Erel totally understood the pressure I was under, and worried that I might lose my nerve and do something rash. He said to me on the intercom, “Take it easy, Iftach, be cool.” And this was the turning point. I relaxed. Erel helped me overcome the nervous impulse to tighten my turn toward the MiG, who was trying to turn his nose toward my tail. Had I done that, I would have been competing with him on his terms. I would have lost the last of the lift on my wings, and we would have spun out and crashed there in Syria.
I took a deep breath and reminded myself of the training fights against the Mirages. I forced myself to relax, forget the MiG, and concentrate only on my own actions. I stopped fighting against the MiG, focused on my Phantom No. 10, and flew him the best he’d ever been flown. Since we had no way to copy the MiG’s agile maneuvers, we did the opposite and “gave some air”—not too much—to those wide wings of our Phantom. I softened my hold on the stick and rudder pedals, and when No. 10 breathed air again—just a little—it was out of the question to let him go forward very much, but this little bit was enough; I could once again lift his nose up, then higher, and then, standing even more erect on our engine plumes, I turned very gently, very carefully aside, using only the foot pedals, the way Tsutsik used to stall-turn the Harvard. And when the big aircraft realized that I was giving him the best flying of my life, he also relaxed, stopped trembling and vibrating, and was suddenly sailing along with sleek, gentle movements. We merged into one, and our Phantom breathed air and showed us he could do better than I ever expected. Gradually, turn by turn, he began overpowering the MiG, cutting it off with delicate, cruel resoluteness and attaining degrees in the curve. My Phantom flew as well and as comfortably as any Mirage.
Suddenly Hassan realized what was happening and was terrified. His movements became erratic, and he began to be thrown meter after meter forward. And then, when we began gaining that advantage, I knew we were going to beat him.
Once or twice, when the MiG crossed in front of me, I fired my cannon in its general direction. I was unable to aim with my nose pointed high in the sky above it. Had I lowered the nose even one degree we would have gone all the way to the ground. But I fired over his head so that he could see the flashes and would know we meant business. And it worked. The Syrian pilot, who until that moment was flying well indeed, got even more frightened and pulled in his reins for a hard stop. The air on the MiG’s wingtips whirled like heated glass. He, who flew a single-seater and had no one like my Yoni Erel, had lost his nerve.
‡
SUDDENLY YONI CRIED, “Look! Look!”
A line of dim light shone out of the dark figure that hovered a little before us. The MiG’s vertical stabilizer glinted. It was turned sharply to its maximum. We both knew that that was that, the last move. The knight in front of us spurred his mount one last time, trying to get one more jump out of him, the decisive one. The MiG lifted its nose. Clearly Hassan was giving me the show of his life.
My legs trembled, and once again I had to restrain myself from pulling up against the MiG—just fly and watch. I couldn’t lose our wings’ frail hold on the air. We simply hovered there, waiting.
And then, really close to us, Hassan’s horse rebelled against its rider. The MiG’s nose reared up in an abnormally fast, light movement, almost reaching the vertical. The MiG stood on its tail like a tower in the air. We were very close and I saw Hassan’s canopy glistening like a soap bubble above us. Then he lost it—the MiG suddenly rolled in the air and spun down toward us, almost falling on our heads. The canopy blew off, and the pilot flew out of the cockpit like a small parcel and hit the ground with his parachute still closed. Instantly the MiG fell right on him, and they both blazed among the black rocks like a napalm bonfire.
Yoni and I breathed a sigh of relief and released our wonderful Phantom No. 10 down to the horizontal, freeing him, too, and breathing the air. We slowly accelerated and turned west among the black Syrian hills, on half power. When we climbed the big mountain going home, we took a last look back: a dirty red fire was burning on its feet, sending up a black pillar of smoke.
We were so short on fuel that on the way home we shut one engine off and flew home directly across all the missiles. They somehow gave us a break and let us pass, and we reached Ramat-David on a wing and a prayer.
THIS STORY ENDED EARLY the next morning at a debriefing. I called in all the pilots and told them what had happened—not that they didn’t already know everything from the grapevine—and then I told them seriously, “This was an egregious offense of squadron rules. The pilot who did it is here and now washed out of our squadron. He is to pack his bags and go. We don’t need pilots like him in the Orange Tails. Let him go home and watch from there how those who know to fight continue to defend Israel.” I saw their surprised faces. We were in the middle of a terrible war. I saw in their eyes the question “What the… ?”
Then I explained, “I will make a technical distinction between two men. The pilot Iftach, who committed a serious offense endangering a crew and an aircraft, is washed out right now. But Squadron Commander Spector is needed in this squadron right now, and he stays. Your squadron commander shall continue to command and lead you as usual.”
They looked at each other.
“And this MiG is scratched and goes into oblivion. No kill will be claimed in this case.”
They kept silent.
“And let me make it clear, the rules have not changed a bit, and their enforcement shall be, if anything, more strict. Any wiseass who commits an operational offense shall be punished without mercy.”
Again they looked at each other, and back at me.
“Is all this clear to everyone?”
They all understood. There were no discipline problems in that squadron after that.
Chapter
21
Wholeheartedly
I AM NOT GOING TO RELATE EVERYTHING about the Orange Tails in the Yom Kippur War, nor tell stories about other battles I was in during that war. I have already tried to do part of it in another book, and I shall likely never finish the whole story. I only want to say now that the combat effectiveness of this squadron has nothing to do with the happy fact that it didn’t lose a single pilot in the war. This fact was evident, of course, only after the war ended.
As a rule, the index for the combat effectiveness of a military unit must in no way begin with counting its casualties.
I DON’T LIKE THE NEVER-ENDING praise for the Orange Tails—coming even from generals and air force officers who should know better—for “bringing all the boys home safe.” This is an unlooked-for compliment. In my eyes, these kinds of commendations represent a fundamental misunderstanding of war and set the wrong standard for officers and men. A good combat unit does two things: accomplishing the mission well is primary, and then—and only then—a good unit looks to minimize casualties. Whoever turns this order on its head better not fight at all.
The Orange Tails fought and behaved well because we had been prepared well for war and understood the situation from the beginning, and because we had the right mixture of toughness in combat and flexibility in thinking. The Orange Tails managed not to sink into laziness or stupidity even in its toughest moments. This was no small feat. And we never had slogans such as “The hard things we do fast.” It was all business.
The Orange Tails was a dynamic battle unit, alert and always thinking. We all watched for kettles, and prepared to douse the fire under them in time. We kept correcting and re-correcting our combat methodology. Thanks to all the above, the Orange Tails met every challenge in the Yom Kippur War.
So nobody was killed in the Orange Tails? Great. But this is just the dessert, the cherry on the whipped cream. The Orange Tails fought well because we put the bullets in the targets and because we had some of the art of war drummed into us.
Squadron commanders were ordered to write fitness reports when the war was over. The last sentence in my very brief report to air force headquarters summed it up this way: �
�The Orange Tails are fit and ready for another war.” I knew that all my men stood behind these proud words.
This was such a wonderful feeling that it’s hard to convey in words. I knew I had done my job right. I felt like a carpenter who cut the wood without breaking the saw.
And my happiness welled out of a hidden personal satisfaction, too. Now, after four years of commanding squadrons in two wars, I finally knew how to command men.
IN DECEMBER 1973, TWO MONTHS after the end of the Yom Kippur War, I handed the Orange Tails’ flag to their second commander. The event was modest, with only a small audience. Again, just like two years before, it was a cold winter day and we had the ceremony inside the squadron’s first aircraft hangar, still shining and clean. Our families watched from the sidelines. They had just returned to base housing after they were dispersed to a boarding school for the duration to bite their nails and await the outcome. The women returned, cleaned up their homes, threw out the putrid remnants that were still in the refrigerators after three weeks, reactivated the kindergarten, and tried to smile through their personal troubles.
Every family had someone dead; names kept coming in from everywhere. We ran around nights, driving all over Israel to visit, to console, to hear stories, to try to understand. Ali’s brother, Maj. (Res.) Yair Dgani, returned from the dunes of the western Sinai to Givat-Brenner still picking the thin steering wires of the antitank Russian missiles out of his hair. Yair was physically unhurt but as shaken as I, and for similar reasons. I heard about how some of his senior commanders had performed only after the war, and later read about it in the report of the Agranat Commission, which investigated the conduct of the war. Sheani was dead. And Goldie. They joined the eternally young faces in the photo of flight school class 31—just six of us left now to get older. Only after the war did I tell Ali about the death in battle of Col. Arlozor Lev, Zorik, the commander of Ramat-David, that beloved man who had welcomed us to the Scorpions and into his home when we were a young couple.
THE NEW COMMANDER AND I saluted each other. I left the podium full of conflicting emotions. Like all of Israel, I was shocked by the failures of leadership in the war and by the removal of Chief of Staff David Elazar—definitely not the guilty party, and perhaps the one man who’d showed any balls in the high command—and with Moshe Dayan’s ugly evasion of responsibility. But on the other hand, I myself was full of pride and felt very lucky. I was delighted to have been one of the field commanders who took the war in hand when those above us dropped the ball, and of my standing as a man in those ten days until the high command realized that the Third Temple wasn’t falling after all. And over all, I knew I reached my peak of professional capability as fighter pilot and combat commander exactly when my country needed it. That was a hell of a good feeling.
But it was hard to show pride and happiness after this war. There were too many hard feelings all around. Thus I kept silent and never shared with anybody either the pain or the personal exaltation I felt—to this day.
Ali was in the audience. She was painfully thin. Our sons stood beside her, and she held baby Noah in her arms. When I looked at her, she unconsciously squared her shoulders, like a soldier, and I recalled the old photograph of Grandma Bracha Tatar “at attention” behind her cart-driver husband. A shaft of pain ran through me. Had the wheel come around again? Doesn’t it ever end?
The short ceremony ended and the squadron’s women pushed in to hug Ali and shake her hand. I could see by Ali’s face that she also was filled with emotion. My nine-year-old son Etay embraced me, coughing deep in his throat. That nervous cough, something like a bark, was to linger until he grew up.
I REPORTED TO AIR FORCE headquarters in Tel Aviv. Everybody was digesting the outcome of the war and working on postmortems. I soon realized that not everything was open for discussion. When I asked the air force commander why he had ordered all copies of the Orange Tails’ war debriefing collected and destroyed, he answered me facetiously.
“An alien from space who decides to study human society on Earth”—Benny was renowned for his colorful images—“should better not use Walt Disney films for that research.”
“What?”
“In the Yom Kippur War,” Benny interpreted for me, “we arrived as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ air force, a grotesque imitation of the real air force we should have been. It’s no use wasting our time studying Mickey and Minnie’s love life. It’s a similar waste of time to study the lessons of this past war. We’d be better off preparing for the next one.”
He didn’t fool me. I knew he knew that was not a good excuse and that he didn’t sleep nights after the war. I also knew that some of his senior subordinates were discussing secretly how to get him out of the top spot. And I was certain the Orange Tails’ war debriefing booklet had been suppressed because it had criticized the workings of air force high command during the war. Many years later somebody sent me that suppressed booklet. I reread what I had written at the end of October 1973, and I agreed that it contained some harsh criticism:
“This war suffered from a lack of designated targets.”
“Feedback was met with negative reaction from the high command.”
“We failed in blindly believing our intelligence.”
“Headquarters lagged behind the field in tactical analysis.”
“Field units feel they can plan operations better than headquarters.”
And finally the sentence that was deleted with a black pen: “In this war, the real enemy was air force headquarters.”
Rereading this after many years, when I was much more mature and distant from the hard feelings of that time, made me able to understand a letter a former commander of mine, Gen. Rafi Harlev, had sent me: “The lessons you wrote about in the Orange Tails’ war debriefing booklet are doomed to be discarded, not because they are mistaken, but because they are written in this unique fashion of yours.” But at the end of 1973 I was on fire, and said bluntly that my commanders had failed in their duty.
I WAS NOT ALONE IN MY opinion. The whole of Israel was furious when the results of the war were known, along with the number of dead, wounded, and prisoners of war. No family came out untouched; every community buried sons. The whole nation—I included—wanted an accounting. The Agranat Commission ran its meetings behind closed doors, but the media spread allusions to leaders and senior officers. I had my own memories of the collapse above me, beginning with confused telephone calls, contradicting and ever-changing orders, and ending with letters I got from people who were inside that cauldron at air force headquarters during the war.
“As to command performance,” one wrote to me, “it was extremely bad. Your evaluation that ‘the command post was under stress’ is nothing in comparison to what really went on up there.”
And another one wrote, “One day we shall have to talk at length about the war… for reasons I am not free to detail, the air force didn’t do what it should have done. My white hairs are the result of it. But never mind,” he added with dry humor, “better white hair than a bald head.”
A third man, who spent the entire war in the air force command post, conveyed the following: “The command post was crowded, fussy, and noisy all the time. Officers and enlisted personnel ran around in the corridors, shouting. People worked around the clock with no place to eat or sleep, and became exhausted. There was no calm place to sit and read, and so information that came in from the field was set aside. Commanders didn’t look at feedback from the squadrons after execution of their missions.” When he saw my astonished face, this officer went into further detail: “Radios blared from all sides. Crazy rumors flew around. Everything was interpreted in an extreme manner, everything was black or white, and everything caused immediate reactions. When they became overwhelmed with fatigue, officers simply disappeared from their posts and couldn’t be found. The air force commander would suddenly show up and issue orders, and nobody understood what and why. There were times when arguments verged on mutiny.” He concluded his indi
ctment with the following words: “When an operation began, decisions to continue or stop it halfway were made on the basis of casualties but without regard to accumulating results. Simply, information about losses came right away, but real results were known only much later.”
For a soldier like me, who was expecting efficiency from his commanders, such descriptions were a damning finger pointed right at Benny Peled.
TODAY I CAN IMAGINE how Benny felt when I sat in front of him demanding to know what happened to the Orange Tails’ debriefing document. I wanted to use it in my new job. Besides blaming my superiors’ performance, that booklet contained concrete lessons I, as a new staff officer, intended to use. And when I realized that I touched a nerve in a touchy person, I expected that Benny—who was known as an aggressive guy—would hit back at me. But he didn’t in that conversation.
Instead, he grabbed my shirt and didn’t let me get up. He sat me back down and began explaining and explaining. The tense atmosphere lessened with the seventh cigarette he lit, and then I reminded him of our previous conversation in the middle of the war. I had called the command post in Tel Aviv from the Orange Tails, found Benny and told him on the phone, excited and happy, “Benny, a helicopter found Yoram and got him out!”
Yoram Peled was a pilot in my squadron, a hot dogger, and his aircraft had been shot down. For a full hour there was no information on what had happened to him.
Benny roared back at me, “Stop filling my mind with crap!”
“But Benny, it’s about Yoram—”
“To you I am the air force commander, not Yoram’s father!”
I hung up silently and said to myself, “Benny is a damn fool.” Then I cooled down and understood what was going on in his head and said to myself, “All right, then, for now I am Yoram’s father.”
Loud and Clear Page 37