Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  The family gathered in the chill evenings around the tiny kerosene stove. This was our time for closeness. I got to know my three kids. Ali and I talked, grew close again. She became pregnant. Spring arrived, and optimism sprang anew. I hummed songs to myself to the rhythm of the tractor hopping over the terraces, mowing and spraying the orchards. I connected with friends, discussing, writing, and weighing many ideas. The world was full of exciting choices. I waxed passionate; there were so many new prospects.

  And then one day the chief of staff of the IDF, Raful, showed up in the orchard.

  It was the spring of 1979, and the days were bright and blue. I led a group of young volunteers from America in thinning out the flowers on the peach trees to assure that the remaining fruit grew out to commercial size. This is great work, the peach trees in full pink bloom, and it almost hurt to extend the hydraulic shears into the tree and cut entire branches with one trigger pull. The boys and girls carried ladders and climbed into the trees after me to complete the final pruning, using manual shears.

  The tractor behind me roared, and due to the noise I didn’t hear anything, but suddenly I saw blue working shirts crowded around a stranger in a green uniform. I went to see, and the commander of the Israeli Defense Force was standing on top of a ladder, pruning branches. Lieutenant General Raful refused to get down, and he didn’t stop working with the shears he took from one of the girls until we broke for breakfast. We went some distance from the volunteers and sat together on the green, warm grass, eating sandwiches and sipping tea from styrofoam cups.

  “You’re coming back in the service.” I grinned. I told him that rumors had reached me already, that command of Hatzor Air Base would be offered to me, and I had turned it down.

  “I am not going back,” I told him, “I have other ideas. And,” I added angrily, “it’s time you told them to release my retirement pension account. I need the money to start my new life.”

  “You’re not getting a penny. First, go talk to Ivry.”

  “Ivry has nothing to say to me.”

  “Ivry is waiting for you. Go talk to him.” The chief of staff rose, brushed the back of his pants, put on his red beret, and walked to his car, which waited near the orchard.

  “WE DECIDED TO BUY F-16 fighters from the United States. The aircraft will arrive within the year,” Ivry said. “I want you to come back and take command of their integration and assimilation into the air force.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “And you’re to command Ramat-David Air Base, too.”

  When I could breathe again, I said, “David, how can you do this, after what happened? Didn’t I let you down?”

  “This is for the Orange Tails,” he answered, “for the Yom Kippur War.”

  I don’t remember if my eyes filled, or if I managed to control my emotions. I was moved indeed, but not because I was hungry for compliments. I was moved because during all those years I learned not to expect any honors from my superiors. No commander of mine had ever bothered to mention, one way or another, the principal occurrences, decisions, and risks that had shaped my life. Not one of them said a word about the establishment of the Orange Tails, or its performance in 1973. Ivry’s saying that was completely unexpected, and the more so from such a closed, critical guy, stingy with his feelings. It was like getting a love song from anybody else. To this day I am grateful to Ivry for that single sentence.

  And still I knew that what was proposed was conditional. The air force hadn’t called me back so I could preach heresy about its future organization and equipment. Intellectually, I received a proposal to turn the clock back ten years. For a moment I sat and weighed it. I was aware that it was absurd. I—who declared from every podium that the air force should change direction from fighters and invest in other alternatives—had received a proposal to take command of the newest fighter force.

  At last I decided. In one stroke I buried my strategic ideas and all my other plans for life, and chose to take command of Ramat-David and the new Israeli F-16 force. The cost was removal from the circle of those who influence the agenda and future of the air force, but a romance with the hottest plane in the world, and living a few more years among the best people Israel could assemble, was going to be a great joy, a dream of any combat commander. And more battles were in the future, for sure. How could I turn this down?

  We shook hands and I rose to go. At the door I stopped, turned back to Ivry, and said, “Ivry, you know well that I’m coming back for one more hitch, that’s all. In two years, three at most, I will leave the service for good. We both know that I came on a mission, and I am not out for command of the air force.” He looked at me with his blue, hard eyes and waved his hand. Ivry didn’t like pompous declarations.

  AGAIN THE MOVING VAN. We left our friends in Kibbutz Tzuba, who had given us a home in time of need, and on a blazing noon in the autumn of 1979 loaded our tattered furniture for the umpteenth time, and after a four-hour drive arrived in family housing at Ramat-David Air Base in the Izreel Valley, into clouds of stinging gnats. It was harvest time, and almost without a breath I was hurried back to military command and into the cockpit of a fighter. Here we go again.

  Chapter

  22

  Halo

  AFTER TWO YEARS AT RAMAT-DAVID came three years more in command of Tel-Nof Air Base, and my military service finally ended for good five years later, in October 1984, when I turned forty-four. My picture was added to a long line of yellowing faces on the office wall in Tel Nof. I said good-bye to Abraham Yoffe, David Ivry, Ran Pecker, Avihu Ben Nun, and the clerks, entered Ali’s car, and we drove together home to Ramat-HaSharon, a suburb near Tel Aviv.

  On the next morning I went to my mother. I found her sitting outside in the autumn sunshine, wrapped in a blanket.

  “Shosh,” I asked her, “how much money do you have?”

  The bright eyes looked at me uneasily. Cancer had already destroyed their hard, self-assured clarity.

  “What do you need money for? What do you intend to do?”

  “I want to go away for several months. I need time for myself, to think. There’s no silence here.”

  “Listen well, Iftach. I am not so healthy anymore… ”

  I understood. “I’ll pay you back to the last penny when I get back.”

  “Where are you getting money?” I saw before me a very sick, scared woman.

  “I will have money. From my discharge bonus.”

  “Ach, why did you have to leave? What will come of it?” She dug deep in her closet and produced ten thousand U.S. dollars in bills, folded with rubber bands. I knew it was all she had.

  I was going abroad for an undefined period of time, for as long as it would take, as far as my mother’s money would get me. I had no other cash resources. I had a list of addresses, and an introductory letter from air force commander Amos Lapidot.

  Ali took me to the airport. When we kissed good-bye, I told her, “I’ll come back with something good. I’ll get it from inside.” And Ali said, holding our little Ella’s hand, “Go in peace, don’t worry. Don’t think about us here, we’ll be all right.” And she added what I didn’t ask from her. “I’ll take care of your mother.”

  I spent the ten hours on the plane browsing in my small notebook, erasing, correcting, and adding lines to the fifty-odd I had already put there in the past few days. Each of those lines was a possibility for new work, for our next life. Some of the ideas were interesting, others curious, and others totally crazy. I was going to check out some of them and come back with one.

  I stayed in America for two months, traveling from place to place on buses and in trains, sleeping in cheap motels, washing my own underwear and socks. In the morning I went for the meetings I had arranged, wearing the one suit I had pressed the night before, sporting my only tie. I met people and visited companies. I collected and read the materials they gave me, and made synopses. I tried to reject forty-nine thoughts and select the right one for me. Gradually I began to see some
light.

  The Israeli Air Force and the defense of Israel still flowed in my veins. At that time I didn’t know yet how to build houses, run farms, develop and market computer programs, write novels, initiate ecological research, or join political struggles for national sanity. In 1984 I was focused on the future of aerial warfare.

  AMONG OTHER THINGS, helicopters interested me most. The military uses of the vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle had captured my imagination for a long time, since I took part in the establishment of the air force commando battalion, which since then became an established fighting unit in blue berets. I knew that the old problem of the helicopters’ flight instrumentation hadn’t changed. When I returned to military service, and after my two-year F-16 venture, I became commander of Tel Nof Air Base. There I met the helicopters again. In the next three years I fell in love with the large CH-53 Petrels, their pilots and mechanics, and the intoxicating operational possibilities they hid.

  I liked to spend long hours with them (a helicopter operation is a process that takes days and nights). After years of flying solo on the limits—the way fighter pilots fly—I found the teamwork of the helicopter crews interesting and fun. Their crews were less arrogant, perhaps because in the first place they were seen as second-class pilots. Their society was not so structured, and they had a better sense of humor. There was always humor in their cockpits, sometimes a little stupid, but I enjoyed it, anyway. Most of all I liked their special vocabulary: where fighter pilots confirm with “roger,” the helicopter pilots used the word “straight,” a wonderful idiom that has special meaning in Hebrew.

  In those three years commanding Tel Nof I learned to fly those complicated machines and joined in their operations, and I still have several stones I collected in dark, remote fields, in places with foreign and strange names. I flew helicopters in training, in war games, and on the battlefield, and I experienced the great variety of helicopters’ activities: the winding, clandestine penetration into enemy areas, to insert men and supplies in various places, on mountains, in deserts, and onto various vehicles; hovering to rescue wounded and dead people, pulling them up out of canyons, floods, and every other place. I caught a parachute that carried valuable equipment while still in the air; transported heavy loads by a hook under the craft’s belly and deposited them gently on the summit of a high mountain, with the rotor blades clawing at the thin air at the limit of their power. And more.

  Helicopter work was amazingly diversified. They penetrated and emerged, sometimes under fire, carrying soldiers, vehicles, and weapons. They attacked, collected intelligence, and chased terrorists in small wars. Gradually I perceived that helicopters went to the limit no less than fighter aircraft, although in different ways. There was enormous combat potential in helicopters, but their flight was complicated and problematic, very different from the beautiful, geometric clarity of a fighter’s movements. Helicopters moved in their secret ways as in a thicket of uncertainties, as in the depths of a jungle. They had to orientate in difficult situations and react quickly to survive.

  I was surprised again by the kind of instruments helicopter pilots had. A powerful helicopter such as the CH-53 took dozens of soldiers with their weapons and vehicles great distances by night and at low altitude, crossing hot battlefields, and winding in complex topographical areas. These were difficult and dangerous flights, and the pilots had to navigate flying low and fast and safely in the darkness among many threats without triggering any of them. The crew had to navigate with perfect accuracy, and to keep spatially oriented all the time. As a fighter pilot myself, I was expecting a serious instrumentation system for what this task required, but the instruments at the disposal of the helicopters’ pilots were years behind the times.

  In the three years I flew with helicopters I waited for somebody to propose new instrumentation, but in vain. Salesmen and marketers showed up, but they proposed just gadgets, pieces of instrumentation that dealt with parts of the general problem but not the whole. The modern fighters were sporting integrated flight systems for their less-complicated missions, but helicopters had nothing. And the helicopter pilots themselves didn’t take any interest in avionic instrumentation. They didn’t understand the concept of integration at all. This is why there was no market for real systems for helicopters—no one had thought much about it.

  I believed that the time of the helicopter had arrived. Somebody with imagination was needed to create new associations. The helicopter’s problem was very different from the fighters’, and the idea was stimulating intellectually. I thought, Perhaps it could be me? Perhaps just because of my strangeness to their world I might come out with a fresh look at the problem and devise an avionic solution that might answer their questions and resolve those difficulties.

  GENERAL PARKER, THE vice commander of U.S. Army aviation, received me at Fort Rucker as if I were a king. Right after a first meeting in his office he drove me to the officers’ quarters. I was housed in a villa with white rugs. For breakfast I sat alone at a table for ten, and a servant, looking like a captain of an ocean liner, wearing a white uniform with shiny gold buttons, served me, passing plates over my shoulders.

  For two long days I got an educational tour. I saw helicopters—lots of different kinds of helicopters. There were long rows with hundreds of them. I conversed with the commanders of various units. Then I had meetings with pilots, flight instructors, simulator instructors, chiefs, technicians, and instrumentation people. I looked into their flight profiles and the instruments they were using. At night General Parker and I flew together in a helicopter, simulating combat flight. I observed the way Americans did things and the different tools they used. At the end of those two days at Rucker, which came after visiting the main industries that produced instrumentation and weapons systems for helicopters, I summed it up this way: “All over the world people cook with the same water.” That meant that their problems were identical to ours. I proposed to Parker that I present my impressions to him and his staff.

  Some ten officers sat before me in Parker’s briefing room. On the wall hung a white board. I got up and wrote on it a group of sentences in red marker, and at the end of each I put a question mark.

  “Well, gentlemen?”

  A colonel raised his hand. “General Spector, all these are well-known things. You’ve written a list of our troubles.”

  Parker nodded to me to go on.

  I added a few more sentences, this time in black. In fact, what I wrote there was an initial characterization, first lines for a full avionic system for military helicopters, but nobody knew it yet. The officers looked at each other and began grinning. These were just empty words, hollow promises. Nothing existed yet in the real world.

  “Gentlemen” I asked, “suppose there could be something that does all this. What then?”

  I didn’t know how those problems could be solved, but at least now I knew for sure and formulated what was needed.

  “If you have such a thing, bring it to me,” said General Parker, “and I’ll buy it. There’s nobody in the world who would pass it up.”

  THERE WAS NOTHING MORE to do in the United States. My time abroad was over, and I flew home. On the airliner to Israel the general definitions of the first integrated avionic system for helicopters took shape. I required the system to combine night vision, spatial awareness, navigation, communication, battlefield orientation, and direction of weapons systems. The year was 1985, and combined systems were operational only in the most modern fighter aircraft, such as the F-16, and those systems didn’t even come near to supplying the services I intended. Had General Parker been a less open-minded person, he certainly would have suggested I join George Lucas in producing science fiction films.

  I called the avionic system I designed Hila, a woman’s name. In English it translated to Halo. Besides the outstanding operational requirements, my Halo had some serious material difficulties that designers of fighter systems didn’t face. The first was price: air forces that were ready
to invest five million dollars in avionic systems for an F-15 fighter wouldn’t invest anything over a hundred thousand to buy avionic systems for a helicopter. Why? I could tell them how wrong they were—a helicopter mishap involves human life, more lives than the crew of a fighter. But what difference would that have that made? Thus I decided that for my final presentation the price tag of the complete system would be a quarter million dollars, but the system would be built of independent subunits that could be sold as modules for a much lower price, and deliver partial services.

  A second major hindrance was the system’s weight: all existing aerial instrumentation—computers, scopes, gauges, etc.—were heavy. A fighter aircraft that carries four tons of bombs can easily carry a few hundred added kilograms of radar, computers, wiring, screens, terminals, and even electronic external tanks. Helicopters, on the other hand, are sensitive to every extra kilogram. So I decided that the complete system could not exceed twenty-five kilograms. The modules, some of which had to be on the pilot’s body and helmet, were limited to grams. In this way I defined more parameters and Halo began to take shape. I finished when I knew exactly what I wanted.

  When functional requirements were completed, the general system designed, and the parameters set, I couldn’t do any more by myself. I needed an engineer. My discharge bonus arrived, and finally I had some money. I contacted engineering companies and bought data and technical help.