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

by Moshe Betser

  And the war continued.

  It did not take long for the tanks to catch up and remind us to get moving again. As the tanks came to a halt, we pulled out after a few words with the commanders, then headed west to the heart of the Sinai.

  Our jeeps quickly caught up with the Egyptian soldiers walking away from the battle that never took place. We drove through them like a car making its way down a street crowded with pedestrians. But these shell-shocked pedestrians wore the pale, sand-colored uniforms of the Egyptian Army, a defeated army broken to its core.

  Sometimes we shot a burst into the air — but only as a siren, to get them out of the way. Other times we saw them across the wide plain of the desert: hundreds of helpless, frightened soldiers, with no weapons and abandoned by officers who managed to grab working vehicles to drive home, leaving their soldiers to fend for themselves.

  Rarely did we come across an Egyptian still carrying a weapon.

  We had expected battles from hill to hill, ridge to ridge, and valley to valley. Instead, our biggest problem seemed to be getting through the crowds of Egyptians trying to get home.

  For two days and nights we moved through those crowds across Sinai, heading west across the center of the Sinai desert. Nights, we rested — another luxury of that war in 1967. In the chill of the desert night, and because of the rules of field security — though we obviously had won, the war was not over — we used blankets instead of campfires to keep warm. We ate cold rations and caught a few hours’ sleep before rising before dawn to continue.

  On the third day, we reached the outskirts of Tamad, a small Egyptian fortress at an oasis where the Bedouin kept a working waterwell. For the first time, we reached a defended Egyptian position. But even that barely counted as a fight. The Egyptians gave up quickly, after a few rounds of mortar fire and a jeep raid into their camp.

  We made camp at Tamad, where the rest of Shaked’s forces joined us. The next morning, when we woke in our camp, hundreds of Egyptians surrounded us — not to fight, but to surrender. They wanted food. They wanted to go home.

  Fuad called together the force for a briefing. Starting his talk, he suddenly stopped. “Who’s that?” He squinted, pointing toward the edge of the crowd of dust-covered fighters. An Egyptian soldier, just as dust-covered as any of us, sat amidst the soldiers, hoping for food. We gave him a tin of rations and some water, then sent him on his way.

  Fuad’s briefing thrilled us all. The IDF controlled Sinai, he announced. But in the north, he continued, battles raged for the Golan Heights.

  For nearly twenty years, since the end of the War of Independence, Syrian artillery and cannons on the high ground of the Golan plateau above the Sea of Galilee had shelled our settlements below the Heights. Over the years, dozens died in the indiscriminate shelling of the farming settlements in the foothills of the Golan Heights.

  But when we gathered at the pickup point for the helicopters to take us to the Golan, Fuad announced another change in plans. In el-Arish, a beach town on the Mediterranean coast of northern Sinai, Egyptian commando forces harassed our forces, who took the town in the first days of the war. Later, I learned my brother Udi fought in that sector, in battles much tougher than anything I had seen so far during the war.

  “They’re hiding out during the day and operating at night,” said Fuad. “And they’ve caused casualties. Dead and wounded.” It sounded exactly like the kind of job Shaked knew best how to handle.

  We reached the soft dunes of northern Sinai in late afternoon, taking positions near the el-Arish airport. That night, staff officers from the armored corps brigade showed up to brief us on the situation. Jumpy and nervous from non-stop fighting holding the town after its quick capture, they described “swarms” of Egyptian commandos hitting the supply lines on the road through town from Gaza to Kantara at the northern tip of the Suez Canal.

  Fuad and Amos questioned locals in the area, but either too scared to tell us what they knew or truly ignorant, the locals gave us little. I suggested that aerial surveillance might help, and the air force provided a two-seated Piper.

  I asked the pilot, Elisha, for “low to mid-level recon over the town and beach.” Instead, he began sweeping the dunes as if he could turn the Piper into a Mirage, coming in a few meters off the tops of dunes, diving and skimming the surface of the beach. To make matters worse, he occasionally let off a burst from the machine gun mounted in the plane’s nose.

  “Hey, Elisha,” I shouted over the noise of the propeller and engine, “drive carefully,” deliberately choosing the term for our trip, to make the point that he should take it easy. I tried to make light of his reckless flying, which took us much too fast over the town for me to spot anything of value in the search for the commandos. But he ignored me. Up and down, over and over, he dove toward the sand dunes, leveling off and then veering to the right or left, seeking another target. I can handle danger. But I have no patience for recklessness. “Put me down,” I finally ordered, not hiding the anger in my voice. He obeyed.

  A few minutes later, Elisha took off with a blast of wind, leaving me on the tarmac beside Fuad and Amos, who waited for my return. “That boy’s endangering himself for no good reason,” I told them.

  A few minutes later, the radio squawked a report that Elisha had crashed and was killed. Shivers raced up and down my spine as I realized that a miracle saved me from ending up dead in a fiery crash in the dunes.

  We hovered in a chopper over the beaches of el-Arish. Despite clear packs of footsteps on the soft white sand, none ended anywhere except amidst others. It made no sense. We figured they probably hid out in town disguised as civilians during the day and at night gathered their equipment from caches hidden in the area. We decided to go in by jeep and on foot for a closer look for the caches.

  The beaches of el-Arish are a fine white sand that slips and slides in tiny avalanches with every step. We hiked up and down the sand, spread out across the beach from the water’s edge all the way to the narrow broken road dividing the beach from the town.

  Nothing appeared extraordinary to me as I studied the terrain — except the palm branches, I realized, about halfway down the beach.

  Any grove of palms has fallen branches. But these branches seemed too neatly arranged, and too green to be dead wood. I looked up. From what I saw so far of el-Arish — salt-eaten single-story villas facing the beach, a dusty main street flanked by two-story buildings, and a shantytown of refugee camps around it, I doubted the el-Arish municipality made a point of pruning its wild trees.

  The tall palms grew out of a depression between two dunes, in what the Arabs call a tmila, where underground fresh water and sea-water meet, forcing the fresh water up closer to the surface. With the underground water barely a meter and a half (five feet) below the surface, and the fronds as a roof, I realized a tmila can make a perfect underground cave for hiding.

  I caught the eye of some nearby soldiers and waved, backing away from the frond roof, warning the soldiers running toward me to be quiet as they approached. I hand-signaled them into formation, and we carefully approached the basin where the long branches seemed too neatly organized to be natural.

  We had walked by those palm branches half a dozen times in the last hour, and nothing had happened. I only made an educated guess. But I wanted to be careful, just in case. Ready? I silently signaled my fighters. They nodded and aimed their Uzis at the palm branches.

  Carefully, almost delicately, I lifted one of the dry fronds. Ten Egyptian commandos, guns ready, waited for us. We shot first. They all died in those bare seconds it takes to empty a magazine.

  Up and down the beach, we stopped everywhere we found stands of palms. We shot at the edges of each tmila, calling for them to surrender. If they refused, we assaulted. Some surrendered; some did not. It was war.

  I had an easy war — Israel had an easy war — but war is no picnic. In the Rafiah area, where my brother Udi fought under Raful, tough tank battles ended in the town with house-to-hous
e combat against Egyptian soldiers refusing to retreat or surrender. Some 650 Israeli soldiers died in the war, fighting in the Sinai, on the Golan, and in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

  One of my best friends at the time, Ranny Marx, died in Sinai. Ranny and I served together as platoon commanders in Shaked, but his release from the army came three months earlier than mine. He went home to Kibbutz Hazorea, and when war broke out, they gave him a reconnaissance platoon attached to an armored brigade.

  Giora Eitan, Raful’s nephew and my first company commander when I joined the army, died on the Golan.

  No matter how great the victory of the war, funerals are full of sorrow. I went to dozens in the weeks after the war. But we needed to put aside our emotions.

  The rest of the world might think the war ended in six days. For us, the fighting continued, postponing my release. Shaked moved to Kantara on the Suez Canal, part of the new IDF deployment along the banks of the famous waterway.

  In places, the Canal is barely a couple of football fields wide, flanked by undulating banks of dunes and hard sand creating natural cover — and long stretches of exposed territory. It stopped tanks — but not artillery, mortar fire, or even a sniper’s bullets. Shaked worked along the Canal, ferrying supplies to isolated positions up and down the Canal and chasing down occasional Egyptian commando attempts to harass our new lines.

  Late one afternoon, a strange request came to Shaked. A platoon from the armored corps sayeret under Brigadier General Shmuel “Gorodish” Gonen, lost three jeeps about ten kilometers south of Kantara. Hit by fire from the opposite banks, the patrol abandoned their jeeps and equipment in the attack.

  “Gorodish wants us to get the jeeps back,” Fuad said.

  “That’s strange,” I said, perturbed by the mission. “A sayeret wants someone else to do their job? They should be able to get the stuff themselves. And why does Gorodish want to risk lives for three jeeps?”

  Fuad scowled. “I bet they left behind the coded maps for the entire zone.”

  “I’d be embarrassed to ask for help if I were Gorodish,” I said.

  Fuad, who would go on to become a politician, stayed silent on that point. Gorodish came out of the Six-Day War a hero, the general who made a point of riding into battle standing exposed in the turret of his tank. I thought about Raful as I followed Fuad to the semitrailer that carried the mobile headquarters of the Southern Command. Raful would never ask for a force from outside his direct command to fix a mistake by his own men.

  Famous for his capricious temper, Gorodish surprised me with a polite, respectful attitude toward us. He ordered coffee and tea brought in, and then explained the situation, starting by pointing at the map on the long table in the trailer, to show us where to find the jeeps.

  Fuad had guessed right. “I don’t care about the jeeps,” Gorodish explained from the start. “It’s the maps and equipment.” He worried that the Egyptians, spotting the abandoned jeeps, would send commandos across to investigate and find the coded maps outlining the full deployment of our forces on the canal.

  I could see his dilemma. What would be more disgraceful to a famous hero of the Six-Day War-to ask Shaked to handle something that his own men screwed up, or to tell the general staff to change all the codes on all the maps in the army?

  “Please get the maps, codes, and radios back,” he pleaded, adding, “tonight,” almost sheepishly.

  Three basic scenarios faced us: either nobody had touched the jeeps, or the Egyptians had already stolen it all and booby-trapped what they left behind, or they still waited in ambush for the IDF to send someone back.

  By eight that night, I worked out a plan based on a ten-kilometer hike across the dunes to the canal, rather than a jeep ride on the road that could be seen from the other side.

  Gorodish okayed the plan, and I picked a dozen of my fighters for the mission. The general insisted on sending along three soldiers from the squad that had abandoned the jeeps. “They’ll show you where to find them,” he said.

  He already showed us on the map where to find the jeeps. I did not need them, or want them. But I think Gorodish wanted them to see how the job should be done. I saw no point in arguing it with him. But setting off, with the three soldiers from his sayeret in tow, I decided not to count on them for any significant aspect of the assignment.

  It took two and a half hours across the dunes to reach the last few hundred meters to the jeeps. Three forces would approach the target — two flanking squads from north and south, and the third squad, which I led, would approach the jeeps from the east. I left Gorodish’s soldiers behind. “To protect our rear,” I said, not expecting any trouble from there, but wanting them out of our way. “Just stay alert and watch for our signal,” I instructed them one last time as my three squads went into action.

  We crawled the last two hundred meters, over the ridge of a dune and then down into the clearing. It took almost as long to cross those last two hundred meters as it took to make the ten-kilometer hike. We could see across the canal to the Egyptian position on the other side, marked by a tall tower that gave them a view over the dunes and ramparts on the east bank. We crawled all the way to the jeeps, careful not to let our profiles show in the stark, treeless landscape of the moonlit night.

  Before trying to take anything, we needed to check that no booby traps waited for us when we opened the glove compartment or tried moving the radio set. One by one we checked each vehicle, then just as slowly and carefully loaded two stretchers with the equipment — radio sets and weapons. I collected all the maps to put them in my pack, for safekeeping.

  We left as quietly as we came, crawling. I used a flashlight to blink the signal to the other two forces — and the three soldiers from the armored corps sayeret — to rejoin us.

  My two flanking squads crossed low against the horizon, approaching in minutes. But no response came from Gorodish’s three soldiers. We crept carefully toward them, all the while blinking my flashlight, worried an enemy commando ambush had got them and now waited for us to walk into their trap. Finally, close enough to see them, the sight shocked me.

  They had simply fallen asleep. I leapt to my feet and ran the last few meters. Enraged, I kicked the first one I reached in the shoulder. A second jumped to his feet, fumbling for his rifle. My foot rose to give another kick.

  “Stop!” cried one of my soldiers behind me.

  I paused, foot in mid-air, speechless at the three soldiers’ audacity — and my own loss of control. Finally, I snarled, “I’ll settle this later,” ignoring their attempts to make excuses. Turning my back on them, I began the march back to the base, my platoon in formation behind me, Gorodish’s soldiers following sheepishly.

  For the entire ten-kilometer (six-mile) march I walked in silence, knowing they worried about what would happen when I told Gorodish about their dereliction. A few hundred meters before we reached camp, one of the three approached, stumbling as he tried to match my stride in the sand. “Sir?” he tried. I ignored him.

  “Sir, I just want to tell you that we screwed up.” His voice trembled. I stonewalled.

  “If you tell Gorodish what happened,” he said, “it will mean prison for us.”

  I knew that. But more than anything, I wanted to finish the mission. I finally spoke. “You’ll hear what I have to say when we get to camp.”

  About a hundred meters before camp, I called the soldiers together for a debriefing, to discuss their performance. For an elite special force, a debriefing right after an operation is critical, while the details are still fresh in the mind and mistakes can be remembered and corrected for the future.

  “You did excellent work,” I began, believing that praise is as important as criticism for a leader. Though I was only a few years older than them, I was their officer, which meant being a teacher as much as a commander.

  The three armored corps soldiers, afraid to look me in the eye, sat with their heads bowed at the edges of the pack of fighters at my feet. “An excellent mane
uver, with a good stealthy approach. Nobody could have noticed us. You found good cover; unloading the jeeps went smoothly. A first-class operation.

  “But we all know the reason for this mission,” I continued. “Another force abandoned those vehicles. They gave us the problem instead of solving it themselves. I left them behind because I did not trust them in the first place. I did not ask them to set up an ambush or a covering-fire position. I asked for nothing except for them to sit there quietly and wait. ‘Just keep your eyes open,’ I told them. And they fell asleep.”

  “I know exactly what’s coming to you,” I said, for the first time speaking directly to the three soldiers from the armored corps sayeret. “And I’m sure that right now you’re feeling something that you won’t forget for many years.” I paused, letting my words sink in.

  With sunrise minutes away, the light was bright enough to read the lines of dust across my soldiers’ faces, dark enough to see the lights on at the brigadier general’s command trailer. I wanted the whole affair to be over. “Dismissed,” I finally said, releasing them.

  I don’t know what became of those three soldiers, but I’m sure that even now, more than twenty years later, they must still occasionally remember with shame the events of that night. I know I have never forgiven them — but I also never said a word about it to Gorodish.

  * * *

  The air force won the war in three hours. The armored corps and infantry finished it in six days. On the seventh day, the people of Israel celebrated — but a new war began. None of us — except for a very few visionaries, like David Ben-Gurion, then an old man living in the Negev and long out of power — understood that our new, presumably safer, borders imprisoned us along with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.

  Inside Israel, many saw the war as a miracle, a divinely inspired liberation of the biblical homelands called Judea and Samaria in the West Bank. Most — including almost the entire political leadership of Israel — were blind to the fact that to hold those lands, we would need to maintain a military occupation. It would take nearly a generation before the Palestinians inside those territories rebelled against that occupation, and then almost another ten years for us to realize that we could not hold the territories by force, suppressing their aspirations forever.