Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  THE ORANGE TAILS BEGAN to take shape. The American embargo was lifted, and the inferiority complex of the “midget squadron” began to go away. We waited anxiously for our new aircraft, and indeed at the end of March 1972 they began arriving from St. Louis, flown by test pilots from the factory. They landed at Hatzor, and we went there to bring them home. I took the first one, tail no. 51, and flew it to Hatzerim. My commander, Colonel Bareket, was a full partner in the greatness of the moment and sat behind me as weapons officer. No. 51 was clean and lovely and smelled like a brand-new car. Bareket proposed that we buzz the base, but I preferred to land the new aircraft carefully and taxi it slowly, holding it like a newborn baby, into my squadron’s no. 2 hangar, just prepared for it. Following this flight I noticed with a slight surprise that I also began calling the aircraft not by its foreign name, Phantom, but by its Hebrew name, Hammer.

  Still, I didn’t love the Hammer. I was repelled by its dinosaur profile, but I caught myself casting sideways looks at it. Something began to drop inside me, like a coin making its way down in a machine. I was almost offended when Briar and his mechanics climbed the 51 on the same day with their dirty shoes and began taking parts from it and peeping into its guts. Briar and his second-in-command, Lt. Mike Lott, noticed my expression, and the next day every ladder in the squadron had rugs for wiping our shoes.

  New aircraft arrived monthly, and soon we could hand the original six back to their original owners. We became an independent fighter squadron, proud of our new, shiny aircraft, and of our squadron’s emblem displayed on their wide, low tails. We painted those tails orange, like the color of the setting sun I saw at dusk from the windows of my office, sparkling at me on the barren Negev hills. We adopted the name Knights of the South.

  WE CONTINUED TO WORK very hard. We already had ten aircraft, so we invited First’s Mirages for a week of dogfight training. We were beginning to fly the Phantom the right way. We practiced with the variety of weapons and munitions the big aircraft could carry. We started competing in fast turnaround competitions—how fast could we arm the whole fleet with bombs and missiles and get the squadron on a war footing—and the aircrew team headed by the muscular Shachar competed against the munitions officer, Lieutenant Jimmy with his Indians. The Friday ritual was set, and everybody—pilots and mechanics together—got together to wash down the hangars and shine up the aircraft. This was the prelude to our Saturday off.

  More and more aircraft arrived, we opened more hangars, and new air and ground crews joined us. Everyone who came of his own free will made me happy. A real fighting unit settled down around me, one that required no more marketing. The senior commanders of the air force didn’t know it yet, but the young pilots already had a sense of what was happening here, and suddenly there were people knocking on our squadron’s door. The two-seat, two-engine Phantom doubled everything, and at the beginning of 1973 my Orange ceased to be a small, intimate unit and became big and noisy like her three older sisters. But the hard beginnings had left us all our own culture of noncompromising insistence on clarity, perfection, and cleanliness. This culture became part of us, and remained even as men came and left.

  I spent most of my waking hours in the squadron or in the air. Ali carried the burden of our home by herself, and in addition she worked in Beer-Sheva and was studying to be a librarian. We had no private car, and every morning she would stand at the base gate to hitchhike to town, and at noon on the way back at the military hitchhiking point at the southern gate of Beer-Sheva. I suspected that the operations clerks were hiding from me that on rainy days they sent the squadron car secretly to pick her up. I preferred not to know. When we met at night I would tell her about my Phantom shop that was so loud that I was hearing buzzing in my ears all the time, and when I escaped to my cockpit, a navigator was making even more noise. My stories amused her, and the laughing brought little Noah to us, a baby girl after two boys. Back then there was still no way to find out the sex of the fetus, and when a girl appeared we both thought we would faint from joy.

  It was a hard time but we were very happy.

  AND I STILL COULDN’T LOVE the Phantom.

  I already knew how to control it and manage its clumsy performance, and each time I took the controls in the cockpit I repressed my revulsion and reveled in the efficiency of teaming with the navigator. The Phantom was a very interesting aircraft, and great for ground attacks and bombing missions, and it had all those wonderful computers, but at nights I would sometimes wake up from a dream and ask Ali how we got here, and how could I have traded my noble steed for a hippopotamus?

  The Phantom clicked with me only in mid-1972, after I had collected some two hundred flight hours in it. We were on maneuvers against the Fighting First. In one of five repeated sorties practicing advanced aerial combat against Mirages at low level, suddenly something happened inside my cockpit. This was a very intimate thing, as if somebody had strummed the bass string, and I froze and listened very carefully, lest I lose it, while the fight went on all around us. Then I tried very gently to open more, and the Phantom heard and responded, smooth as butter.

  I stopped idolizing Mirages, and they became just good models of the MiG-21. In that flight’s debriefing I heard Epstein from the First, who had keen senses and a sharp eye, say, “The Orange Tails have become dangerous.”

  Though I was never as sure of the Phantom as of the Mirage before him, he had shown me that he also knew the game.

  I DON’T WANT TO DWELL on the next year, so let’s skip the training and the deployments to Refidim and Ophir in the southern part of the Sinai. Let’s skip the stories from family housing, the parties, the picnics, the kids, the women, the friendships, and even various operational sorties.

  Let’s only mention the failed attempt to intercept the futuristic MiG-25, which crossed the Sinai Peninsula at untouchable altitude and speed, like a space satellite, to take our pictures for the Egyptians. This MiG was a secret Soviet aircraft with hypercruise performance, and it flew much faster and higher than anything our Phantom could dream of, but we climbed toward it intending to make an approach at sixty thousand feet and launch radar-guided missiles at it from there. We saw its vapor trail coming toward us on our climb to position, but then we had an oxygen malfunction, and Manoff and I had to stop our climb halfway, choking, and the MiG passed high over our heads, painting a white trail in the sky. We landed at Ophir disgusted and disappointed, the unlaunched missiles still hanging under our aircraft.

  JUST A LINE ABOUT MY OLD friends from the thirty-first flight school class. Goldie was completing a stint commanding a Skyhawk squadron and designated to take over the Bats Phantoms at Tel Nof; Or Yoeli, who flew my wing that stormy night, and now was commanding the neighboring Skyhawk squadron in Hatzerim; and Uri and Shula Sheani, who lived next door, with four kids. From all Sheani’s capabilities, the air force decided to use his talents in orienteering . He became the commander of the preparation stage for flight school. And let’s not forget Asher Snir, who had begun to get me into interesting discussions over “space-time” and “the psychophysical problem.” Snir was using these discussions as an excuse to come and convince me to vacate the Orange Tails for him, since his time was running out. For me, well, it was just an honor to have someone like him wanting to come down here, in spite of the desert dust.

  And for the same reason, to cut to the chase, let us cut short the arguments against “Baban”—the best of all the instructors—who vehemently opposed my habit of washing out of my squadron whomever I didn’t approve of.

  “Teach them, you bastard!” he would yell at me. Baban had been my flight instructor on Meteors in 1960, the first jet I ever flew, and his beautiful, long-fingered hands manipulated the stick with such adroitness that very few could match him in a dogfight. I thought he was great, but I remembered the lesson Gen. Moti Hod taught me. I was expecting a war, and not about to let my squadron become dysfunctional, as I had seen at the Fighting First. I didn’t intend to compromise on the q
uality of men when I was building a squadron from scratch. I agreed to accept only the good ones, and kept washing out anybody I didn’t feel right about. War was coming.

  MY SECOND-IN-COMMAND was promoted and Gordon replaced him, and after Gordon came Maj. Shlomo Egozi from the Bats, probably in some clandestine plot with Snir the expectant. They all were strong men and good managers, and they gave me a platform from which I could get the squadron on the right path. Briar also was promoted to a job in base technical management. Mike Lott, his deputy, replaced him as the squadron’s technical officer.

  Suddenly this was a different Orange Tails, a new group of people, less stressed, brighter of spirit, perhaps happier, but I knew that deep within, the currents of purposefulness and resoluteness were still flowing, left behind from the initial establishing team. We were moving on, to October 1973, and the Yom Kippur War.

  THE FIRST SPARKS OF THAT conflagration began to smolder at the end of 1972, in the North. Again, we began attacking in Syria and Lebanon. We bombed and destroyed a Syrian SAM battery in a place south of Damascus called Sheikh Maskin. This operation was deceptively easy. A few days later we attacked a terrorist training camp near Damascus, again with success. These attacks were in the SAM killing zone, but their silence encouraged those who believed that the SAM was a toothless tiger. Later there was a nighttime dogfight.

  I was flying in Syria, with Oren as backseat weapons systems officer (WSO). We cruised around, lights off in total darkness, deep in the Syrian Desert, with Israel in the distance as a colorful line of blinking lights. There were MiGs in the void around us, and from time to time afterburners lit up and went out like distant fireflies. Oren managed to catch echoes on his radar screen and we maneuvered to attack, but this time the new American missiles malfunctioned. A fuse connection kept shorting out, and the missiles refused to launch once, and then again. Suddenly a fireball lit up right over our left shoulder, and turning back, we saw a long tongue of fire, striped blue and purple. We pulled up toward a slim shadow that passed over our cockpits, rolled out, shut his afterburner off, and vanished into the night.

  THEN THERE WAS SEPTEMBER 13, 1973, a big day just a bit before the big war, in which the Orange Tails shared, with the rest of the air force, thirteen downed Syrian MiGs. The two kills Oren and I brought back, and another one brought by Egozi, were the first for the Orange Tails, and our joy was great even though Oren was busy pulling his long, blond hair in the backseat for having failed to lock his radar on our third MiG of the day. That MiG escaped into a cumulus cloudbank, and we couldn’t continue searching because we were alone, and our fuel—as usual—was low. We left that MiG and returned to Ramat-David, into a hornets’ nest of the local Hammers’ pilots and their mechanics, who claimed we had come from the South to poach. Only among them, in the Hammers’ ready room, did Oren calm down and finally agree that opening his backseat career with two kills was not so bad, although—he continued complaining—had we knocked down that third one, too, things would be so much better.

  When we landed that afternoon back in Hatzerim, after champagne and kisses from Ali, and the cheers of the mechanics, who carried us on their shoulders all the way to my office, I found a note on my desk. “Spector, it was really something! The squadron deserved it, I deserved it—difficult to express my feelings, embarrassed at how happy I am! Simply unforgettable!” It was signed “Yankele Briar.” My tough and aggressive technical officer, a man of the original team, allowed himself only this once such an expression of feeling. His note made me happy indeed.

  Whoever connected these events could see how the drum taps were quickening toward October 1973.

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  JUST A WORD ABOUT the men.

  After my disappointment in myself over the First, I no longer sought the affection of my subordinates. I believed in command cut and dried, not in comradeship or leadership. Accordingly, I required only two things at the Orange Tails: clarity and efficiency.

  Of course, the men were the principal material I had to work with and the principal risk factor, too. For that reason I was checking on them all the time. Whoever didn’t fit was promptly washed out, fast, before he put roots down and before he could do any damage. I tried to treat my subordinates hard and fair. This was the new rule of life. And to be hard I built walls to keep myself from becoming too personally involved with the men. I didn’t want to become a slave to my emotions or soften my stance. I didn’t hide this attitude from them.

  From myself I demanded foresight, and the future was all in my men. The men were not just conglomerates of fortuitous occurrences. The behavior of each hid connecting lines, concealed from the untrained eye, that were the causes of all the phenomena that swirled around them. Gradually I became convinced that the men were directing subtle signals my way, calling my attention by their actions, asking me to watch them.

  The men, pilots, navigators, and mechanics were many and complicated and interesting, and my memory alone was not enough. I learned to write down a plethora of details so I wouldn’t forget. I had a separate page for each aircrew and senior mechanic. There were days when I covered dozens of points in that book, and each point colored—good in green, bad in red, neutral in blue. Soon I found myself connecting dots with green, red, and blue pencils. On every Friday afternoon, when work finished and everybody went home for the weekend, I would shut myself in the empty squadron building and add new points and draw my colored lines in my notebook. Very soon I began extrapolating the graphs into the future.

  I had ethical doubts. I began to realize that by just selecting the points to be written down, I was insinuating my own personality into the mix. The graphs I produced were not objective, and the forecasts of the future even less so. Was it fair to judge people, reward and punish, and even wash them out on such a basis? This was indeed a good philosophical question of the kind that interested my friend Snir. Still, I had no other database, so I continued cross-checking. And then one evening I took a big step. Looking at a page full of conflicting data I had collected on one of my more complicated officers, I shut my eyes and let my unconscious speak. My hand played with the pencil, and on the white page the curve of my emotions—what I felt about this man—drew itself. I lowered my gaze and saw a circle, but the circle was broken and I saw where the break was. This way the data porridge on the page formed a pattern, and for one brief moment I was enlightened. I believed I understood what drove this guy, and trapped that understanding in words.

  The next morning I invited him to my office, and I almost shouted for joy when he raised offended eyebrows and asked, “How did you know? Who told you?” I hid my Sherlock Holmes excitement, and the next move was simple. We went on to solve a latent problem that could have led to serious trouble in the future, and perhaps even have endangered his life.

  From that point on I understood that though the details were important, and I had to continue collecting them diligently, the details themselves did not make a picture. The details came from the outside, but the full picture came from within, and the picture was the important thing. Getting to a valid conclusion was not easy; it required a lot of work from me, and it was hazardous, too. I knew that in spite of all the graphs and dots and my unconscious processes, my conclusions were not infallible. Sometimes, when a conclusion surfaced concerning a person or a situation, it surprised me, too. In the beginning I used to delay it, fearing to consolidate my results, even to utter them verbally. Even formulating a conclusion in words created a new situation. But Dvorah, my second mother, had taught me that to cope with reality one has to bring things into the light. Once, when I feared to utter the word “cancer” in her presence, she said to me, smiling, “Don’t be afraid of words, Iftach. Words don’t bite.”

  And so I learned to define people and situations, to confront my conclusions even if they seemed weird in the beginning, to declare them loudly, first to myself and then check them with my officers. The more I practiced the method, the better my capability to hit the mark became.

/>   And in this way I learned gradually to “see.”

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  SOMETIMES A PERSON who generally was “green” showed “red” deviations, and then it was necessary to take him aside and to find out—directly or indirectly—what was going on with him, and to watch him closely. But “deep blue” also was not good enough, not combat-fit. Blues had to be shaken up. And so I was prying and digging inside myself, and the men talked to me in their secret language from the pages, and more ideas rose in my mind and I brainstormed with myself, and without realizing it I learned to command men. And only when I had finished going over the whole fifty or so pages and the darkness of Friday night was creeping from the windows into the room, would I get up and stretch, yawn, lock the notebook in the drawer, free the secretary standing by, and say good night to the readiness crew who remained to spend the night in the ready room. On the way home I would circle the aircraft hangars to wish all the mechanics a good Sabbath. Later, in the dark of night, I would see those circles again.

  I WAS SEARCHING FOR THE PATH, which is more significant than any single fact.

  “The first warning of things going out of kilter in the unit comes in a casual conversation among men on the squadron balcony,” I wrote for a lecture to the air force. “Then it is time to get involved. If you miss out on that, you will have to confront more serious trouble later.” In Dubi’s case, for example, warning lights kept flashing in my head. For long periods he seemed “all green,” just a good, happy kid with no stress, but behind this misleadingly bright exterior hid a wild devil who would pop out at times. I numbered those pop-ups meticulously, and I warned him once or twice. Then, one day, one dot too many intersected his red line. I invited him in and on the spot locked him up for thirty-five days.