Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Major Spector, I suggest you take care of your squadron and I’ll take care of my base,” he lectured me. “Everyone should mind his own business—this is the way to have the air force be successful.”

  On the way out I met Nathan, the longtime head of Hatzor’s construction team. He was a civilian, a gentle giant, a very sensitive guy who always knew how to help and advise the young, confused couples who arrived at family housing.

  “What’s up, Spector?” he asked me in his Polish accent. Before his warm smile, and the concenetration camp number tattooed on his arm, I opened up. Nathan listened to my tale of woe, shaking his head. A month later, unexpectedly, a truck arrived from Hatzor. It unloaded needed pieces of furniture we had been unable to get. A huge photograph was added, a picture of a Phantom taking off, to be hung in the office I didn’t have yet. I understood that Nathan had put his construction unit to work for us without asking his superiors.

  When I told my men what had happened to our Daggers, they rebelled. I cooled them off. I understood. Harlev also knew the secret—he was the officer in charge, and so threw his weight around as much as he dared, and whoever wanted to sue him was welcome to try. This was the world I knew, and I didn’t take it personally. The order to transfer those Daggers got old in Harlev’s files, and the missiles stayed with the Falcons in Hatzor. All that happened was that my Orange Tails flew their initial operational missions without Dagger missiles.

  Even so, I didn’t feel we were weak.

  MAYBE IT WAS JUST THESE difficulties that conjured up the fighting spirit in us. Yes, we definitely were envious of our sister squadrons, the senior Phantom squadrons who sat safely in their padded nests. But we decided that we were in a good position to do well. In the Orange Tails we learned what we could from the other squadrons in order to copy, imitate, and then outshine them. We decided to learn it all and then select the best and filter out the worst. We were in a perfect position, free from any past encumbrances.

  THE TIME OF ARRIVAL of our first six Phantoms was set for December 10, 1971. Now we had a timetable, ninety days to define how we were going to do it all a better way. We doubled our efforts. And—well, we were all veterans of the War of Attrition. We knew we had to prepare fast, because the next war was on the way.

  AND THEN THERE WAS THE Phantom itself.

  After a short conversion course I began to fly with the Falcons and the other squadrons as a guest. From the very first moment, I hated this aircraft. It was very large, very clumsy, very complicated, and always there was somebody in the rear cockpit making noise, and bothering me with advice and instructions. I felt as if I were back in the Harvard trainer, in an unending struggle against a noisy, unresponsive aircraft, together with an annoying instructor on my ass.

  It was particularly hard for me to come to terms with the performance of this aircraft in aerial combat. Whenever I reversed turn, or just rocked it a little in the air, the Phantom would react with a long delay, as if the stick were on springs. And when it finally condescended to obey, it would start with a symphony of rattling and drumming, like forks in a dishwasher. At times I stole a sideways look to make sure that all the junk was still attached to the airplane.

  During my second flight in the Phantom I sat in the backseat of Eitan Ben Eliyahu, to watch and learn. Eitan wanted to show me acceleration to twice the speed of sound. Halfway, one of the engines began braying. I told him,

  “Eitan, this is the Phantom?”

  “When you have two engines and one of them goes south,” he told me, “you still have the second one to take you home.”

  “Aha.” I was not impressed. The Mirage didn’t need two engines to get to Mach 2 or to get me home.

  MY PARTNERS WERE ALL HARD, tough men.

  Major Uri Shachar, my designated second-in-command, came from the same job in a Skyhawk squadron. Gordon had already been flying Phantoms for few months. All three of us had grown up in the Fighting First, had fought together, and understood each other well. The designated technical officer was Maj. Jacob Baram, also a Mirage graduate, who came from Ramat-David. Everybody called him “Briar,” and he was hardwood indeed, much tougher than any of us. The fifth in the team was Lieutenant Shemer, a very sharp young officer, a go-getter, who had replaced the girl adjutant. Now we were a men-only team.

  During the week we scattered over all the country, flying and learning what we could from the three active Phantom squadrons, and on weekends we gathered in Hatzerim and sat down to go over what we had learned and our new ideas. Sometimes, when our needs were not met, we were not ready to compromise. We had to squeeze a Phantom squadron into the headquarters of a Mirage squadron two sizes too small for it. We redesigned the space to use every corner, which required big changes in the internal structure—moving walls, power lines, etc. Then we were notified that the air force wouldn’t approve the budget for the changes, and we found ourselves facing an insoluble problem. When we realized that no money would be allocated for the necessary infrastructure in the squadron building, Shachar and I rose early one Saturday morning, drove down to the building with heavy hammers, and smashed down all the unneeded internal walls. The base commander appeared, and his face got very pale. He threatened us with dire consequences. But the next morning the construction workers came over with the drawings we had prepared for them before our budget was turned down. Over time I suspected Colonel Bareket, my commander, of sympathizing with his radical new Phantom pilots.

  IN THE SAME WAY WE FOUGHT outside, we fought with ourselves. Our meetings lasted for days and spilled over into the nights, and usually were hot and noisy. None of us was pretty. Each brought with him loads of ideas of how to shape the material in our hands, and each was ready to die or kill for his ideas. We would struggle till late at night with everything: training programs, aircraft readiness, caring for the soldiers, furnishing the operations and technical control centers, and education of future pilots and mechanics. We spread maps and drawings on the floor till there was no place to step, and then shouted at each other from opposite sides of the room. Once I was called to decide on the way information should be transmitted between the squadron’s operations room and the technical control center. This is a crucial connection, especially in wartime, and here also we had an opportunity to set up a better system than any other in the air force. I came in and found a heated dispute under way between Gordon and Briar. They both came from opposing schools, and each had his arguments. There was no intermediate solution that could integrate all the advantages, and I had to decide either or. At last I decided, and chose Gordon’s way. Briar was entrusted with the preparation of the required tools—boards, magnets, communication terminals, etc. On the next week we met, and the tools were ready, all right, but they were not made exactly according to our specs. There were alterations. I threw a furious Gordon out of my office and shut the door.

  “Briar, what’s going on here?”

  Briar waved a large, bent finger in my face. “Spector, you made a mistake here. Let me explain to you again.” He was a warm man, radiating energy and power.

  I pulled out a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and folded it in two.

  “Give me the Scotch tape, please.” I sealed the page all around and put it into my notebook.

  Briar stopped and watched me, not understanding.

  “Briar,” I told him, “we had an agreement and you tried to get around it. The next time it happens I’ll use this page.”

  The conversation that followed ended with a signed agreement that consisted of two words: “Everything clean.” Then we shook hands, and Briar went out to do his job over again from the beginning.

  I DID NOT REALLY ENJOY the bitter struggle of “all against all” I was leading, but I convinced myself that I didn’t care. I was already far beyond the Fighting First and my failed tries to find grace in the eyes of my people.

  In fact, I went to the other extreme. I had a mission to accomplish, and without rea
lizing it I was hurled back to the forgotten rule of my youth: keep it all inside. I stopped taking interest in the outside. I accepted the reality that I’d lost the popularity contest, and I didn’t pay attention to it anymore. Instead, I invested a lot of effort in figuring out what I really wanted to accomplish. I listened to everybody, all the while writing and sketching in my notebook. When I came to conclusions, I worked hard to articulate clear decisions. Everything became technical—organization charts, timetables, construction processes—and every detail after processing came out bright and clear. Manpower was an important part of my equations, but human beings were not.

  Home was all but forgotten. Ali and my two sons receded into the background. I learned that Ali had found a place for Etay in the first grade of a primary school in Beer-Sheva, and in passing learned that she had found work and was taking classes. This was all good news. I nodded and fell asleep while my kids fought to climb on my lap Friday nights.

  ‡

  ON DECEMBER 5, 1971, we called in all our men from around the country and opened the new squadron. It was a cold, blue, winter day. A hundred people—pilots, technicians, and clerks—met on the truck parking lot. I sat all of them on the asphalt and told them for the first time why we all were here in Hatzerim, and what I expected from them. They came to a drab and distant place, but the things they heard were clear and resolute.

  We took them on a tour of our assets, which were unlike anything they had known in the places they came from: a lone, battered building at the end of the remotest runway. Inside it, in the briefing room, instead of the briefing center with boards and charts, they saw a blackboard standing in front of a line of plastic chairs with metal pipe legs. The temporary operations office was near the rest rooms until the end of renovations of the underground floor and consisted of nothing more than a hand-cranked field telephone on a chair. But the rooms were washed and clean—the setup team had cleaned up the night before.

  Our base had no housing for our people, and the Oranges’ mechanics were issued large army tents. But before the arrival of our people we all got together, officers and pilots, and fixed up their quarters. We assembled bunk beds for them, brought mattresses and blankets from the quartermaster stores, and on every bed were put two clean blue utility uniforms.

  FIVE DAYS LATER, ON December 10, our six borrowed Phantoms landed in Hatzerim—tail numbers 43, 44, 49, 59, 65, and 67. All six, with their twelve noisy jet engines, rolled down the slope, entering what was definitely the cleanest, most efficient, and best-looking subterranean hangar in the whole Israeli Air Force. The domes were all whitewashed, with plenty of mercury lights. All the required installations—refueling, air pressure, tool storage, office space—were new and perfect. Everything gleamed.

  A short ceremony took place, and the flag of the new Orange Tails was raised for the first time by the air force commander, Maj. Gen. Moti Hod, and handed to me. This was Friday noon, and when the sodas and peanuts were consumed and the few guests had gotten into their cars and headed back north, we all changed clothes and washed our new Phantoms with water and soap until even the sooty metal of the jet pipes shone. When Saturday dawned, everyone scattered to his quarters or tents, but not before the hangar floors were washed again. From now on, we all knew how things should look in the Orange Tails.

  When that Saturday’s morning I couldn’t restrain myself and dragged my two small boys down to the squadron to look at my new aircraft, I found a crowd assembled at the hangar, and the guards struggling to keep them off from touching “the dirty half dozen,” lest they spoil their virgin beauty.

  ON SUNDAY WE BEGAN TO FLY, and from then on we squeezed those six Phantoms to the utmost. All we had were those six, and right away we stripped one of them for disassembly in the service hangar—the technicians had to learn the guts of this large and complicated monster—so we were left with five, and no reserves. On these five ships we intended to build the infrastructure for a standard Phantom squadron, equal in size to its three elder sisters. A month after the opening of the midget squadron we became operational. With a bit of chutzpah, we viewed ourselves as “The squadron of the South,” the first line of defense against the Egyptian enemy. Though operations were managed via a field telephone on a chair, in early January 1972 we mounted our first operational flight. I led a four-ship flight patrolling the Egyptian border, covering the First, which was going farther in. The Mirages were doing a real reconnaissance mission, and we just flew along as insurance. We didn’t delude ourselves that something was going to happen this time, but we briefed the flight as if we were going to fight the whole Egyptian Army and Navy. As we returned proudly from the long, eventless patrol, we knew that on the control map in the air force’s command center, the symbol “1/Orange” had crawled down the Strait of Suez, and we had been visible on radarscopes in all the radar units. We were on the map.

  AND THEN THERE WERE THE DAYS when we had only two or three aircraft available for training. The mechanics stayed up nights and worked selflessly to fix every problem and have every aircraft ready to fly every morning. Most of our technicians were young and inexperienced, airmen eighteen or nineteen years old, and when I passed the hangar at night to see what was going on, I found the few veteran technicians with their heads in the fuel tanks or lying soaked with black oil under the bellies of the aircraft, while a circle of the new techs stood around and repeated for them in loud voices, in broken English, procedures from the technical manual for the Phantom. When I first saw it, I was worried.

  “Is this the way to get it done?” I asked Briar. But later I was amazed to discover the dialectical beauty of our situation: since our squadron was new and inexperienced vis-à-vis the other squadrons, we gradually developed a strong technical culture built on a fresh and stable foundation.

  THE PILOTS HAD NO TIME for self-pity, either. We all were new on the aircraft, and it was necessary to get flight time. We were flying all day, every day of the week. In January we went farther, adding six flight nights, but after we realized that everybody was falling off their feet, we went back to one night a week. To get in even more time, we began flying double shifts. This was a way of getting in two sorties for the price of one: after landing, instead of returning the aircraft to the mechanics for maintenance, we parked for refueling without leaving our cockpits or shutting the engines off, and in essence stayed aloft. When the aircraft was refueled, we took off again for another round. In this way—it was at the edge of the margin of safety—we could get five or six sorties from each aircraft daily instead of two or three. When we didn’t have enough aircraft to get a flight of four airborne, we asked other squadrons to join us, either to fly with us or to compete against us in the air.

  OUR ORDER OF PREFERENCE was clear—first of all, operations and training, while living conditions were not a topic of discussion yet. The room slated to become the squadron’s ready room remained bare. In its center stood a Formica table, and breakfast was jam from a jar and sliced bread. In the hot summer hours at about noon, pilots would nap sitting on chairs in every room, facing the wall, or lying on the cool floor of the corridor. At night, the readiness crews slept on beds near the door that led to the hangar, covering their heads with military blankets against the mosquitoes.

  ‡

  WE THOUGHT UP NEW WAYS to improve our flight performance. We divided ourselves into fixed crews of pilot and navigator—not common in the IAF, which prefers standardization. My own partner was Roy Manoff, a thin, dark junior officer who had joined us after his initial training at the Falcons. Manoff knew the Phantom better than I, and I knew more about flying. And so we got together, a twenty-year-old second lieutenant and a thirty-year-old major, planned the flight, and for the next hour shared the work as equal partners. After landing we split up—me to command the squadron, and Manoff to the navigation room to draw maps. He was a serious young man, very reticent; perhaps after five years in Israel—he had come from Argentina—he didn’t trust his command of Hebrew. Instead he wo
uld smile with a mouth full of gleaming white teeth. While he rarely spoke, his short comments were always on the mark. Soon we all realized that he understood things in a different, deeper sense. At that time I didn’t yet know about EQ, emotional quotient, but I began rethinking my former opposition to the two-seat fighter.

  We wanted to improve our teamwork and thought that introducing our navigators to the pilot’s functions might help. There was a rare asset next door—the flying school with all its two-seat Fouga trainers. The base commander, Colonel Bareket, agreed to approve some flight hours for us. He only asked me, “What happens if all the Phantom squadrons want this, too?” I answered him with the same language I learned from his friend and colleague at Hatzor, Colonel Harlev. He laughed, and then for a while our navigators flew as pilots in Fougas, and trained simulating attacks on each other, operating the gunsight and struggling with pilot emergencies.

  IN MARCH 1972, FOUR MONTHS after our inception as a squadron, we checked and decided we had finished the initial stage. Then we wrote and published a thin booklet announcing the completion of a new Phantom squadron. At the end of the booklet we added a plan for new staffing procedures that was designed to direct everyone—from headquarters down to the floor sweepers—regarding how to establish a new fighter squadron. We gave lists of equipment, timetables, goals, and targets—including those we hadn’t reached yet. Our booklets came back with a contemptuous dismissal: who are those nobodies so pretentious as to dictate procedures for IAF staffing? Well, perhaps the process was flawed, but for us the writing itself was a binding public declaration: “We said it, we did it, and we will do more.”

  After four months of very hard work, the training period ended and the air force took a week off. We decided that instead of taking a week of leave, we would brush up a little more. We asked one of the senior squadrons to host us and prepare a course for advanced students. After a week of training at Ramat-David at the Hammers, we all went back south for another bout of hard work.