Refidim was a crazy oasis in the middle of the desert. It was uncertainty itself, wild and heartbreaking, bursting with men, and overrun with flies. It was in the middle of nowhere—half sublime, half ridiculous. Once, all the pilots pulled emergency duty to help unload casualties from a helicopter that had come in, blackened, from a battle in the salt marshes of northern Suez. None of us will ever forget how the door opened and the doctor fell out with the dead and wounded covering him, all of them blackened and bleeding.
The atmosphere was morbid. Once, I was hanging out with two reservists making a pot of coffee near our aircrafts’ hangar. They looked ancient to me, at forty-five or fifty. I was all of twenty-eight. They invited me for a cup with them.
“You get a choice,” said one. “A son fucked up at the Suez Canal, or a daughter fucked in Refidim. Which would you choose?” Suddenly I realized that none of them laughed; this was not a joke.
On the other hand, Refidim actually had some nightlife. After dusk just two pilots had to remain on alert while everybody else could take a shower and was free to wander around. There were many attractions: visiting the Sinai Armored Corps headquarters to join the unending discussions; commandeering a jeep to radar station 511 on the hill, five kilometers off base, to peer in the windows at the girls. And there were many parties wherever lights were on; and night rides on the desert’s crumbling roads, to roll around in the dunes.
THIS WAS A GOOD TIME, except that the relations between my immediate superior, Ran Pecker, and me were going badly. I knew I had made some mistakes in the running of my unit. Some of those command mistakes were marginal, but a few were really dangerous. Ran reprimanded me, and rightly so, but he chose an annoying venue: he chose to do it in public, sometimes even in the lecture hall in front of my instructors and students. I was in trouble.
I thought I understood what he was after. I had never forgotten that talk behind the stage in Hatzor, and figured there was some plan he was working. I felt he was setting me up. The blowup came one Saturday night in Refidim, the Sinai front-line airfield. We were resting there, six pilots of the Fighting First on ready alert, when the telephone rang. Epstein gave me the receiver, his eyebrows going up.
“It’s Ran Pecker, and he wants you,” he whispered to me. “Watch it, Spike; he is really steamed.”
The voice that came out of the receiver was so loud that everybody around heard every word. “Spector?”
“Yes, Ran.”
“What are you doing in Refidim!” The sentence ended without a question mark.
“I’m on duty—” I began, stating the obvious, and then he flared up, cutting me off. He went over all the mistakes that had happened in the unit I commanded since he “unfortunately” accepted me at the school. Ran had an excellent memory for detail, and he connected every mistake with an absence of mine. Once I took leave, in another I was ill, the third time I “disappeared” to fly with the Fighting First.
“Again you’re absent from duty? And I have to hunt for you all over the country, and find you in Refidim?”
This was unfair, but I had no way to stop the harangue issuing from the receiver.
“And what about the training of the aerobatic team tomorrow morning! You got out of that, too?” I was the leader of the aerobatic team of the flight school. Every morning, at dawn, we trained for formation maneuvers with six aircraft, preparing for the forthcoming air shows. Aerobatics in formation is a hard and dangerous performance, and only the cream of the flight instructors are selected to take part in it. It also requires much meticulous drilling, over the normal daily routine of flight training.
“I postponed the training to Monday, when I am back from duty.”
“You postponed it to Monday?” his voice was hoarse, choking with anger. “And you think you are good enough to cancel a training session ten days before the parade! I have seen how you fly…” And so on and so forth. The pilots around watched me with pitying eyes.
I decided to cut this short.
“Ran, excuse me. Just a minute! Yes, I made a mistake. I’ll fix it. Tonight I’ll return to Hatzerim, and tomorrow morning we’ll train—” He slammed down the receiver, and I began looking for a volunteer to leave his home in the North on a weekend and fly to Refidim to replace me. The commander of the Fighting First, Marom, finally arrived after midnight with a Mirage, and I returned in it to Hatzor. At four o’clock in the morning I arrived by car at Hatzerim, shaved, and at six o’clock we performed the aerobatics drill over the base. When, after landing, we entered my office to debrief the flight, yesterday’s voice was already booming from the intercom.
“No, this time I have no complaints about the aerobatics, but now I’m going to teach you a lesson about irresponsibility.”
The intercom is an irritating machine—there is no way to shut off the loudspeaker and talk privately; everybody in the room hears everything. I signaled to the six pilots that the debriefing was over. When the door closed, I dialed the telephone to Ran’s office. The intercom over my head kept rattling on and on.
His secretary picked up.
“Tell Ran I am coming to his office.”
A short pause. The intercom went quiet.
“Okay. Ran says he is waiting for you. He said to come in full uniform.”
Every soldier understands the meaning of “come in full uniform.”
I STOPPED AT MY HOME at base housing to take off my sweaty flight suit and boots and put on a clean uniform. The house was empty and cool. Ali was in Beer-Sheva, at work. Etay and Omri were at kindergarten and nursery. I drank water from the tap, tried to think, and when I went out to the sunny street, I felt my heart beating rapidly. I breathed deeply. Then I decided to go for a moment next door to see Nissim, a close friend since the Scorpions, before I went to the commander’s office.
I found Red as usual, lying in bed. His bandaged hand and foot were hooked up in traction. He had multiple injuries after being returned just a short time before from a four-month stint in an Egyptian prison. They showed him a really good time there, and now he was in the middle of a series of operations involving most of his body. He was on pain pills, but every hair in the brush on his head and mustache stood redly erect, his Bulgarian accent cutting, and his black eyes direct and sharp as ever.
IN THE THREE YEARS of the War of Attrition, eighteen of our soldiers became POWs in Egypt and Syria. Most of them were pilots who were shot down in battles over enemy territory. A few of them were returned after some months of captivity, but most prisoners—some of them seriously wounded—stayed in an Egyptian or a Syrian prison almost four years and were returned only after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After interrogation, which included torture, they were put in one room and for some years they established there a “society” of their own, and lived as if out of time. Sitting in prison was hard, but after it another punishment waited for them, even harsher. While they sat there, the outside world went on. Each of them had had his future and plans, and each had a family at home, parents, wife, and children, whose lives changed during his absence. In some cases the cracks that opened could not be mended anymore.
In the Jerusalem Talmud there is the story of Khony, who fell asleep in a cave for seventy years. During that time the holy temple had been destroyed and rebuilt again, and Khony didn’t recognize the world. When the prisoners of war emerged from whatever hole or prison cell they were kept in, and returned to the world, each of them was a changed person and met a different reality. For some of them their temples, and their whole lives, were ruined.
Becoming a prisoner of war. This was in the background all the time, like a droning in all of us who continued to fly and fight. The thought of it became the horror of my life.
WHEN WORLD WAR I BROKE OUT, Ali’s grandfather Moshe Felzen, of Berlin, was conscripted into the Kaiser’s army and became a POW on the Eastern Front. He spent six years in Russia, and definitely didn’t imagine that his fatherland, for which he had fought and suffered, was already planning factorie
s to make soap out of him and his family. After the end of the war Felzen returned to a hungry Berlin, where his wife and daughters didn’t recognize him.
After time, I saw in Ali’s family album a strange photo post card from the time of captivity of her grandfather Moshe Felzen in World War I. A soldier is standing in the snow. He is wrapped in a heavy military jacket, collar up, and with two lines of buttons on the front. The coat is large and calf-length. The sleeves hang down, empty-ended. Behind the soldier there is a massive doorway between walls made of heavy logs. One could only guess what waits inside.
The face of the soldier is square and pale. A black, thick mustache falls from his wide nose down on the contracted jaw, under a helmet that shadows his face. From this shadow gaze two white eyes. The picture was taken in a dirt crevice of a deep trench, and the blanket of snow turns the dirt white, shades and subshades of white, and only around the soldier’s feet a large, round stain, like a black puddle, sprawls as a mass of strange shadow in that totally black-and-white world. It seems the soldier was marching in place for long time.
But once you narrowed your eyes, that weird picture would turn, in a magical way, into something else: the dark puddle would turn into some black hole forming its center between the two boots like a thin leg, and over it the dark wall widens and resembles a black wineglass on the snowy background. The soldier stands imprisoned in his black glass, handless, and only his white eyes gaze dumbfounded from it.
I have no idea how Moshe Felzen’s picture was taken there, and in what conditions. But this picture, imprisoned in the snow, came to me in my dreams and became my nightmare.
“WHAT’S UP, YEFFET?” Nissim got right to the point. There are no sick visits in the daytime, so something must have happened. I told him everything.
“That’s it,” I told him. “Tomorrow I’m out of here.”
For some time we remained silent together. Then my friend Nissim said, “Look, Yeffet (that is how he nicknamed me a long time ago, when we were flying Super Mysteres), I can’t tell you what to do, but I’ve known you a while. Just stay cool, take it easy. You’ll find a way out.”
When I left, he sent his voice after me, “And be strong. Tomorrow you’ll still be here.”
On the stairs up to the commander’s office I stopped, and thought that the cellars at the prison in Cairo, with interrogators messing with the open breaks in your limbs and beating the soles of your feet with bamboo canes, were much harder than anything I could expect here. So I took a deep breath and calmed down. Nissim helped me as much as one can help a friend in need.
I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR. Ran got up to meet me. He was as ready for a fight as a rooster, but this time I was, too. Before he began speaking, I cut him off. “Sir, just so you know. From here, I’m flying directly to Tel Aviv.”
He was surprised. “To Tel Aviv? What’s in Tel Aviv?”
“I’m going to see General Hod, to remind him about the question I asked him in the Hatzor cinema. He still owes me an answer.”
Ran looked at me for a long time in silence and then said, “Go back to work, Spector. Enough of this nonsense.”
I rose and stood facing Lieutenant Colonel Pecker, hesitating. Nothing was settled. We looked at each other for long time. At the end I made my decision, saluted, and turned toward the door. At the door he said, “And work more on that responsibility, Spike.”
And so it ended. Our relations became friendly again, and since then, I’ve had no further run-ins with Ran Pecker. But when I left his office I knew well that I had compromised on something very deep. I returned to instructing on the Fougas under Ran and tried not to think of what Toledano would have done instead, or what Shosh would say had she known, and I kept it all inside.
I treasured the only real asset I received from Ran Pecker: his personal example as a fighter and leader in battle. I added to my internal book the rule he taught me, that the courage and integrity of a warrior is measured by the number of holes in the target. This was a very clear lesson, and all the rest I suppressed. I was a soldier, and I was at war.
‡
TEN YEARS LATER, RAN LEFT the air force, slamming the door behind him. His leaving had no connection to the mysterious alleged murder of the prisoner, or any other moral issue. It was due to a banal struggle for control and ego. The special thing in that struggle was only that not just Michael wrestled against Gabriel, but also a whole bunch of inferior saints and demons were involved. At the end the angels won, and it all ended, in T. S. Eliot’s words, not with a bang but a whimper.
When Ran was released from military service I invited him to Ramat-David for a ride in the new F-16 aircraft I was introducing into the air force. He came happily, and we flew together. It was fun and a gift of honor for both of us. After the flight we sat in my office and talked. We both enjoyed comparing the American plane to our common love, that French beauty, the Mirage. Over a cup of coffee I tried to remind him of those two tough talks we’d had.
“What are you talking about?” he replied. “I don’t remember anything like that.”
I believed him.
Photographs
Zvi Spector, my father, who died at sea in World War II when I was seven months old.
With my uncles, Aronchik (left), and Israel Spector, 1947. Shaike, my father’s other brother, the youngest, was killed in December 1947.
Air cadets, Course No. 31, 1959. Left to right, front row: Zur Ben Barak (ZBB)*, Yoel Arad (Brutus)*, Zvi Umschweiff (Umsh)*, Yaacov Zik*. Middle row: Giora Yoeli, Yair Khativa*, Nachshon Halperin, Nir Gershoni, Micha Genosar, Ami Goldstein (Goldie)*, Nachshon Gal*. Back row: Uri Sheani*, Dan Zimmerman (Zimmer), Hannan Peled*, Dan Segri*, Iftach Spector, Yakir Laufer*. (* dead)
The French-built Ouragan fighter-bomber jet was flown by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) primarily in the mid-1950s, but it served as a trainer for long after and also saw action in the Six-Day War.
IAF’s flight-school Harvard trainers in formation flight, Course No. 31, March 1960.
My future wife Ali, in the early 1960s. We would marry in May 1964.
During the filming of Sinaya, while on a special two-month leave in 1962. For a time after appearing in this feature film, full of propaganda for the air force, I was a media item.
The gray, skinny iron triangle of a Mirage III, a French-built supersonic fighter flown by the IAF in the 1960s.
A Tupolev 16 bomber at Cairo West Air Base finds itself in the gunsight of a Mirage at the beginning of the Six-Day War, June 5, 1967.
Attacking an Egyptian convoy between the desert forts of Nakhl and Mittle in the Sinai, June 8, 1967. We fired short bursts into tanks, trucks, and mobile cannons.
Firing on a ship that carried no signs or flags clear enough for two sharp-eyed fighter pilots to discern; soon identified as the American spy ship USS Liberty near El Arish, East Sinai, June 8, 1967.
Mirage No. 59 shoots down a MiG-21 over Egypt, March 6, 1970. Gunsight pictures show aiming at the MiG (left) and the successful hit.
My handling of the formal flight procedures wasn’t free of problems. An extravagant Phantom takeoff in Hatzerim, in aerial display, July 1973.
Sam Khetz, the first commander of Israeli Phantoms. His wit, and the special grace he radiated, brought him honor and affection all over the IAF.
In the cockpit during the Yom Kippur War, October 1973.
Mechanics under the wing of a Phantom. Every aircraft was loaded with some four tons of bombs.
A thin bridge, very hard to see from the air, and parts of broader one, on the Suez Canal. October 7, 1973.
An F-16 on the tarmac just before takeoff to Iraq, June 7, 1981. Operation Opera seriously damaged Iraq’s nuclear reactor, eliminating the threat of Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons.
After landing from the attack on the nuclear reactor. From left, sitting: Ofer, Katz, Nahumi, Ramon, Raz, Maimon. Standing: Spector, Mohar, Yoffe, Yadlin, Falk, Sas, Shafir. Ilan Ramon fell as an astronaut in the crash of the Columbia space shuttl
e.
Left to right: Iftach Spector, Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the government’s visit to Ramat David after the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor.
Chapter
13
Authority
The Fighting First, the first Israeli Air Force fighter squadron. Established in 1948 with Avia-199 Messerchmitts made in Czechoslovakia. The planes were brought to Israel, dismantled, and assembled at Tel Nof. The squadron’s first operation was an attack on an Egyptian column on its way to Tel Aviv, on the bridge named Ad Halom (End of the Way). This aerial attack stopped the Egyptian army.
Soon the squadron was equipped with Spitfires flown directly from Czechoslovakia in a daring flight, and after the War of Independence it added American Mustangs. In the Sinai War of 1956 the squadron flew French Mystere jets, and then it was the first to absorb Mirages.
The first commander of the Fighting First was Mordechai (Moddi) Alon. Moddi died in the War of Independence, when his Messerchmitt crashed.
THERE IS ONLY ONE SQUADRON I’d care to command: the Fighting First, the one and only, the First Fighter Squadron of the IAF. My squadron.
Loud and Clear Page 21