Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando

by Moshe Betser

  “That’s bad news, Matan,” I said.

  Tagalongs are a phenomenon in the IDF — people show up wanting to get in on the action. Sometimes they are former members of the unit, sometimes from other units. The larger an operation, the more likely that the circle of people aware of the secret preparations will grow. And in tiny Israel, word spreads fast.

  More often than not, tagalongs get in the way, especially in a special operations mission, where everything is measured out and planned. Vehicles are loaded so perfectly that every soldier and item has a number, the order in which they go in and out of the transport, or a specific position in a formation, or a task to accomplish. Adding a tagalong means taking someone else out. Matan knew this as well as I did.

  “No tagalongs,” I said. “Not with me.”

  “Muki, please …” Matan asked.

  “No way,” I insisted. “And you know better,” I added, making no effort to hide a reprimanding tone from my captain (something that can only happen in a special operations unit of the IDF, where a soldier’s skills are as important — if not more important — than his rank).

  Although Matan did know better, as a career soldier he had his own considerations. But I refused to give in — especially when I recognized one of the two tagalongs coming up the walkway.

  Tzimel’s appearance confirmed everything I felt about lateminute arrivals from outside the unit. A company commander in the brigade when I first reached the sayeret, he made a bad impression on me then. Now, trailed by an air force intelligence lieutenant named Nissim, who claimed to have a background in infantry and wanted to be taken along, Tzimel’s appearance in the operation gave me a foreboding feeling.

  “No way,” I said to Matan, shaking my head, not caring if Tzimel overheard. “No tagalongs. Come on,” I insisted. “This operation looks like a lot of fun, but it also could get very complicated. Those people will not be any help. They’ll just get in the way. And you know it.”

  “I’ll take one and you’ll take one,” suggested Matan.

  I shook my head. If he wanted to take them on, he could. But I wanted neither of them. “No way,” I repeated. “No way I’m going to take off someone who knows the plan to put in someone who doesn’t. No way.” Like many of my generation from the Jezreel Valley, I am stubborn. Matan finally gave in. I hoped he would send Tzimel and Nissim home. Instead, he added them to his force.

  We took off in the dark, in eight helicopters. Half an hour into the ride, the pilots went into a holding pattern because of fog. Five minutes went by, then fifteen, while the pilots did figure eights. There is nothing unusual in an operation’s schedule changing in real time-as long as the other forces involved know about the new timetable. When the helicopters resumed their flight path down the Jordan Rift Valley, it never occurred to us on board that central command stuck to the same plan, without taking our delay into account.

  I am not saying our job was the most important cog in the operation or that if we had arrived on time, everything would have worked like clockwork. But to prevent the enemy’s escape from Karameh, they needed us in the right place at the right time.

  Nobody warned us that we lost the element of surprise in the swirl of dust before dawn, our landing camouflaged by the fastchanging light of the desert just as the sun rose over the red mountains of Edom.

  My teams scrambled out of the rocking choppers, heading to the formation we had practiced. The choppers left behind their dust storms while we began jogging west to our position above Karameh about six miles away. Our plan said to be there by five-thirty, just as the air show began.

  But barely a dozen strides into the hour’s run, carrying full gear across the wadis of the Rift east of Karameh, we ran into the enemy.

  I don’t know who was more surprised, us or the armed Palestinians in their raggedy collection of mismatched surplus uniforms from Arab and Soviet-bloc armies, in sneakers and sandals as well as army boots. None seemed to have helmets, and most wore the black-and-white checkered keffiyot that identified them as Fatah, loyal to Arafat’s majority faction of the PLO.

  Some tried to fight. Most looked for hiding places in the crumbly sandstone gullies of the wadis.

  We chased them down into the dry riverbeds and over the ridges, killing about twenty-five who resisted and taking about a dozen more prisoner. All the while, we kept pushing to Karameh under annoying mortar fire from Jordanian Army positions in the foothills to the east behind us. It surprised us as much as the unexpected encounter with the enemy.

  In the months after the Six-Day War, our intelligence experts scoffed at the idea that the Jordanian Army would help the Palestinians, or even challenge our temporary occupation of their country while we dealt the PLO a punishing blow. After all, since the end of the ‘67 war, the PLO under Arafat had challenged King Hussein’s authority throughout the country and completely subverted it in places like Karameh. But as so often happens, intelligence estimates proved to be wrong. Luckily, the Jordanians were not very accurate with their mortar fire.

  It took almost five hours to move five miles, instead of the hour we planned. Because of that, I knew something was very amiss in the operation. At eleven in the morning we finally reached a bluff overlooking Karameh, giving us a panoramic view of the war in the village below.

  About a mile to our west, tanks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), half-tracks (rear-axled tank-treads), and jeeps zigzagged through the village, blasting at resisters holed up inside the driedmud and tin-walled houses. Planes roared out of Israel in the west, looping in and out of the scene, diving to drop their bombs. Helicopters carrying wounded flew back and forth. From the foothills of the Edom mountain range, Jordanian artillery shelled the battlefield while our artillery shot back.

  South, north, and due west, I saw tanks bogged down in the mud of the Jordan River’s winter overflow. Towers of smoke rose from burning equipment in the fields and the buildings of the village. The clear, clean air of the desert gave way to the awful smell of warflaming fuel and oil, burning machinery, and charred bodies.

  The IDF was in trouble.

  And so was Matan. My communications sergeant, carrying the radio on his back, tuned into Matan’s frequency to report our position. I heard General Uzi Narkiss, commanding officer of the central command, in charge of the operation, shouting orders at Matan. “Get your forces organized and get out of the area.”

  “Impossible,” Matan answered, in a voice much cooler than the general’s. “I have wounded,” he explained.

  “Helicopters can take them out,” said Narkiss.

  “I’m having problems getting to them,” Matan explained.

  The IDF is not supposed to leave casualties behind. We are a small country, and have no unknown soldiers.

  I broke in on the channel. “Matan,” I asked, “where are you?”

  He gave me his position. “I’m coming to help you,” I announced, not waiting for a response. He probably would have said he did not need help, but I distinctly heard him say “problems.” I started my fighters on the mile-and-a-half run to Matan’s position north of us, handing over our prisoners to another infantry force we encountered in the field.

  As soon as we reached Matan, I understood the problem. A soldier lay wounded about a hundred feet away, under intense fire from snipers. It would not be easy to get him out of there alive. But Matan’s problems did not stop there. “Another squad is in trouble,” he told me. “Their officer was wounded, so we evacuated him. Alexander took over.”

  “Alexander’s a good sergeant,” I pointed out. “He can handle things.”

  “I know,” Matan admitted. “But we’re getting strange reports from them. They say they are lost, and want help getting out.”

  I knew Alexander, a good field soldier. Getting lost did not sound like him. The back-packed radios of the time were the best available to the IDF, but not perfect. Frustrating minutes passed until, finally, I got a response to my own calls.

  “We’re not pinned do
wn,” the voice on the radio said. “But maneuvering is difficult.”

  From what he described, I placed him on the map two wadis away to the north. I told them to stay put and asked Yisrael Arazi, a good friend and my best platoon commander, to pick a dozen fighters for the rescue force. In minutes, we reached the first wadi, where we encountered a little resistance that we quickly dispatched.

  Entering the second wadi, I saw Nissim, the air force lieutenant who came along as a tagalong, and immediately understood what happened.

  With the platoon’s officer wounded, Alexander had taken command. But Nissim pulled rank on the sergeant and looked for what he thought would be a shortcut to the safety of the concentration of IDF forces closer to Karameh.

  He tried cutting across the desert on a straight line up and down the wadis. He didn’t know it’s safer to stick to the high ground rather than down in the riverbeds, where caves, boulders, and brush make easy ambush cover and the slippery banks of crumbly sand and stone are difficult to scale on the run.

  Alexander knew how to lead the squad along the ridges, where, if they encountered enemy fire, it would be easier to identify its source — and take it out. The lieutenant, ignorant of basic tactics and believing that rank, not knowledge, gave him authority, endangered my men. Nissim thought it would be a picnic. When it turned into a real firefight, he wanted out. There is nothing more dangerous in combat than a fool.

  Always a little hot — blooded, Arazi hissed, “Let’s kill him now,” making sure Nissim heard. Alexander smiled weakly behind the tagalong’s back. I swallowed back my own anger, hushing my angry platoon commander with a wave of my hand.

  The air force lieutenant tried stammering an explanation. I cut him off with a glare. “We’ll straighten this out when we get back to the base,” I vowed, and ordered the soldiers into formation for the hike back.

  I took the center, keeping an eye on our flanks, while the platoon fanned out with about five meters between each soldier. We worked our way over the first ridge, alert for any enemy movement, sweating under the midday sun in the desert.

  Heading down into the wadi from the ridge, I left behind a threeman squad to provide cover from the cliff top as we slipped and slid down into the riverbed. We slalom-dashed across the dusty wadi floor and climbed the crumbly limestone wall up to the next ridge. Reaching the plateau, I called over the squad left behind. Now we gave them cover in case of enemy fire erupting in our footsteps. They made it across without any shooting, and we started down the second wadi. With me in the center, Arazi took the point.

  Just as we reached the most dangerous part of the move down into the wadi, exposed on the slope, fierce, effective fire burst at us from up the wadi’s path. I hit the ground, about halfway down the slope, aware of my men doing the same around me.

  “I’m hit,” Arazi shouted, about thirty yards below me in the wadi bed. He collapsed beside a rock jutting from the wadi floor, clutching at his stomach. Bullets raced across the riverbed, kicking up the dust in tiny cyclones around him-and us.

  Above, the three fighters on the top of the ridge returned the enemy fire coming at us in bursts and singles, a constant attack from more than one source. Well hidden, the enemy caught us with nowhere to hide. We were pinned to the ground by hot lead screaming overhead and smacking into the ground around us.

  I scanned the scene. We could make it across the wadi to an outcrop of boulders a couple of dozen yards ahead, on the other side of the wadi. But it would mean abandoning Arazi. I could not do that. Seriously wounded and fully exposed to the enemy’s withering fire, he was my first priority.

  “Get him to cover,” I snapped at the squad to my left. They had practiced for this situation hundreds of times. One soldier lofted a smoke grenade. It toppled through the air, exploding into a billowing cloud. Three ran into the smoke screen, racing to rescue their stricken officer, knowing the thick smoke only hid them, but did not protect them from the bullets.

  They knew the drill: to get Arazi to cover before anything else. But when the smoke cleared, I saw my soldiers frozen by panic. They forgot everything. One soldier knelt by Arazi’s side, a second fumbled with a packet of bandages, and a third stood, fully exposed to the incessant enemy fire.

  Bullets stormed across the wadi at us all. I shot back with my AK-47, my Klatch, as we nicknamed the Kalashnikovs captured from the Egyptian Army in Sinai the year before.

  Prone, at an odd angle created by the slope of the wadi’s bank, I noticed a tiny cloud of dust rise from the ground where a bullet struck just beside me. I ignored it, concentrating on Arazi and the three paralyzed soldiers.

  “Get him to cover!” I shouted.

  I heard a soft moan beside me. I looked to my right. “Betser, I’m hit,” said Engel, a redheaded kibbutznik lying a few meters away. I looked him up and down. Blood darkened his green fatigues above the knee.

  “It’s your leg,” I told him, offering a reassuring smile. “Not your shooting hand.” He winced back a smile at me. “Keep firing,” I said. He did.

  For the third time I shouted for the soldiers around Arazi to get him across the wadi to safety. But just then, one of the three fell soundlessly to the ground beside his wounded commander.

  Only a few minutes had passed since the shooting began and we had already lost two good fighters, not counting wounded like Engel, still shooting beside me. If we did not get out of there, we would all die.

  “Hanegbi,” I called to a soldier about halfway between Arazi and me. “Get down there and tell them to move him to cover.”

  “No way I’m going down there,” Hanegbi answered.

  “Hanegbi…” I repeated slowly and sternly. More afraid of me, perhaps, than the enemy bullets, he started running toward Arazi. But after a few strides, Hanegbi flung himself to the ground, under heavy fire.

  With nothing left to do but go myself, I plucked a smoke grenade from my web-belt and flung it into the wadi. Red smoke streamed from the can. As soon as it began billowing, I dashed down the slope toward Arazi. Firing over my Kalashnikov’s sights toward the enemy, aware of my soldiers behind me doing the same, I raced to save my soldiers.

  A freak gust blew the red smoke the wrong way, exposing me fully as I zigzagged across the wadi toward Arazi. Bending for my last strides, I saw the shock in his blanched face. Concentrating on his web-belt’s canvas strap, I reached for it on the run. I planned to grab it and pull him to the safety of a boulder jutting from the far bank of the wadi. My action would resolve the will of the soldiers who had panicked. Indeed, bursting into their view, lead whistling in the air around us all, I became aware of my soldiers around me beginning to move. I reached for Arazi’s belt.

  And when I touched it, a blast exploded inside my head.

  As if struck by a huge ax, my head felt like it had burst open. The impact jerked me upright, while teeth flew out of my mouth. Blood cascaded from my face, a thick red waterfall pouring over my torso.

  Instinctively, I grabbed my throat where the bullet had ripped into my head. But as the blood poured out of me, so did my strength.

  Still on my feet, I realized I was dying. The thought echoed inside me, reverberating into a singular serenity that quickly overcame all my other thoughts.

  A soldier goes into battle thinking it won’t happen to him. That makes it possible to face death. It should not happen to anyone. “But if it does, at least it won’t be me.” That’s what I thought. Now I knew better.

  As the officer in charge, I was the last person there who should have been wounded. But as my strength ebbed away and the sensations of my body diminished, I let go of those thoughts. The shooting around me continued, but nothing mattered anymore. I said farewell to the world, ready to die. Still on my feet, I let my hand finally drop the futile effort to stem the bleeding at my throat.

  A hot blast of desert air seared my throat, surprising me as it filled my lungs, shocking me with the realization I would live — if I survived the swarm of bullets around me.


  Even if I reached cover, I intuitively knew that I should not lie down, certain that if I did, I would drown in my own blood. I must stay on my feet, I thought. Not dead — at least not yet — and still the officer, responsible for my men; getting help for them became my primary concern.

  I walked straight ahead, dimly aware of the shooting behind me, and started up the slope leading out of the wadi, knowing that only a few hundred meters away, Matan and his soldiers waited for us, oblivious to our predicament.

  Gunshots snapped in the air like a crazed drumming. “Betser, get down! Muki! Get down!” Soldiers shouted around me. But I marched on, alone, directly up the slope.

  A warm, familiar feeling in my boots made me think of home, of the fields of Nahalal, pulling irrigation pipes up a field after a night of watering. Then I realized that blood, not water, filled my boots. It soaked down through my uniform, into my socks, filling my lacedup paratrooper boots.

  I do not know how long it took to reach Matan’s position, but as I marched alone, a tall target in the battle zone, I waited for the enemy bullet that would kill me and thought about all that had gone wrong.

  Somehow I managed to make it all the way. No enemy bullet struck me down from behind. Ahead of me familiar faces, soldiers I trained and led, stared at me, the horror of my appearance reflected in their eyes. To my right, someone told me to lie down. I waved a hand, to say no. Every movement of my head turned into an excruciating pain reverberating through my entire body. I tried to speak, but only gurgling gasps came out.

  Dr. Assa, our unit doctor, led me to a rock to sit down. Beyond his face peering at my wound, I saw Matan sending a rescue team in the direction of my soldiers in the wadi. While Assa studied my face, not knowing where to start, a medic cut open my trouser leg. For the first time I discovered a wound in my thigh. The bullet reached all the way to the bone.

  “Do you want some water?” someone asked. I reached for the canteen with a steady hand. But when I tried to drink, the water only spilled down over the remains of my destroyed jaw. I looked down at the wound in my thigh and poured some water on the bleeding gash.