was really amazing—in acceleration, rate of climb, and top speed it still could rival today’s modern fighters, and it had some interesting innovations. And as in all the stories, after a few more flights I fell in love with the Mirage, and also in love with the Fighting First, which had renewed itself with this outstanding aircraft. And the Fighting First became my new home, my true home.
The Super Mystere had been my first love, but I never flew one again. The Scorpions were already a second line unit, and the archenemy wasn’t the MiG-17 anymore, but the fast and modern MiG-21, capable of twice the speed of sound, and the pinnacle of Soviet technology. The Super Mystere had changed from a racehorse to a plow mule. I knew I owed much to the Scorpions, but from that moment on I became a man of Mirages.
THE YEAR WAS 1966, and the air was charged with energy and uncertainty.
While we were looking inward, polishing our capabilities in aerial combat and ground attacks, the world around us hissed and bubbled. Revolutions took place everywhere. Every other week a new military coup in Africa. Charles De Gaulle withdrew France from NATO, and white Rhodesia was crumbling. Indira Gandhi was chosen prime minister of India. Nobel Prizes were awarded to the Israeli author S. Agnon and the poet Nelly Zakash. Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Chicago, and there were race riots in Michigan. Mao began the Cultural Revolution, and China spiraled into chaos. The Beatles—more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon proclaimed—gave “definitely the last concert” in San Francisco. Soviet Lunas landed on the Moon and Venus, while the Americans fought back with Gemini flights around Earth and space walks. A quarter million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, heavy American bombardments hit Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor, and the North Vietnamese declared full national mobilization. The first artificial heart was implanted in Houston, Texas. Turkey and Greece threatened one another over Cyprus. In Yemen, where an endless war dragged on, Egyptian bombers dropped poison gas. Every other week a plot against Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was unearthed. Executions took place in Al Mazza Prison, Cairo. A military coup in Syria, and the Baath Party, led by Jedid and Hafez Assad, took over the government. Syrian strongholds overlooking the Sea of Galilee shot down at Israeli fishermen. The Israeli-Syrian border heated up—and the days were still so fair.
I LOVED TO GET UP VERY EARLY in the morning, before sunrise. I washed and shaved quietly and quickly, and left our small housing apartment in silence, tiptoeing carefully in my flight boots so as not to wake up Ali and the baby. Outside, I stopped momentarily on the stairs, breathing the cool morning air laden with the scent of eucalyptus trees, feeling the clean cloth of my flight suit on my skin, and seeing the pearls of dew glittering on the lawns.
One by one we gathered near Hatzor’s old cinema and waited for the truck to take us down to the Fighting First. Then came a morning full of action and light, working with young men and fast aircraft that smelled of burned gasoline. This smell was sweet in our nostrils. In the afternoon, after debriefing two or three training flights, the workday was over. Only the men on duty remained in the squadron building, preparing to sleep in full gear with their boots on, and everybody else searched for a lift back home to base housing. We usually got home before sunset.
The world was an orderly place, and step by step we settled in. We skimped and saved on my military salary and Ali’s work as a typist. Her mother, Jenny, helped us buy our first car, a blue Citroën Deux Chevaux, well used, and soon I found myself lying under it on Saturdays, greasing, changing oil, installing lamps. In the nearby town of Gedera we got seeds and planted a large garden behind the house: tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, green onions, lines of dill and parsley for our own salads. I built a hut from planks of wood I found in base salvage, and creepers with bottle gourds, good for drying out and making into artifacts, soon covered it. I began flirting with painting. I painted aerial landscapes that soon became abstracts. I couldn’t get rich colors, so I used hued white toothpaste. With it, I dotted carpets of shining points over a black velvety surface, and created a vista of the breathtaking coast, hovering in oblivion, as seen coming home from a training flight on a dark night far away over the sea. But after a while the toothpaste absorbed moisture and disintegrated, and the pictures were lost.
On one summer Saturday we succeeded in getting a military pickup truck—a great coup—and the three of us drove north to Kibbutz Afikim, on the Sea of Galilee. There, in the salvage of the kibbutz’s plywood factory, we loaded the car with a huge slice of a tree trunk prepared for us by Aki. After lunch with Aki’s family in the kibbutz’s public dining room, and a swim in the Kinneret, we drove back to Hatzor, the pickup swaying under the enormous weight. It was two hundred kilometers of bad road to Hatzor.
We placed the wooden slice on our lawn, among the blue eucalyptus trees, and used it as a large outside table. We hung over it a lamp I made out of
a burning jar taken from a jet engine I found in the dump. On this round table we feasted occasionally on Friday nights with our friends Nissim and Etty, Sam and Rana Khetz, Judy and Ilan. Mossik was dead by then. He was killed in an accident.
These were wonderful evenings, with every couple bringing a dish from their small kitchen, and the kids romping on the grass. When the children fell asleep, we put them to bed and continued the evening in one of the apartments, cracking sunflower seeds and chatting into the night, the men with the men and the women with their own interests. By today’s standards we were miserably poor, but that’s how it was for everybody. Our lives were on a small island detached from the world, where jet engines roared day and night until we no longer noticed them. Sometimes we went off base to the short main street of Gedera, to dine at Auntie Leah’s, a shabby roadside inn run by a grumbling old woman, to chew shreds of burned rubber with onion that she insisted was steak.
The greater world around us became French, and Paris was its center. The lingo changed, and the accent. The American hits that had melted our hearts in the fifties on Radio Ramallah from Jordan (“Caroline Husseini sends her wishes to Diana Nashashibi, on her birthday, with Paul Anka in ‘Diana’”) were replaced by the hoarse, smoked humor of Charles Aznavour, the sophistication of Montaigne and Edith Piaf, the lyrical choir Compagnon de la Chanson.
Ali was ready to invest a full month’s salary to see Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petite performing in the Hall of Culture in Tel Aviv. When we managed to get places for Maurice Béjart with “The Rite of Spring” and “Bolero,” we both felt on top of the world and couldn’t sleep the whole night after. Money was scarce, and we stood with empty pockets eyeing mouth-watering miracles such as the newly introduced pizzas, hamburgers, or whipped Italian ice cream dispensed from a machine.
At that time there was still no television in Israel, and on Saturday evenings we all gathered and danced with romantic lighting around the record player, necking in the dark to the sounds of the Platters and the Golden Guitar, coming with “My Prayer.”
NOT THAT THERE WERE NO security issues. The Syrians kept shooting at us, and even tried to divert the source of the Jordan River to dry us out. There was a lot of rapid arming of our aircraft, many ready alerts, and a lot of scrambling aloft. One time I was scrambled with a four-ship formation of Ouragans, loaded with bombs to hurry north to attack the Syrians. On the way I heard Goldie’s voice on the radio—he had led four Mysteres and hit the Syrian post Khamra at the source of the Dan, a major tributary of the Jordan River. Before we could get there, too, we were called back, to our great frustration. On another occasion some Super Mysteres—Nissim and Umsh were in the bunch—had an inconclusive scuffle with some MiGs. All such events excited us. We young pilots all hoped to get a piece of the action.
We Mirage pilots had our special dream: MiGs. Every one of us was praying to his God that his MiG would appear, the one designated just for him. But at the end, one day of training followed another, and the important fight was that of the next morning, against the one comrade who shall be set against you. The wars of the mid-1960s were still in the future. The days were fair, nice days of the end of autumn, before the storms came.
Only at headquarters in Tel Aviv serious men sat, watching with somber eyes the Arab military buildup. They felt the sky darkening; they planned and worried. And somewhere in Tel Aviv, in his apartment, Yak was turning over restlessly in bed, sleep elusive. He drew from his stormy brain various ideas—some of them a bit crazy—and proposed them to his superiors, endangering his reputation and status.
At the end he stood before the commander, Ezer Weizman, and presented him with the answer.
AND JUST LIKE THE SHOWERS of an early autumn, a small series of air battles and victories began. Each case was single, as if it were the last one. When the first ever shooting down of a MiG-21 occurred, an Israeli Mirage of the Fighting First, my squadron, did it. It happened on July 14, 1966, Bastille Day.
I was in Paris then. I met there with Peel, nicknamed Elephant, a friend from the squadron. We both were in Paris on our way back to Israel, after short courses abroad, and luckily we happened to be there on the French national holiday.
We wandered, happy and excited, on the sidewalks of Boulevard Houseman, among a large and colorful crowd streaming toward the Champs-Élysées to watch the grand military parade. Loudspeakers on the chestnut trees trumpeted military marches. We were dizzy. Paris was colorful, noisy, and tempting.
In front of the supermarket Prisunic, a small gathering crowded around a couple of hippies, a young man and a woman, who painted flowers on the ground and collected donations. Passersby threw centimes for them. In Israel you didn’t see things like that. After watching, I told Peel, “I can paint better than those two.”
Exactly at that time the music stopped, and a loud voice broke out over the loudspeakers, speaking with great excitement. The entire crowd froze and listened. The speaker got enthusiastic and shouted in a high-pitched, breaking voice, and suddenly everybody around began to yell and whistle. They all jumped up and down, cheered, waved their hands, hugged, and yelled. We looked around, amazed. We could identify a familiar word—“Mirage”—over and over, but it made no sense. We looked at each other. What did all this mean? Was it a joke? What was the big deal? And all the time the hoarse voice kept shouting, “Mirage! Mirage!”
“Qu’est-ce que il dit?” We pulled the sleeve of this one and that with our basic French, and finally we understood that an Israeli Mirage fighter had just shot down a Syrian MiG-21 over the Golan Heights.
“Le Mirage is a French-made fighter,” they informed us, “and the MiG-21 is the best of the Soviet industry.”
“It’s ours! A French fighter did it!” yelled a man in a fancy suit.
“Not an American!” cried his wife, and he spun her in a dance. Everybody around jumped and applauded. “On Bastille Day!”
Peel and I looked at each other in amazement. Who made the kill, the French? Bullshit, it was us!
“Paint it!” roared the Elephant, and so our demonstration began.
I grabbed the box of chalk from the surprised hippies and began stretching fat yellow lines along the walkway. The crowd backed under the physical pressure of the Elephant, whose name reflects his bodily measurements, and left us an elliptical space of ten or fifteen meters.
Soon the lines of the long bodies of the fighters were drawn on the pavement; the MiG in front with the Mirage sitting on his tail. I didn’t bother much with scenery and clouds; general outlines were enough. On the other hand, the aircraft were painted in great detail. I spotted the Syrian MiG with brown and black and green, but the Mirage’s skin glowed white and silver.
Big drops began falling from the clouds above us, but the gathering around us grew and grew. I drew from the Mirage’s nose a line of yellow chalk stars hitting the MiG’s fuselage. Yellow and red fire broke out with a black trail of smoke. After some thought, I drew an ejection seat from the burning cockpit, with a small pilot sitting in it.
“Mustache, mustache!” somebody in the crowd cried, and immediately a whole bunch of people joined in. The Elephant, ever responsive to the demands of the people, snatched a piece of chalk and drew on the Syrian’s helmet a large black mustache, bristling in the wind. The mob cheered and applauded, women shrieked for joy, and when I added blue and white David stars on the tail and wings of the Mirage, the money began flying and covered the picture. Our hippies hopped around us and collected notes and silver in their hats and squeezed them into their backpack.
“We could have asked for a commission, at least,” Peel scolded me when we pushed in to watch the multicolored French parade. Our work of art was already washed from the pavement by the rain, lost to humanity forever. “At least we could squeeze them for a good dinner, don’t you think? And not couscous again. Did you ever hear of Maxim’s?”
I shrugged. All I wanted was to return to the squadron and get my own MiG.
Chapter
Savage
ONE MORE IMPRESSIVE PERSON squeezed into my life in the last months before June 1967. This was the extraordinary pilot and commander Ran Pecker.
On January 1, 1967, I was posted to the Bats—a sister Mirage squadron—together with eight other pilots of my age group who had been gathered from the rest of the fighter squadrons. We were sent there for two months to take an advanced aviation course called the senior leadership program (BBN for short). This squadron’s exceptional commander, Ran, impressed me greatly, as he did the whole air force in the coming years.
The Bats was the newest among our three Mirage squadrons. It was stationed at the large base of Tel Nof, and was tasked—besides all the normal missions—with intelligence-gathering over enemy countries. The reconnaissance flights were secret, of course, but everybody knew that the Bats were crossing borders. It was the only squadron in which pilots endangered their lives almost daily. They flew deep over Egypt and Syria and brought back pictures of airfields, army units, bridges, and all kinds of installations. Their photos were making the rounds to us in the other squadrons, with the notation “taken on the date of…” When we filed those photographs in our target packages we could only guess which of our friends in the Bats had taken it because they would never tell.
Ran was already a legend. As a fighter pilot, and especially as a leader, he was the best of the best. He wasn’t an ivory tower intellect developing theories, like Yak, nor did he have an analytical mind, like Ephraim. But he was energetic and daring, a charismatic, open man who had learned the Mirage well and who knew how to wring out of it all it had for speed, maneuvering, and range. The frequent reconnaissance operations connected him, a young lieutenant colonel, directly and daily with the gods: the air force commander, the chief of intelligence, the IDF’s chief of staff, the minister of defense, and the prime minister. They all saw him frequently, and soon his name was known all over the country. He knew everyone personally, and everyone knew him. His close friends, his houseguests, were the top military men who commanded brigades and armor and paratroop corps, the leaders of special units, politicians, and spooks.
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