The brigade doctor ran with bloodied scissors from one foxhole to the other, oblivious to the shelling. One of the wounded was Arik’s co–deputy commander of the brigade, Yehudah Bar, nicknamed “Yud-Bet.” Though a shell fragment had lodged in his arm, Yud-Bet insisted on remaining at the front.
Arik and Danny turned their instinctive reaction to their first shelling into a code: after a bombardment, they would look at each other, shrug, and smile.
THE EGYPTIANS TURNED their fire against the Yard, where thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and supply trucks assembled, waiting to cross. Soldiers hid in craters formed by exploded shells and crawled under tanks. Trucks burned. The Death Yard, soldiers called it.
Two men were buried alive in foxholes. Danny ordered: From now on, foxholes must be no more than half a meter deep.
Hundreds of wounded were lined up on stretchers, waiting for long hours before half-tracks could risk transporting them to the rear. The bombardment was so intense that helicopters couldn’t get close. The paratroopers in charge of the Yard barely slept. Their commander, Yossi Fradkin, kept himself awake by burning his arms with cigarettes.
A low-flying MiG appeared. Ariel Sharon, temporarily headquartered in the Yard, fired a machine gun at the plane. An explosion: Sharon’s armored vehicle toppled into a crater. He emerged with a gash in his forehead. A medic bandaged him. A photographer caught the scene, and the picture of Sharon, bloodied bandanna around his head, became the iconic image of the war.
FOR TWO DAYS AND NIGHTS, Yoel Bin-Nun had been waiting with his unit on a sand dune for half-tracks to retrieve them and bring them to the canal. The men sat beneath a camouflage tent, listening to explosions in the distance and news updates from transistor radios. They were so close to the canal that Yoel could discern the blurred outlines of the Great Bitter Lake, just south of the Yard. But the war seemed to have forgotten them.
For the first time since the war began, Yoel had ample time to contemplate its meaning. Of course the war had meaning: It was, in essence, a spiritual war. He tried to piece together the pattern. The Jewish people attacked on its holiest day, devoted to purification and atonement. A total war, with the most massive tank battles since World War II. Two nuclear superpowers fighting by proxy. The entire world economy threatened by a new weapon—an Arab oil boycott against the West. What else could this be, if not the beginning of Gog and Magog, the final battle before redemption?
Yoel had received a postcard from his father, who expressed similar thoughts: Let’s hope, wrote Yechiel Bin-Nun, that the prophecies concerning the woes of the end times have already been fulfilled in the Holocaust and that the Jewish people will be spared further suffering.
Gathered in a corner beneath the camouflage tent, a small group of religious soldiers prayed together. They repeated a Sukkoth hymn to the messianic era, “Kol Mevaser Mevaser V’omer”: “The voice of the herald brings good tidings and proclaims: Your mighty salvation comes. My Beloved is coming.”
ON ANOTHER SAND DUNE, Hanan Porat and his unit were also waiting to be moved west, to the canal.
It was the eve of Simchat Torah, the end of Sukkoth, celebrating the completion of the weekly reading of the annual Torah cycle. Hanan and the other religious soldiers finished their evening prayers. Though Simchat Torah is one of the happiest days of the Jewish calendar, marked by hours-long dancing with Torah scrolls, no one felt like forming a circle. How to dance in proximity to death?
A friend of Hanan’s from his Mercaz days, Menachem Davidovich, called out, “Hevreh, it’s Simchat Torah! Why are you sitting around like golems?” He grabbed Hanan by the hand and began dancing. Reluctantly, others joined and formed a circle, their heavy boots sinking in the sand. Hanan tried to ignore the pain in his feet, a result of the too-small boots he’d borrowed from Abu.
Menachem sang, “Behold, I am sending you Elijah the Prophet,” herald of the Messiah. Hanan closed his eyes and tried to recall the majesty of Simchat Torah in Mercaz: the strong young men holding aloft silver-crowned scrolls as circles of dancers surrounded Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, whose vigorous clapping urged them on to more determined singing, repeating the same lyrics until they lost all sense of time, until Israel’s ancient glory and modern resurrection merged like the beginning and the end of a circle.
AVINOAM “ABU” AMICHAI, Hanan’s friend from Kfar Etzion, had been among those who had crossed the canal on the first night of Operation Brave-Hearted Men. He’d been on patrol ever since, helping to widen the beachhead. He hadn’t made it back home for his son’s circumcision after all.
On Simchat Torah he had helped secure a ramp—one of several long and high mounds of earth built by the Egyptians to overlook the canal. On Thursday evening, just after the holiday ended, Egyptian commandos attacked the ramp, firing RPGs and machine guns. They attacked the northern end; Abu, stationed on the other side, rushed toward the shooting. The Egyptians were pushed back. When the fighting ended, paratroopers found the bodies of four of their friends, among them Abu’s, with a bullet in his forehead.
THE NEXT MORNING, Hanan Porat crossed the canal on a rubber float. He hadn’t heard that Abu had fallen.
Almost as soon as Hanan and his friends stepped onto the opposite shore, they were hit by an artillery attack. Hanan looked up and saw a missile fell an Israeli Phantom jet.
Hanan’s company turned north toward the city of Ismailia. They came to an abandoned village of mud huts. A mortar bombardment: it happened so suddenly that Hanan had no time to hit the ground. An 82-millimeter shell crashed into his right shoulder and then, astonishingly, bounced off. Hanan flew backward. Another shell exploded, filling his chest with shrapnel. His rib cage was shattered, his chest torn open.
Friends tried to stop the bleeding with bandages, but the flow was too strong. Someone ripped off Hanan’s shirt and tied it tightly around his chest, and that stanched the wound. Hanan was lowered into an irrigation ditch. Explosions sprayed him with sand.
Gasping for air, he remained conscious. He didn’t feel acute pain, only a sense of seeping away. I’m going to die— He said good-bye to his wife, Rachel, his three-year-old daughter, his one-year-old son. He thought he heard the soothing words of the Friday-evening prayer: “A Psalm for the Sabbath day. It is good to praise God and to sing to Your Name, to proclaim Your kindness in the morning and Your faithfulness in the night.”
He was lifted onto a half-track. Through the shelling, Hanan made it across the canal on a raft. From the Yard he was flown by helicopter to the field hospital in the Refidim base. A medic spoke to him without letup, to keep him from losing consciousness. Why is he driving me crazy with all this talk?
Heaving, he was rushed off the helicopter. “We have to do it now,” he heard a doctor say, and, without anesthesia, a catheter was jammed into his chest. Hanan went wild with pain. And then he began to breathe again.
MENACHEM DAVIDOVICH, who had led Hanan and the other soldiers in dancing on Simchat Torah, was killed by an artillery shell shortly after crossing the canal.
THE BEACHHEAD STANDS
AVITAL GEVA AND the men from Company D reached the Yard. They crossed the canal on rubber floats and found part of the 28th Battalion camped in a mango grove. Avital greeted his friends with hugs. “Ya Allah,” said Avital, “you can’t imagine how good it is to see you, you can’t imagine.”
The battalion, Avital was told, was about to head south toward Suez City, to cut off the supply lines of Egyptian troops in Sinai. The war was still before them. But for now, here he was, drinking Turkish coffee with the hevreh at a campfire in an orchard.
THE BRIDGE WAS pulled into the Yard and laid across the canal. Significant reinforcements began moving into Egypt. Paratroopers posted a handwritten sign on the western side of the canal: Welcome to Africa.
YOEL BIN-NUN and his friends reached the Yard on Shabbat morning, October 20.
They approached the bridge. Bolts of light exploded around them. Yoel burrowed into the shallow indentations left by
tank treads. The sand exploded in another round of Katyushas. “Shema Yisrael,” he silently recited the prayer before death, “Hear Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.”
The explosions ceased. Still alive—
He crossed the bridge and entered Africa. Another barrage of exploding light. Yoel lay on the ground. A Katyusha hit a palm tree, and splinters flew around him. He repeated the Shema.
The unit proceeded northward, toward Ismailia.
They entered a village of mud huts. Roosters wandered the empty dirt road. Behind him, in the distance, Yoel heard the explosion of Katyushas.
TOGETHER WITH DANNY, Arik shuttled between either end of the beachhead along the western shore of the canal. He hadn’t washed, shaved, or changed clothes in days. He slept only for a few minutes at a time, usually on the half-track.
Arik’s tendency to suppress emotion, often a liability in civilian life, helped him cope now. He could ignore at will the carnage around him, focus on problems that required solutions. Like what to do with a friend who had been assigned to the Yard and who, Arik was convinced, was suffering from shell shock. Arik’s friend complained that the commander of the Yard was persecuting him, denying him shelter during the shellings. Consulting with a doctor, Arik concluded that the best way to treat shell shock was to keep the soldier at the front until it passed and that sending him home prematurely would only deepen the trauma. Arik told his friend, “You’re staying at the beachhead, but with me,” and he brought him back to the Egyptian side of the canal.
TWO MIG-21S FLEW LOW over the beachhead, then shot straight up, somersaulted, and dived, firing rockets. Two Israeli Mirages brought them down.
Danny and Arik watched the dogfight from their half-track in the eucalyptus orchard. One of the Egyptian pilots parachuted and landed about a kilometer away. Limping and disoriented, he was captured and brought to Danny, who ordered the pilot checked by a doctor.
The pilot, a colonel, turned out to be the commander of an air base. When he realized that his side had lost the war, he explained, he’d decided to go down fighting. An enemy worthy of respect, thought Arik.
Afterward, Arik heard that one of the paratroopers had stolen the pilot’s watch. Arik summoned the offender. “In my command, we don’t take watches,” he said, and ordered the watch returned. But Arik did take the pilot’s handsome pistol as a memento.
THE FINAL BATTLE
ARMORED TROOP CARRIERS confiscated from the Egyptians transported Avital Geva’s company to the southern outskirts of Suez City. The paratroopers had been dispatched there for “adjustments,” a last attempt to take the city before a final cease-fire. It was an area of warehouses; burning containers released the smell of scorched oil. Just beyond rose sand-colored apartment buildings, many half built, in which Egyptian soldiers waited.
The battalion’s company commanders met in a deserted apartment on the outskirts of town with the commander of the tank unit that would offer cover to the paratroopers as they conquered Suez City, house by house. The tank commander, Ehud Barak, had been one of Israel’s leading commandos; dressed as a woman, he had been part of a unit that had assassinated PLO terrorists in Beirut. Avital, who knew Barak from reserve duty, greeted him with a hug.
The commanders sat on the floor, eating canned meat and corn. “There’s no reason to rush,” said Zviki Nur, commander of the paratroopers’ 28th Battalion, “the city is surrounded. We’re going to do this slowly but surely. First, Ehud’s tanks will fire on enemy positions, and only then do we go in. No adventures.”
Avital led his men, in groups of three, toward the first row of apartment houses. He had to be especially alert now. In a few hours, the rumor went, a cease-fire was going to be declared, and the last hours of a war, when soldiers lowered their guard, were the most dangerous of all.
A tank fired at a building. Avital ran through the smoke, shooting into the debris. But the building was empty; the Egyptians had fled. No one wanted to die in the last hours of a war.
The pattern was repeated. A tank fired, paratroopers entered, no resistance.
One bloc after another fell. The Egyptians regrouped in the center of town.
12:00. AVITAL HEARD THE ORDER on the radio: All forces cease fire. He and his men were in houses on one side of a wide, empty avenue. Egyptian soldiers were in houses across the street.
Tentatively, men on either side emerged. For a long moment, the Israelis in their olive green uniforms and the Egyptians in their khaki uniforms looked at each other. But no one fired a shot or aimed a weapon.
Spontaneously, soldiers from both sides ran into the street. They smiled and shook hands. An Israeli and an Egyptian embraced. There were shouts of joy.
Avital told himself: Be clearheaded! What if the cease-fire suddenly collapsed? What if an Egyptian opened fire?
He ran into the street. “Hevreh, have you all gone crazy?” he shouted. “Get back! Get back!” Reluctantly, his soldiers retreated. Egyptian officers were also shouting at their men to disengage. UN soldiers in blue helmets appeared and took up positions between the two forces.
Chapter 16
“OUR FORCES PASSED A QUIET NIGHT IN SUEZ”
THE WAR ENDS, AND CONTINUES
THE IDF HAD beaten back invaders on two fronts under the worst conditions it had faced since the War of Independence, brought the battle into enemy territory ten days after the invasion, and extended its reach to within ninety-five kilometers from Cairo and thirty-five kilometers from Damascus.
Yet the people of Israel felt defeated. The initial disarray had shattered Israeli self-confidence. For the first time since 1948, Arab armies had taken the initiative. In eighteen days of combat in Sinai and on the Golan, Israel lost over 2,500 men, a quarter of them officers, along with over 7,000 wounded—the largest number of casualties in any war since 1948. For a population of three million, the losses were devastating. Everyone seemed to know someone who had fallen. Once again, the toll was especially high on kibbutzim.
The 55th Brigade had led the most daring operation of the war and then endured sustained bombardment—more intense, said Danny Matt, than in any battle in World War II. Yet the brigade survived relatively intact, losing fifty-seven men (along with three hundred wounded)—half the number of its fatalities in the battle for Jerusalem.
Along with grief came rage. The Labor Zionist leadership had led the Jewish people through the twentieth century, remained steady through war and siege and terrorism, through waves of mass immigration and economic devastation. Until now. How had the pioneer statesmen and their hero generals become so complacent, so arrogant, that they had failed to notice the growing strength of Arab armies and the prewar buildup on the borders?
The world had never seemed to Israelis a more hostile place than it did in late October 1973. The Arab oil boycott, which punished pro-Israel countries with a suspension of oil deliveries, pressured Third World countries to sever relations with the Jewish state, while panicked European governments suddenly discovered the Palestinian cause. Only two countries—the United States and Holland—stood with Israel. And who knew for how much longer? The whole world is against us, Israelis told each other. This fatalism about “the world” was a negation of Zionism, which had aimed to restore the Jews not only to Zion but to the community of nations. Gone now was the Zionist challenge to outwit the curse of Jewish history. The war that began on Yom Kippur threatened the secular Zionist dream of a normal Jewish state, a nation among nations, and seemed to return Israel back to Jewish fate.
ARIK ACHMON STOOD with folded arms and shook his head in disbelief as UN supply trucks drove through Israeli lines on their way to the besieged Egyptian soldiers of the Third Army. Another few days, he thought, and we would have forced the Egyptians to surrender.
The Israeli government had yielded to American pressure to prevent another humiliating Egyptian defeat. The Americans were hoping that if a stalemate were created, peace talks might result. Yet many of the men of the 55th Brigade felt bet
rayed. They had turned the war on the southern front in Israel’s favor. But the government that had failed to prepare for war and ignored warnings of the surprise attack, that had delayed a reservist call-up and vetoed a preemptive strike, had now committed its final folly.
Despite the cease-fire, sporadic shooting continued along the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. Reservists had been demobilized immediately after the fighting ended in the Six-Day War, but this time they were kept at the front. No one knew for how long. The men set up tent encampments in the agricultural belt on the “African” side of the canal, took over abandoned houses in Suez City, and prepared for a long winter.
Arik moved into Danny’s headquarters in an Egyptian army bunker. It was cold and damp and infested with gnats. “The Holocaust cellar,” they called it, after a museum of that same name on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
THE MIRACLE MAN
HANAN PORAT AWOKE, delirious, from a ten-hour operation. “I just saw Abu,” he told his wife, Rachel, standing by his bedside. “We danced together on Simchat Torah.” In fact he hadn’t seen his fallen friend since the first days of the war.
Part of Hanan’s shoulder, where the missile had hurled into him, was gone. His surgeon showed him a fist full of metal. “This came from your chest,” he said. There was more shrapnel that hadn’t been extracted. Hanan’s shattered ribs were tightly bandaged, and he could hardly move. Volunteers working the wards placed phylacteries on his arm and head.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 29