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

by Moshe Betser

  “They’re already assigned,” a transport officer told us.

  Dejected, Giora and I headed back to the camp near Safed. Overhead, Phantom jets raced low to the Golan, carrying bombs. Roads that ordinarily slowed down for tractors pulling trailers of hay were suddenly gridlocked with tank trailers. “We’ve got no choice,” I decided as we pulled into the woods where our soldiers waited. “We have to steal some transport. Otherwise we’ll be stuck here until the end of the war.”

  I put the most cunning soldiers in the Unit on the job. “Get out on the roads. Look for APCs. Do whatever it takes to get them back here. Beg, borrow, steal. Whatever it takes.

  “And, Giora, give me the keys to your car,” I decided. He drove a white Carmel, a boxy fiberglass car an Israeli firm once made, which came with the major’s rank. He tossed me his keys.

  “I’m going to head over to the emergency warehouses in Safed,” I told him. “I’ll talk someone up there into letting me have something. Half-tracks, APCs, something.”

  I started driving toward Safed along the winding, hilly roads of the Galilee. Only a couple of minutes after leaving the woods, I came around a bend in the road. Down the hill to my right a convoy of APCs made its way toward me. I started counting. Five, ten, twenty, more than thirty armored personnel carriers. Just what we needed. I pulled out my binoculars and took a good look at the brand-new open APCs heading straight for me, their caterpillar treads tearing the asphalt. From the top of the hill, I looked down into the transport bays of the APCs. Unmanned, except for drivers, they were just what we needed. A white Carmel, just like Giora’s, led the convoy.

  I sped toward them, stopping in the middle of the road and flagging down the Carmel. A transport major sat behind the driver’s wheel, his secretary beside him.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I started shouting before he even came to a halt. “There’s a war going on! We’ve been waiting two hours for you!”

  “I know, I know,” the major answered through the open window. “Don’t ask. It’s crazy. Some officer tried to steal the APCs away from me …”

  “I don’t have time for history or excuses,” I commanded him angrily, though captain’s bars, not major’s leaves, decorated my epaulettes. “Follow me,” I snapped, “I’ve got fighters waiting for these APCs.”

  I turned Giora’s car around and kept an eye on the convoy through the rearview mirror. Coming around a corner on the winding mountain road, I saw the woods where the force waited.

  And coming around the corner, right at me, was a Military Police jeep. It flagged me down.

  I held my breath as I rolled down the window to listen to the MP’s request. It was one of those rare moments I remember from my army years when an MP proved to be useful. He asked if I needed any help.

  “Sure,” I said. “Make sure they follow me.” I pointed over my shoulder at the convoy of APCs.

  “No problem,” said the MP sergeant, turning around in the narrow road in front of the APCs, then waiting until they all passed, taking up the rear of the convoy.

  Less than fifteen minutes after I left Giora in the shade of the pine trees in the woods wondering where to get half-tracks, I returned with a convoy of thirty-three behind me, to the cheers of the eager Sayeret Matkal fighters, who ran, without any need for orders, to take over the APCs from their drivers.

  The transport major climbed out of his car and pulled out a clipboard. “Sign here,” he said. Giora looked at me. I looked at Giora. I shrugged.

  Only then did the major realize what had happened. He raved and ranted, trying to get through to Northern Command headquarters and find someone with authority over the Unit. But nobody had time for an angry transport officer that day.

  “Give me back the APCs,” he shouted at Giora. “And you!” He turned to me. “You’re going up on charges.”

  I was lucky the MP waved goodbye to us as the last APC rolled into the woods. Behind me, our fighters were churning up the ground turning the APCs into a convoy ready to leave for the war.

  “What’s your name?” the transport major demanded.

  “Betser. Muki Betser.”

  He scribbled my name down on a page on his clipboard.

  Giora took me aside. A gentleman of the kibbutz, he never would have stolen the APCs the way I did. “What are we going to do?” he asked me.

  Missing the war worried me more than a court-martial after it. “What do you care?” I asked Giora. “So maybe they’ll put me on trial after the war. I’ll worry about it then. Right now we have the APCs. Let’s get going.”

  He looked at the last of the fighters climbing onto the vehicles. Right then, nobody could have ordered battle-hungry Sayeret Matkal fighters to get down from the APCs. Giora told the transport major to file whatever report he wanted. Meanwhile, we had a war to fight.

  THE SPECIAL GENTLEMEN ARE HERE

  For all the sense of urgency and emergency, and even with planes constantly overhead rushing up to the battle, the war seemed like a distant thunderstorm as we rode the winding roads from Safed across the Galilee to the Golan.

  But up on the plateau, inside the front, the thunder turned into war. Brushfires created by fallen shells in the farmers’ fields and the wild ranges of the Heights blazed in the darkness around us. The thump, whistle, and rumble of artillery and cannon fire beat like drums beneath the constant roaring of warplanes above. The smell of smoke permeated everything.

  As soon as we reached the plateau, Giora and his forces split off heading south to Hushniyeh, where the Syrian onslaught threatened the southern end of the Sea of Galilee.

  We meanwhile raced due east toward Raful’s headquarters at Nafah, radioing ahead to let them know we were coming, shocked to learn he had moved into the field out of the huge army camp when it came under heavy attack in the opening hours of the war. The mere fact he had needed to move his headquarters to an APC in the field proved the severity of the situation.

  Favored visitors to the Golan, just a week before the war he had served us food straight from his personal refrigerator when we visited him in his Nafah office. Now, a few miles northwest of the fort, we found him in the center of a huddle of APCs, half-tracks, and jeeps, hunkered in the darkness of a rocky field for a quick consultation.

  Yonni and I approached the open back door to Raful’s APC. The dim lights of the interior revealed him in his trademark Australian bush hat, surrounded by officers. He pointed with a bandaged hand at a map in front of him. Later, I learned the injury happened in his carpentry shop back home, but then, it made a deep impression on me.

  “Shalom, Raful,” I said, standing in the open back doorway to his mobile headquarters.

  He looked up from the map. Unshaven, his dust-covered face looked like war itself. But then he smiled, recognizing us. “Great to see you,” he said. “How’d you get here?” he asked, making me wonder if he had already heard that Sayeret Matkal stole the APCs to get to the front. But as far as I was concerned, that was already ancient history.

  “We’ve got two task forces in fifteen APCs, all the equipment and weapons we need, RPGs for tank-hunting. Whatever you want us to do,” I spoke up. “We’re ready.”

  “Great,” he said. “Let me finish up here and then I’ll take care of you, okay?”

  Yonni and I waited in the field, watching the sky, listening to the tense discussions inside Raful’s APC between the distant thumps of artillery and cannon fire. Raful’s calm voice led radio conferences among him and Northern Command, Intelligence, and brigade commanders. But mostly he spoke with individual tank commanders left alone in the battle after the Syrians had destroyed the rest of their battalion. He encouraged them and comforted them, made wise suggestions, and never sounded under pressure.

  Finally, he climbed down out of the APC to talk with us. “Okay,” he began. “What do you guys want to do?”

  Tank-hunting, we had decided while we waited for him. “We know the Heights,” I pointed out, “can work at night, and have plen
ty of anti-tank rockets, and plenty of ammo. Send us out tank-hunting.”

  Raful loved the idea. He grinned and called for a handset to contact Zvi Barazani, left behind at Nafah to hold the base. “Barazani, the special gentlemen are here. I want them to start hunting.”

  While Raful took his staff to the field to run the division’s counteroffensive, Barazani stayed in Nafah to hold the camp against an inevitable second Syrian attempt to capture the base at a major crossroads in the central Golan.

  Over the radio, I could tell Barazani was not exactly delighted with the idea. He had only taken the brigade command the day before Yom Kippur, before anyone knew of the impending war. Maybe he thought it meant putting infantry forces at unnecessary risk; maybe he thought the air force could do the job better. Whatever the reason, he did not seem pleased with Raful’s request. Nonetheless, Raful got off the radio and sent us to Nafah. “Work up some plans with Barazani for a night offensive, then get back to me,” he said, sending us on our way.

  I knew Nafah as one of the Golan’s largest army bases, an armored corps regional command, full of tanks, APCs, half-tracks, jeeps, and trucks neatly parked in their proper place, every footpath lined by rocks painted white, epitomizing the armored corps’ obsession with tidiness.

  Now, wisps of smoke hung in the windless air like witnesses to horror. Cars, jeeps, and APCs still burned with final weak flames. Smashed and broken, the destroyed vehicles lay about like corpses.

  We drove slowly into camp, astonished by the sights around us. Soldiers started coming out of buildings darkened by the blackout. Dark smudges of soot and the even deeper darkness of sleepless worry shaded the fear in their eyes. For the young, the Syrian onslaught became their first encounter with the death of friends and the feeling of survival after a battle. Looking at them made me think of myself at Karameh, walking off the battlefield, feeling let down by the generals and the politicians.

  At one point in the fighting, said the soldiers, Raful and his staff shot their way out of a bunker, reduced only to their Kalashnikovs, a few bazookas, and RPGs. Shooting at the advancing Syrian armor, they made it to the APC that became his mobile field command. Just when it seemed that all the fighters in the fort needed to withdraw, the enemy advance stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  Tanks led the Syrian push into Nafah. The soldiers halted the advance, but it cost a great many casualties on both sides. Syrian tanks reached into the camp, gun barrels pointing over the fences — and through them.

  It reminded me of something that had happened during the War of Independence at Degania, the kibbutz settlement started by my grandparents at Umm Juni. A Syrian tank reached the main gate of the kibbutz, halted only by the willpower of kibbutzniks using handguns, rifles, and homemade grenades and Molotov cocktails. To this day, an old Syrian tank sits in the yard of Degania, a monument to Israel’s survival of the War of Independence.

  We found Barazani in the operations room.

  “Listen,” said Barazani as soon as he saw us come into the operations room. “There’s no intelligence that pinpoints tanks, so I’m not recommending you look for them on foot.”

  “Why not?” I wanted to know. “Show us on a map where there’s a concentration of tanks, and we can take them out.”

  He shook his head. “No intelligence,” he repeated, reiterating the severity of the situation. “All I have are reports from individual positions along the lines. They’re under fire. They have casualties. Aircraft is hitting them. Cannon is hitting them. But no intelligence. The air force faces serious problems with the SAMs. And if they can’t get through the SAMs, we can’t get good aerial photos. No intelligence on their positions.”

  “Look, Zvi,” I said. “We were here last week. We know the area. We know the field. We can go out as a recon unit and get the intelligence.”

  He knew me from the paratroops, and he knew the Unit. But despite all my efforts, he did not want to take responsibility for sending us out on such a dangerous mission. To get an operation going without intelligence is nearly impossible; and as a new commander in the area, unfamiliar with the nuances and details of the terrain, he did not want to make a mistake.

  “Zvi,” I tried again, repeating the argument that had won over Raful. “Nobody can beat us at night. We can get right up to the tanks at night without being spotted, we can go out and find them, watch them, observe, identify, and hit. Nothing is going to happen to us. So what are you afraid of?”

  Awake since the first signs of an impending Syrian assault on Friday, Barazani scratched the dark stubble on his chin. “Let’s wait until morning,” he finally said. “We’ll get through the night and maybe by tomorrow we’ll have better intelligence.” He read the impatience in my face. “Listen,” he added forcefully. “There’s no choice tonight. You boys want to do something? Secure the camp perimeters. I’m sure there’s going to be another attempt to take the base.”

  “And tomorrow we’ll get going on a tank-hunting operation,” I added. I still felt we should go after enemy tank concentrations. We could either take them on our own or radio their coordinates back as targets for the air force or artillery to strike.

  But Barazani did not want to take the chance that Sayeret Matkal might be seriously damaged under his orders. Avraham Arnan, though officially no longer responsible for the Unit, still wielded a moral authority in certain circles of the army. Though still in uniform, he field no formal position of authority over the Unit. But he also never forgave anyone who endangered his baby.

  I took a junior officer and we made a quick tour of the perimeters of the camp, finding high-ground points of observation in the direction we expected the Syrians to use when they resumed their attack on the fort.

  While we toured the camp looking for good positions, the Syrian shelling resumed. Mostly cannon fire, it included occasional mortars, which meant the enemy was only a couple of thousand meters away.

  Inaccurate but annoying, it slowed down my steady progress from one position to the next. But we found several good points to deploy crews for a perimeter defense of the camp in the east and the south. As I was instructing one of the crews, a shell fell in the direction where I had just deployed another squad. It looked like a direct hit.

  I grabbed the radio microphone, but before I asked, the officer in charge at the position, Shai Avital, came on the air. “Nothing to worry about,” he said, cheerful as usual. But I worried. I jumped into the jeep and raced to the position. “Some guys flew a little, that’s all,” Shai said, smiling when I came to a halt beside him. “We’ve got bruises, not wounded,” he said.

  “Okay,” I told him, relieved. “Stick to your positions.”

  The shelling continued, but not intensely enough to drive me to cover, indeed ever more sporadic, like a heavy storm turning into a drizzle. I scouted the eastern fence of the fort that faced the Syrian forces. A blackened Syrian tank, still smoking from the fire that engulfed it the day before, nuzzled the fence with its gun barrel. I touched it. When I had noticed the Syrian tanks before, thinking of Degania, I considered the tanks against the fences as an abstract thought, a curious, almost surrealistic idea. But now, up close, the idea that Israel was on the defensive blackened my mood as much as the soot darkened my fingertips. I decided to press Barazani once again for a tank-hunting mission, and went back to his operations room.

  “Avraham Arnan called me,” Zvi said as I came in. “He’s against you guys being here. He wants you to go back to your base.”

  I just shook my head in dismay, unable to understand the idea that the best fighters in the country should not be helping. But I knew Arnan’s call scotched any chance of Barazani giving us the okay for tank — hunting.

  I wandered around the camp, thinking about Karameh, where I first saw the fallibility of the Israel Defense Forces, and about Degania, where my grandparents helped lay the groundwork for the active defense of the Jewish people in their land.

  Crossing one of the craters made by a Syrian shell,
I looked up and saw the entrance to Raful’s headquarters. I entered the two-story blacked-out building. Used to seeing it full of staff officers and secretaries, now its empty offices symbolized the IDF’s failure. I moved down the dark corridors to Raful’s office, realizing that I wanted to eat something other than the hardtack of our field rations.

  There it was, just like last week — his refrigerator. I pulled open the door. The light went on. As if nothing had changed since last week, the best of Israel’s farms filled the fridge: cheeses and cold cuts, fruits and vegetables.

  “As if nothing has changed,” I said aloud, repeating the thought, realizing at that moment that whatever the outcome of the war — and I had no doubt we would eventually prevail — nothing would ever be the same again.

  I dug out some bread, sausage, and cheese and found a jug of orange juice, then sat down at Raful’s desk to make a sandwich. A black civilian telephone sat on the desk. If there’s food here, I thought, and the refrigerator light went on, maybe …? I reached for the phone. The banality of the working dial tone surprised me. Amazed, I called home.

  It elated Nurit to hear from me. After I left Nahalal on Saturday morning, she helped organize the bomb shelters in the village. “And good we did,” she said. Syrian missiles had fallen in the Jezreel Valley. One hit a building at Migdal Haemek, a nearby town. Another damaged an empty school building at Kibbutz Gvat. The electricity at Nahalal went out on the first night of the war, because a missile hit power lines down the valley. She knew never to ask about any details of my work. She did not even ask from where I was calling.

  “Don’t worry.” I told her again. “We’ll hit them back twice as hard.” As we talked, Raful’s deputy walked in.

  “Muki, what are you doing here?” he asked, so astonished to see me behind Raful’s desk that he did not notice the phone in my hand.

  “I wanted to call home.” I smiled, showing him the phone in my hand.