Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  On May 27, 1970, my wish was fulfilled. I stood opposite Marom on the taxi strip at Hatzor. The hundred-odd men of the squadron stood in ranks of three, facing us at attention. The pilots’ platoon wore their usual gray, wrinkled flight suits, and the mechanics their well-worn fatigues, black oil staining their elbows and knees. I squinted at the mechanics’ platoon, and suddenly I realized I had become their commander, too, responsible for the preparation and maintenance of the Mirages, not just for flying them.

  I saluted Maj. Gen. Moti Hod, the air force commander, and he took the squadron’s black-and-red flag, with the winged skull, from Marom’s hands and gave it to me. Moti and Marom returned my salute, did an about-face, and marched to Yak’s car. The three senior officers then drove together to the base commander’s office. I was left with my men. My squadron, finally.

  Soon I will enter my new office and sit in “Zorik’s seat.” Above my head will be the picture of the first and for always commander of the Fighting First, the young and handsome Moddi Alon, who crashed his Messerschmitt and died in the 1948 War of Independence. And serious faces will watch from the walls, among them a boyish Ezer Weizman, looking into the far distance, his curly hair waving in the wind. Benny Peled, too, the squadron’s commander in the Sinai campaign, who was shot down with his Mystere in enemy territory and rescued in an amazing operation. Many others, too.

  And now it’s my turn.

  I took a deep breath, took a sheet of paper out of my pocket, and cleared my throat to get their attention. This was going to be my first speech as a commander. I was full of plans and intended to read to them the outlines, where I was going to take this squadron. Just then, a blast of compressed air shot out of the readiness hangar. The whole parade froze. A hundred heads turned around to see what was going on. Then a siren screamed, and two jet engines huffed and puffed, accelerating their turbine revolutions. A pair of Mirages emerged from the hangar and sped to the near runway. The pilots lit their afterburners and took off. Another roar of thunder, even louder, rolled in from the other runway, and two F-4 Phantoms from our neighboring squadron—the Falcons under the command of Sam Khetz—scrambled, too. The black trails of the smoking Phantoms stretched behind the little Mirages, diminishing in the western sky.

  “Who is in that section?” I said with a questioning look at my new deputy, Capt. Menachem Sharon, who stood in front of the pilots’ platoon.

  “Reservists,” Sharon said, hurrying up to me. “All the active service pilots are here at the ceremony. We put the reserve pilots on alert.” And suddenly he asked, “I hope that’s all right?”

  Hey, I was being asked.

  “All right, all right,” I answered cautiously. “Let’s continue according to plan.” But my legs were not steady. I folded my paper, put it back into my pocket, and kept my remarks short. I kept quiet about the ideas I had been working on during the past year, how I would change and improve the Fighting First, put my stamp on it. No time for this now. Let’s go.

  “Attention! Dismissed!”

  The parade scattered in all directions, everybody running to his working place, and only the new commander of the Fighting First walked slowly, restraining himself from running. He has to show everyone that everything here is in order, that he trusts his men, that he is cool. I descended the stairs to the operations room slowly when everybody was already there, crowding around the humming radio.

  “Well,” I thought, “I haven’t been given any hundred-day grace period, not even fifteen minutes, actually. “In the evening,” I consoled myself, “there will be some quiet, and then I will find time to sit in my new office, think, organize my thoughts… ”

  I had no idea.

  MY FAMILY, ON THE OTHER HAND, had a smooth landing at the new housing.

  That same morning, as the truck unloaded Ali with the kids and the furniture near our new apartment in Hatzor, I was still checking out an air cadet on the Fouga trainer. At noon I waved good-bye to Uri Sheani—they were back from Africa and lived next to us in Hatzerim—and took off in a Piper Cub to Hatzor, together with the family cat, Cleo, who hated flying and all along the way glided among the seats, cutting long scratches in the tough seat covers.

  Both Ali and I were very happy to get an apartment next to Sam and Rana Khetz. This was good luck indeed; the four of us had been friends for a long time, and our children played well together. Dedi, their firstborn, was about the age of our Etay, and Uri and Omri—the seconds—were both babies. Right away they invited us for dinner.

  I HAD KNOWN SAM KHETZ since childhood, long before military service. We both grew up on kibbutzim, and met in youth camps in the summers. There was some similarity in our personal backgrounds (what we called mockingly “our stolen childhood”), and there were always things to talk about. Khetz was a year senior to me, and when I arrived at flight school as a new cadet he helped me adapt, and used to lend me his notebooks. In the evening he sometimes came to our room to help us with the more difficult material.

  His simple and direct manner couldn’t mask his depths. Khetz had a complicated and interesting personality. His wit, and the special grace he radiated, brought him honor and affection all over the air force. At the beginning of the War of Attrition we served together in the Fighting First. Once we drove together to air force headquarters in Tel Aviv for a briefing. When the meeting ended, he told me, “Come, let’s visit Moti.”

  “Visit whom?”

  “Moti, the air force commander.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “What? Of course not. But if one passes by, one should drop in and say hello.”

  Moti’s secretary, of course, knew Khetz. She cleared the general’s agenda, and Captain Sam entered Major General Moti’s office, and they sat for an hour. While they discussed matters there, I sat in the entrance and read magazines.

  AMONG HIS MANY FRIENDS, Khetz had one best friend, Yitzhak Arzi, Aki. Aki was an athletic, handsome guy—very unlike Khetz, who was skinny with a hook nose. These two, from the moment they met each other in the flight school, were always together. When they arrived at the Scorpions, exactly one year before I arrived there, they were given a common nickname, Khezarzi. Everybody thought it was a good name—two for one, as it were. Around this double star we, the newcomers, revolved like satellites.

  Then Rana appeared. I met her first in the back of a transport leaving Tel Nof. She was a very slim, black-haired soldier—dark eyes in an exotic face. “Wow, what a beauty,” Ali said. Rana had two sisters, both beautiful, and a father, Papa Saul, who had a special sense for finding and picking mushrooms in the fields. We brought the onions and potatoes, and together we made a good dinner and became fast friends.

  ON DECEMBER 1, 1967, Aki died. He went down in the Gulf of Suez and vanished, like all the unfortunate pilots who went down there. Zorik and I were in Refidim, and we flew around like mad over the ever-widening petroleum slick in the blue-black water, searching for survivors, annoying ships, and chasing them into the Egyptian harbor at Adabiya to see if they raised anything or anybody, then expelled by ack-ack fire and hanging out again until dusk came and we had to return to Refidim with empty tanks. Nothing was ever found of Aki and his navigator, Raz. From then on, whoever had used the name Khezarzi didn’t mention it again. Khetz got another, single nickname, Khetzkel.

  He returned to the Fighting First as second in command to Marom, and Khetz and I worked together. He never talked about Aki. I didn’t kid myself into thinking I filled the hole in his life. At about this time Rana and Ali became close friends, and remain so to this day. After a short time Sam Khetz was selected to head the Phantom mission—an indication of the regard the IAF had for him—and I took his job in the squadron.

  Rana and Khetz went to America to meet the new aircraft, and we in Israel went on fighting. Now the few were even fewer, and the future Phantom jockeys were very much missed. International telephone conversations were out of question back then, so Rana sent us post cards from the American town t
hey were living in—I believe its name was something like Arcadia, a Greek sound that reminded me of green, mythological fields. We missed them both, and particularly Sam’s exceptionally bad cooking in Refidim.

  When they returned from America, and Khetz began building his new squadron—the Falcons, the Phantoms of Hatzor—Ali and I were already at Hatzerim, in the flight school. Khetz had his work cut out for him building his new squadron, and I was working hard, too, so in the next six months we met very rarely. And so, on our first evening back in Hatzor, when we sat down together for dinner, I was amazed to see how much thinner he was, and that his back was bent more than before. There were shadows under his cheekbones, and the flash of joy in his eyes seemed to have faded. The women were talking about their stuff, so we spoke of ours.

  “So, how is the Phantom?” I was curious. This was the new magical aircraft—“a knight in shining armor,” some called it. Khetz waved his hand dismissively. He was fed up with talking about the wonders of the Phantom, and he was very tired. The burden he bore was the absorption of magnificent and complicated aircraft and getting them into action in an escalating war. He had begun his squadron from scratch, and was up to his neck in the details, from the developing of fighting doctrine to the integration of a lot of intricate and expensive hardware, with too few trained people to help him. In the Falcons, the competent pilots trained new pilots, navigators trained navigators, and mechanics trained mechanics, while at the same time the Phantoms pushed themselves—and were pushed by the IAF—into battle, with all the power they could muster.

  The story of the first two Phantom squadrons in the Israeli Air Force, 1969–1970, is an untold epic. I am not the man to tell it, since I was not there. But the Falcons squadron was my neighbor, and I could see how my friend Khetz was pushed to the wall until he broke.

  MEANWHILE, I ALSO HAD a few problems. The two reservists who took off during the ceremony landed safely. But there was a dogfight involving other squadrons, and the radio in my operations room went nuts. The two-ship section from the Fighting First arrived in time but was ordered to patrol the border, and when their fuel was finished they were sent home without doing anything.

  Still, I didn’t suspect anything. But the next morning fighting broke out again and the whole air force was airborne, but the Mirages of the Fighting First were left sitting in our hangars. Amazed, I called central control.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked the controller peevishly.

  “Just a moment.”

  Then I heard somebody saying, “Yes, it’s him.”

  “Okay,” the controller returned, “talk to the air force commander.”

  Moti came on the line. He used to run operations personally, and his control of every detail was famous.

  “Sir,” I began, “I have four sections here in a high state of readiness. Why aren’t they in the air?”

  “Iftach, they are not going up today.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Take a look at your personnel and you’ll understand.” He hung up.

  I was stunned and humiliated. I hadn’t yet finished the first day of my new command, and this was a real slap in the face to the pilots of the Fighting First.

  I had difficulty even uttering the words to share the bad news. I put the receiver down and left the operations room. I went up to my room and sat there for a while. Then I called Sharon in and told him the story. I was really steamed.

  “Take it easy, Iftach,” said Menachem. He was a large man with a very centered disposition. “Come on, let’s look over the personnel and rethink everything from square one.”

  When we looked up from the list of the squadron’s pilots, we got the commander’s message. The menu the Fighting First offered was varied, eclectic, and tasteless. We served a lot of dishes, from experienced aces to rookies, students, desk jockeys, airline captains, and senior officers still putting in flight time. All of them were great guys personally, but many were rusty and others ready for the scrap heap. The Fighting First was not serving a decent lunch, but a dog’s dinner. Now I saw the formations I had called ready for battle with new eyes. I also understood that Moti knew us all, and he was watching us closely. Moti was running a war, not a soccer match. And I knew that he didn’t have time for any bullshit. He needed super-ready teams—“top guns” and nothing else. I understood I was going to have to give him the real thing, not kids or the over-the-hill gang. It was just my bad luck—or perhaps my good luck—that he decided to deliver his message on my first day there.

  I looked closely at the list of pilots and agonized. Some of them were my former instructors, commanders, and leaders. Others were my personal friends who came from my own age group. Still others were my own students. The people of the Fighting First were my best friends and my reference group. Over the past four years we had fought together in the Six-Day War and numerous other battles. These were the men with whom I spent weeks in the bunkers at Refidim on cots, studying for matriculation examinations, soaping each other’s back in the field showers, viewing endless films at night, cooking up all kinds of weird shit, telling each other personal secrets, laughing together. Together we ran to the aircraft, took off, flew to the heart of darkness and back. Some of them had protected my tail from MiGs; others I had saved. This was the moment of truth, and I really felt the pressure. I didn’t want to do what had to be done now.

  Hesitating, I looked at Menachem, waiting to get his opinion. Even he, Captain Sharon, my exec, was not considered a top gun. Sharon got to his feet.

  “Iftach, this is your call. This problem you have to face on your own. You are the CO of the squadron.” Before he closed the door silently behind him he added, “I’ll see you.”

  That evening I worked late.

  DURING THE FOLLOWING WEEKS I talked to eight of the squadron’s pilots. Eight pilots, 30 percent of the force of the Fighting First on the day of my arrival, packed their bags and unceremoniously left the squadron. Some of them got angry, some froze up when I told them of my decision, and their faces hardened. One pilot could not restrain himself and wept openly in my office, another preached at me, a third one seethed with anger and humiliation. But a few understood. Curiously, in this difficult command process I found myself alone. This was like an upside-down situation—I made decisions involving more senior officers than myself, but none of the higher-ups said anything. Yak and Moti kept quiet. No one asked for a report, or gave any advice, or just parted with me in my difficulties. The commanders looked from above and kept their distance. I decided who left and who stayed; the washed-out left offended and their friends who remained watched me with visible uneasiness.

  This is how Moti taught me a lesson I never forgot. Since then, the manning of formations for readiness and operations was handled only by me or under my supervision. Within a week from the beginning of the process the ban was lifted, and the Fighting First rejoined the fighting air force.

  What happened, moreover, was that once I was burned with hot water, I became careful even about the cold. I began to fly in most of the operational missions. In my logbook I find that in June 1970 I flew thirty-six Mirage flights, a considerable number, but the point is that twenty-three of the total were written in red pencil: operational flights. Clearly I had difficulties trusting my comrades and subordinates.

  They felt it, too.

  THE AIR WAR AGAINST EGYPT, which began to boil over in March 1969, reached its peak in the middle of 1970. The Syrian front was hot, too, and Jordan also made noise, but in relation to Egypt those two were secondary, lukewarm fronts. All our aircraft—Mirages, Skyhawks, old Mysteres—fought day and night. And among us all the special role of the new Phantoms began to appear.

  These heavy American fighters that just appeared in the region with their rookie pilots and mechanics who had just learned how to load ordnance on their aircraft went on all the missions. More than that, soon they became exclusive players in two of the hardest missions: attacking strategic targets deep in Egyp
t, and the dangerous battle against the surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries the Egyptians stationed beyond the Suez Canal.

  The Egyptians could not deal with us in the air, and asked the Soviets for more and more SAM batteries, and they got them. Every day new red circles were added to our maps, indicating danger zones to avoid. These were the killing fields of the missiles; they could get you if you flew there. Initially we attacked the batteries, bombed them, cleaned out some red areas for limited periods of time; but then, like the plague, the batteries returned, modernized and multiplied anew.

  At the end of 1969 the Phantoms took this job exclusively. We, with all the inferior aircraft, were sent off the field to watch from the stands the deadly game taking place. The Soviets supplied the Egyptians with more and more replacement batteries, and the missile arrays widened and thickened. Single red circles joined together and overlapped, covering each other until a big, knotty tube was smeared on our maps like a big piece of camel dung going north to south halfway between the Suez Canal and Cairo.

  The air war against the missiles heated up, and the few dozen Phantoms began to absorb hits and take losses.

  THE WAR OF ATTRITION was strange because the armed forces fought but Israel was not at war. The borders flamed and soldiers killed and were killed there, but inside the country, traffic moved and streetlights shone brightly. Israel’s economy bloomed. Restaurants and theaters were full. Every day the newspapers carried casualty notices, but the people of Israel just flipped the newspapers aside and said with a sigh, “That’s how it is,” and went back to business. Those few who actually fought—in the air, at sea, and on the ground—were not present in the streets, so they were unseen. Only their relatives worried for them but they kept silent, lost in the happy crowd. This was really a war—and what a war—but it was not announced as one, and not perceived as such. Just a nuisance, a fact of life, a thing one cannot change, like the rate of accidents the air force continued to produce, war or no war.