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

by Moshe Betser

  Nobody conducted any soul-searching about what really happened in the Six-Day War. The celebrations overshadowed the funerals of more than 650 of our young men, and women too, who died. Tough tank battles around Rafiah, where Gorodish’s unit and Raful’s paratroops brigade — including my brother Udi — took many casualties. So did the house-to-house fighting in East Jerusalem, reuniting the city that was left divided by the cease-fire lines at the end of the War of Independence. Getting up to the Golan plateau, where the Syrians field the high ground, cost hundreds of lives.

  But the people preferred euphoria to reality. Hero worship — an instant industry of victory albums, books, and records — developed within hours of the last shots fired. Public opinion-makers, politicians, and generals, the chief of staff and the newspapers, the foreign correspondents and the rabbis — everyone analyzed the results of the war on the assumption it was a great victory.

  We repaired border problems left over after the War of Independence, widening the country’s borders at its center, where, until 1967, barely ten miles separated the Jordanian border from the Mediterranean Sea.

  We reunited Jerusalem, which the cease-fire lines of 1949 left divided down the middle by tin and cement walls, from which Jordanian soldiers sniped at citizens in the streets of Jewish Jerusalem and denied religious Jews access to the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Jewish Temple of the ancient Jewish commonwealths.

  On the Golan, we eliminated the Syrian artillery threat over our settlements in the lowlands of eastern Galilee, while in the south, the capture of the Sinai Peninsula more than tripled the physical area under Israel’s control. Everyone regarded the new borders as safer.

  The whole world treated Israelis like heroes, especially the Americans, who seem to worship efficiency. In June 1967, we gave them a model of efficiency, while they sank deeper into the morass of Vietnam.

  Worse — we regarded the enemy as weak and primitive. The barefoot Egyptian soldiers, abandoned by their officers and escaping home across the sands of Sinai, inscribed an indelible image in our minds.

  It all felt wrong to me, but like everyone else I fell into the trap of believing that the IDF was invincible, with the best commanders, the best air force, the best everything.

  So, despite voices like David Ben-Gurion’s, warning that we had swallowed the enemy alive inside those new borders, the vast majority refused to listen. In fact, the vast majority figured that the IDF could conquer Arab capitals with the same ease with which we had captured the Sinai.

  For years to come after the Six-Day War, all we heard from the Arabs was “no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel.” We interpreted that to mean we could do whatever we wanted. One day, we said to ourselves, the Arabs will come to their senses and sue for peace.

  Meanwhile, despite all the talk of pan-Arab brotherhood, they let the Palestinians rot in refugee camps instead of absorbing them into their societies.

  By winning the Six-Day War, we won territories that appeared to give us security, emphasized our link to the biblical lands of our ancestors, and created the impression we could do whatever we wanted. Successive governments called the territories a card to trade for peace but settled the areas with civilians, arguing that Zionism regarded settlement as the way to defend the country’s borders. Many were blinded to the facts of the military occupation because they were so enthralled with messianic visions.

  Right after the war, the Labor government ran down to Ofira in Sharm al-Sheikh, laying a road down the Sinai coast just to build a town at the end of the peninsula. In northern Sinai they developed Rafiah; on the West Bank they established the farming settlements in the Jordan Rift Valley and, inspired by the Bible, put up Kiryat Arba near Hebron. (Later, from the late seventies to the end of the eighties, the Likud emphasized Israel’s biblical ties to the territories and, using tax breaks to get people to move there, increased the Jewish population from three thousand families to ten times that many — about 150,000 people.)

  I must confess that I also fell for the belief that our strength and Arab weakness made the need for compromise irrelevant. Moshe Dayan said, “It’s better to have Sharm al-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm al-Sheikh.” Only a decade later, in perhaps his greatest act of bravery, Dayan changed his mind as one of the architects of the Camp David agreement, the first peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors.

  But meanwhile, an unrealistic assessment of our capabilities led inexorably to the Yom Kippur War, when Egypt and Syria caught us completely by surprise and we would learn that force has limits, that euphoria is no response to war, and that our enemies can also learn the lessons of one war to prepare for the next.

  HOME — TO THE PARATROOPS

  The war postponed my departure from the army. I stayed with Shaked through the establishment of its new headquarters in Sinai, at Rafiah, an abandoned UN field station that became one of the IDF’s biggest bases in Sinai. But by August, two months after the Six-Day War, I looked forward to being at home for good by the Rosh Hashanah New Year holiday in September.

  One hot evening, I sat on the steps of the Shaked office, thinking about the future, watching the vast desert sky for shooting stars. A popular Tel Aviv rock-and-roll band entertained the troops. The music wafted across the camp. I prefer an acoustic guitar or accordion and quiet singing around a campfire. But I took pleasure in the happiness of the soldiers, and my own anticipation about mustering out of the army and going back to Nahalal.

  “There you are!” Matan Vilnai strode toward me across the packed sand of the camp. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” The son of Zev Vilnai, one of Israel’s most famous historians and guides to the Land of Israel, Matan graduated from a military high school near Haifa and, like me, went straight to the paratroops. A few years older than me, in his mid-twenties — one of the youngest captains in the army at the time — he wanted a career in the army. On the eve of the war he won the appointment as commander of the paratroops sayeret, my original unit. Nearly thirty years later, in 1995, he would become deputy chief of staff.

  “I hear you’re leaving Shaked,” he said, taking a seat beside me on the cement steps.

  “And going home,” I added.

  “But you applied to the paratroops brigade for reserve duty,” he pointed out.

  “Of course.”

  “I saw Fuad’s letter,” he said. “Not that I needed to see your file to know I wanted you.”

  “Fuad really went overboard in that letter,” I pointed out.

  Fuad wrote a letter for the Southern Command’s adjutant to attach to my personal file. He gave it to me when I began the process of finishing my service, a much longer procedure than the one involved on induction day. On my way to Southern Command headquarters in the Negev, I sneaked a look at the contents, quickly closing it after reading its embarrassing shower of compliments. People from the Jezreel Valley only use language like that in eulogies at cemeteries — and, even there, sparingly.

  At Southern Command headquarters, however, they wanted to keep good officers in their service. My formal request for a transfer to the paratroops brigade did not please the adjutant at command headquarters when I handed over Fuad’s letter.

  “‘To Whom It May Concern,’” the senior Southern Command adjutant read aloud from Fuad’s letter, not realizing I already knew what it said. “‘The officer finished his service in a satisfactory manner,’” he began, inventing a totally different text for Fuad’s letter, the upshot of which said that the adjutant could decide where I would best serve the IDF. And since regional commands hate losing good officers, he naturally wanted to keep me in the Southern Command and not let me go to the paratroops brigade.

  I did not let him get away with it, but I did not tell him I knew what Fuad’s letter really said. “Look,” I said firmly. “I don’t even know why I’m talking to you, a desk jockey. You work against our own side, not the enemy. Give me my file. I’m going to the
paratroops.” I reached out for the file. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “They’ll take me.”

  No lieutenant had ever spoke to him that way before. He folded the letter back into the envelope and handed it over to me, along with the brown folder that I’d carry to the desk jockey for the paratroops brigade. At least in the paratroops brigade, even the clerks, male or female — including my little sister Tami, who served as a company clerk in the paratroops sayeret — have all jumped at least once.

  So, that night in Rafiah, I reassured Matan that come September he would find me ready for reserve duty in the paratroops brigade. “You’re getting me for reserves,” I promised him.

  “No,” he broke in. “I want you as my deputy.”

  “I’m going back home,” I reiterated. “Back to Nahalal.”

  “I want you,” Matan said.

  I shook my head, no. I had made up my mind.

  “Listen,” he said softly. “We had a terrible war.”

  I knew. I had wanted to be with the brigade, and particularly its sayeret, rushing to the brigade headquarters with the first signs of war in mid-May. But Amos had grabbed me back for Shaked. Later, I heard the paratroops sayeret began the war sitting in a plane on a runway, waiting to fly over Sinai and parachute into Sharm al-Sheikh, at the peninsula’s southernmost tip. But the air force’s success made the jump unnecessary. From then on, the unit chased after battles they never reached in time to see action. They went through the entire war barely firing a single shot.

  “I need you,” he said. “You have the experience of the sayeret as a new recruit, plus skills from Shaked. There’s a lot of tracking ahead. Intelligence predicts a buildup of terrorists along the borders. We’re going to be busy chasing them down. You turn out the best soldiers.”

  Matan can be very persuasive. The performers on the flatbed truck had long since gone to sleep while we still talked it over. I finally admitted that it appealed to me. But at the end of our talk I only conceded that I needed time to think.

  “How much time?” he wanted to know.

  The next day was Friday, and I had already planned a trip home for the weekend with another soldier going home to the Jezreel Valley. In another few weeks I would be home for good, but mean-while, whenever I found the opportunity, I went for a visit to see Nurit, pregnant with Shaul, and my folks and friends. “A couple of days,” I promised Matan.

  Though Israel is small, the roads in those days were not very good, especially from the heart of Sinai, far in the south, to the Galilee. By car, coming out of Sinai, the trip to Nahalal could take as long as eight hours. With Nurit pregnant at home, I didn’t want to waste any time waiting for a bus or hitchhiking. But my parents always taught that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  When Nasser evicted them, the UN troops left behind some Citroën Deux Cheveauxes, frog-eyed two-horsepower cars, like a French version of the Volkswagen Beetle. The IDF also had Deux Cheveauxes. The UN cars were painted white-and-blue, ours gray.

  I got hold of some gray paint, and painted one of the Deux Cheveauxes, changing the license plate to the white on black of the army instead of the black on white of the UN, and we started home to Nahalal. The Military Police set up checkpoints at roadblocks out of Sinai and Gaza to catch looters. One stopped us. They searched the trunk and the backseat and all the while I sat there smiling at them. They never realized the car itself was booty. We laughed about it most of the way back to the Galilee.

  All weekend, I considered Matan’s offer. I walked in the fields and worked in the barn, my mind and heart like two sets of scales, each in turn weighing the values I field dear.

  I loved being at home with Nurit, now in her final weeks of pregnancy. I also loved the action of the army. Yet I had no interest in an army career, to become a general like Amos Yarkoni had predicted. Generals watched battles from the distance and spent more time behind desks than in the field.

  I loved being in the fields of the Jezreel Valley. But I also loved being in the field with my soldiers, an officer teaching the self-reliance they needed to survive on the battlefield.

  Indeed, I loved the heightened awareness that comes in an operation, when all the senses are at work and you feel 110 percent alive. I loved the mental and physical challenges that come with being in a special forces unit. I loved going up to the edges of my abilities, and derived pleasure in knowing I stayed calm at the height of confusion.

  But Nurit and I had made plans. We wanted to travel, and I surprised myself by realizing that I wanted to go to school, to study the geography of the Land of Israel. It was the subject I loved most, for it combined zoology and botany as well as geology and history.

  I wanted my own life, but the values instilled in me from childhood told me to answer the call of service in my country’s defense.

  * * *

  Though the war ended in six days, non-stop conflict followed. Day and night, Egyptian MiGs and artillery hit our new positions on the east banks of the Suez Canal. At Ras al-Ash, near the northern end of the Canal, an infantry platoon holding the position ran out of supplies and asked headquarters for help. I took a platoon in jeeps and half-tracks, carrying ammunition and medical supplies.

  Under fire the entire way, it took almost three hours to travel the twenty kilometers, stopping wherever the Egyptians could see us across the Canal, putting up our own covering fire, and then racing vehicle by vehicle across the open stretch.

  But the most frightening moment on the trip to Ras al-Ash came on our arrival. I had never seen frightened Israeli soldiers. And these soldiers literally shivered with fear, hunkering in their underground bunkers. They continued shaking long after the ground stopped after a MiG attack.

  They begged us to take them out of there. We stayed a few hours. Our presence helped calm them down. I had almost decided to chalk up their fear to their specific circumstances, but when we returned to Kantara, I was in for another shock.

  Hit by artillery, Shaked’s command moved to a position a few kilometers north, perfectly normal military behavior considering the circumstances. But nobody radioed us with the news. I suddenly realized then that maybe we beat the Egyptian Army in the war, but as an enemy, they could still hurt us.

  Eventually, that long three-year static-line war that developed after the Six-Day War became known as the War of Attrition. It cost more than five hundred of our soldiers’ lives before it ended in August 1970. But few people in the summer of 1967 wanted to let signs of a new war disrupt the euphoria over the war just won.

  Maybe the big wars are over, I thought — not knowing how wrong I would be proven in only six years — but the little wars remained, especially against the terrorists. More than any other IDF unit that I knew of at the time, the paratroopers in the brigade’s sayeret would be the front-line fighters in those little wars. And I knew I had the ability to contribute, and therefore the responsibility.

  As deputy commander of the sayeret, Matan wanted me to train the next generation of fighters. With my experiences from the war, from Shaked, and from the sayeret itself, I could make a difference, he said. At home, friends from the unit, unable to hide their envy that I saw action in the war while they sat on a runway, confirmed that morale in the paratroops sayeret fell low after the war passed them by.

  That Saturday night after dinner, I went for a walk into the darkness of the field behind our house, listening to the sounds of night that had once frightened me so much as a child and now were so familiar.

  I could remember when only Nahala’s lights graced our corner of the valley, and how Bet She’arim began to grow after my parents moved there from Haifa.

  Now, settlements filled the valley, and their far-off lights twinkled like bracelets in the night in every direction I looked. Nahalal was safe. My family was safe. Nurit and our baby would not be alone in Nahalal, surrounded by family and friends, hers and mine both. I could get home often, both for short day visits and weekends — except when an operation required me. Matan was right
, I realized. He did need me.

  But in less than a year I would be home again — recuperating from wounds suffered in a military defeat resulting from underestimating the enemy at Karameh.

  UNFRIENDLY SKIES

  “Disability claim,” said the Defense Ministry clerk from the rehabilitation department, stacking a sheaf of forms on my bedside night table in the hospital in Afula, the main town of the Jezreel Valley.

  The doctors took off all the bandages except a large white square covering the wound on my throat. But steel wires still field my rebuilt jaw together, forcing me to learn to groan a whisper, and even that hurt. I shook my head no. The last thing I wanted was to be listed as an invalid.

  “You have to sign to get your disability …” he repeated.

  I interrupted him. “Forget it. I have no intention of signing.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m not disabled,” I rasped. “I’m wounded. But I’m going to be healthy. I’m not suing anybody.”

  “It is procedure,” he tried.

  “I’m recovering.”

  “Fine,” said the clerk. “Sign here.” He leaned over the folder of papers he shoved in my hands and turned a page. “And here.”

  Weak but not incapacitated, I grabbed his shirt and wheezed “Get out of here” into his astonished face.

  He came back a second time, a few days after I got home. I threw him out. The third time they sent a friend of mine, also wounded in battle, to explain the procedure.

  “You sign now, and in a year’s time they give you a permanent disability percentage and you get all kinds of benefits,” explained my friend. “Money, Muki. They give you money.”