Herman Wouk - The Glory

by The Glory(Lit)

  a cheery if horrendous racket, as thousands of lawyers, teachers, garage mechanics, shopkeepers, and other assorted civilians go about forming up into an armored division of two hundred tanks. In fact an air of make-believe pervades the camp, because it is all so much like the recent drills. The threat of war seems very remote here. Many soldiers are still fasting.

  In his office in the command hut he finds on his desk the latest intelligence summaries of Egyptian tank and troop movements; veiled jargon, full of unit names and coded locations. Having followed these reports for two weeks - especially of the positioning of new Soviet bridging equipment all along the Canal, and the visible massing of huge water cannon and motorized rafts - Kishote has long since guessed that this is to be an attack, astutely planned to look like training maneuvers to the last moment, so that a preemptive strike by Israel will raise a world howl of "Aggressor!" But intelligence is not his job. One thing is evident: for this round of war, if it breaks out, better brains, Arab or Russian, are at work in Egypt than in 1967.

  "Well, the top brass have royally fucked it up again." A recognizable abrasive voice speaks behind a thin plywood wall. "And so our asses are back on the line."

  ' 'Exactly so.'' Another familiar voice. ' 'And they'll be shot off on day one if it's up to Sharon. Tough to be a Jew."

  First voice: "Well, at least that fat son of a whore knows what he's doing. Not like those fuck-headed politicians of ours." Crash of falling signal equipment. "Hey, easy! That receiver's not one of your shitty ceramics, it's valuable."

  "No harm done, you can drop this thing off a cliff. You're right about the politicians. Golda's been a major disaster."

  "In what way?" Yossi inquires, walking into the signal room next door.

  Unshaven, in ill-fitting uniforms, the two reservists get to their feet; Shimon Shimon and Yoram Sarak, pals in the army as at the Jericho Cafe. Equipment is piled in disorder around them for transfer to field HQ signal cars, and coffee cups and remnants of sandwiches litter a table. Though still fasting, Yossi is not offended or surprised at this pair of scoffers. They are both keen signal operators, which is all that concerns him, rosh katan enlisted men who ducked officer train-

  ing during compulsory service; better at the job than the kids in the regular army, but with other things to do except in war.

  "Is it the real thing, sir?" inquires Sarak, with a nice mix of deference and friendliness. From his viewpoint, Brigadier General Nitzan is a good reserve boss. Some officers enjoy lording it over well-known civilians doing their miluim (reserve duty), but this Don Kishote is all business, very sharp, now and then slipping into tart humor with the journalist under him. Also Sarak, a notorious skirt-chaser, can respect Nitzan's rumored success at that game.

  Without replying, Yossi looks to Shimon Shimon. "In what way has Golda been a disaster?"

  "Sir, that's a large subject," says the ceramicist. "I don't want to commit treason while on active duty."

  "Frank talk isn't treason," says Kishote. "Go ahead."

  Shimon glances at Sarak, who grins and shrugs. "B'seder, sir. I think she's weakened Israel, if not destroyed it. From 1948 on we lived by a consensus just to survive, and to convince the Arabs to let us live in peace. But she and her gang - that foul Galili and the rest - decided after the Six-Day War to be a big little country, and hang on forever to the Sinai, the Golan, and all the rest. The national consensus is kaput. We're split down the middle. Frankly a lot of us sympathize with the Arabs, sir - me included - and if this is a war, we may be too divided to win it."

  "I could hardly say it better myself," says Sarak, "though in fact I have. I wrote that column six months ago, Shimon."

  "Well, are you two guys ready to fight?"

  They look at each other. "What's that got to do with it?" says Sarak. "En brera."

  "Good enough," says Kishote, and he goes out to an orders group of brigade and battalion commanders. He is still addressing them in bright sunshine about plans for a night advance to the Canal in case of war, when at 2 p.m. the sirens go off.

  In the smoky gloom of the Tel Nof fighter control center, operators closely watch the radar scopes for the approach of enemy aircraft, while noncoms wearing headphones mark the progress of the war on the big table map, and others chalk Hebrew cabalisms on blackboards and Plexiglas panels.

  Benny Luria paces amid busy officers, awaiting word on the effectiveness of Egyptian antiaircraft against the first wave. A girl brings him a phone on a long cord. "For you, General."

  "Luria?" Peled sounds hoarse. "Pick up the red telephone." He dashes up two flights of stairs, down a long corridor, and through the side door of his inner office. "Luria here," he says, out of breath from tension, not exertion.

  "Trouble, Benny. OC North is asking Dado for close air support at once and at all cost. The Syrians threw a giant artillery barrage for an hour, and now they're clearing the minefields and bridging the antitank ditch. They have eight hundred tanks in the jump-off zone. We have about eighty there to stop them till reenforcements and reserves arrive."

  "Rough."

  "Very rough. In a few hours their armor can be running all over the Golan and down into the Galilee. What planes do you have ready to go?"

  "Six units of four, set for the second strike against the Canal missile batteries."

  "Wrong armament. Switch them to antitank and strafing ordnance."

  "Sir, unloading those heavy bombs has got to take a lot of time."

  "You're right/Send those aircraft to drop their bombs in the sea, and return to rearm."

  Luria is taken aback. It is an emergency procedure for a plane in trouble, otherwise unprecedented. "Sir, are you seriously telling me to order my pilots to jettison their weapons?"

  "Luria, Dado has ordered immediate air support in the north. Immediate is immediate. Last time we surprised them, now they've surprised us. That's how it is. En brera. Central Command will give you latest enemy movements and weather in the north."

  With heavy foreboding Benny Luria issues the order: Urgent. Second wave jettison all armament at sea and rearm for close air support north.

  Of all commands Dov Luria could receive, even Proceed alone to bomb Cairo might be more welcome. He takes off sick at heart. Jettison his bombs! What a contrast to mokade, the great triumph his father led six short years ago! But he

  does as he has been told, roaring with Major Goldstein's unit of four out over a blue sea wrinkled by a strong offshore wind; and as his first act of war, with a sense of nightmare, he drops into the water weapons worth millions of American dollars. His radarman, a dour young moshavnik planning to go back to dairy farming, says as the bombs splash far below, "Well, sir, don't feel bad. Maybe some Arabs are swimming around down there."

  Circling to land at Tel Nof, Dov sees ground crews waiting beside bombs all laid out in the well-drilled pattern for rearming planes fast. Here at least is an echo of mokade! Armorers and mechanics swarm over his plane as he climbs out. At the coffee urn in the hangar he finds Itzik Brenner, number three in the four-plane unit, a dark big lieutenant with a huge nose and a black beard.

  "I thought I'd make it through the fast," says Itzik with a guilty grin over his coffee cup. Though from a religious kibbutz, Itzik is no longer very observant. "But I want to be sharp for the Syrians. I owe them."

  Dov knows what that means. Itzik grew up within artillery range of the Golan Heights. When he was four a direct hit collapsed the kibbutz shelter, killing two kindergarten friends and breaking his arm, which is still crooked. But the kibbutz has hung on, though since the Six-Day War the young people have been drifting away to the cities.

  Amid the racket of the reloading and the roar of patrol planes landing and taking off, the pilots are briefed on the field by the squadron leader. General Luria is there, noting the strain on his son's pale young face as he listens to late fragmentary intelligence. But such were the briefings in the turnarounds of the Six-Day War, too. This has been something like Dov's bar mitzvah as
an Israeli pilot, the father wryly thinks. Passing the course, getting the wings, earning praise for high performance in training - all very well! Now the enemy waits in the north. As he watches the quartet take off, and Dov's plane leap into the air and dwindle away, he mutters a prayer.

  Flying up the Jordan Valley in cloudless sunlight over familiar terrain, Dov feels his mood clearing. This was something he has also trained for, after all, close air support, and he feels ready. Those poor tank guys on the Golan are catch-

  ing the heat, so the mission is a necessary one. Ahead and to the right of him roar three aircraft, Major Eli Goldstein in the lead. Dov's fit of nerves is gone, his head is cool, and his heart soars to be flying to a real fight in the world's best fighter-bomber, with these familiar dials, the familiar cockpit smell of fuel and electronic ozone, the familiar reassuring engine roar... but damn, the weather reports are not wrong. Ahead over the Golan Heights clouds are piled, dark and multilayered from the horizon to the zenith.

  19

  Fathers and Sons

  About the time Dov is taking off, Arik Sharon is returning to his division. He finds Kishote at the optical gear depot, in a dusty field overgrown with rank-smelling weeds and crowded with a vast jumble of private cars, delivery trucks, ice cream wagons, moving vans, taxicabs, even one cement-mixer, the motley vehicles by which the ten thousand reservists of the division are solving the Yom Kippur dearth of busses. Kishote is quelling an angry dispute between the quartermasters and a besieging mob of tank commanders. The hubbub dies when Arik appears in his blue leather jacket, gray-blond hair windblown, the most recognizable man in Israel after Moshe Dayan. "What's all this?" he demands.

  The supply of binoculars and periscopes is short, Kishote explains, since many were drawn for peacetime war games and never returned. Now the quartermasters are requiring forms filled out for each instrument. Sharon shouts to the quartermasters, "The forms are waived! First come, first served!" Cheers from the sergeants commanding the tanks, ranging from youths who have barely finished their draft service to middle-aged reservists. Sharon again. "If the supply runs out, there will be more down at Tasa, don't worry! First come, first served, I say, and make ready to move, all of

  you. Nitzan, call an orders group for section heads and brigade commanders."

  Around a long narrow conference table, some fifteen senior officers gather to hear the few reliable facts that Sharon has learned from the confused first reports at Gorodish's HQ. Without question, he says, the Egyptians have achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. This is not the time to ask why and how. One day soon the people will call the government to account, no fear! (There speaks the politician still, thinks Kishote.) Now there is a war to win.

  The bitter truth is that Egyptian forces are crossing the Canal on motorized rafts in at least five major thrusts, bypassing the Bar-Lev maozim, which they stunned and silenced with an hour-long rain of murderous artillery fire. Already they have gained several shallow lodgments - he raps a pointer at the locations on a large Sinai wall map - and are now blasting breaches in the ramparts with water pumps of fantastic power, and starting to lay pontoon bridges. General Mandler's three regular brigades, with less than two hundred tanks, face an Egyptian onslaught of seven divisions and at least a thousand tanks! The position accordingly is very dangerous.

  Having poured on the gloom, Sharon turns brisk and optimistic. The Arab is a good soldier and a brave enemy, so long as he fights on a set plan. So far Egypt appears to be doing things by the Soviet book, planned and drilled to the last detail. The way to reverse this initial success is to break up the enemy timetable. The two reserve Sinai divisions - this one, and one under General Adan coming from the north - have to race down the peninsula and counterattack to contain the invaders' bridgehead, then cross the Canal and cut them off from the rear. With this the entire Egyptian front in Sinai can falter and collapse in three days. But meantime it will be very hard going all the way.

  "The bottleneck right now is tank transporters." Sharon slaps his pointer on a wall photograph of a monstrous low-bed trailer truck carrying a sixty-ton Centurion. "General Adan has requested priority on these. I didn't argue. He has farther to go. I don't know how long it'll take to round some up for us, and so, gentlemen, I mean to run south all night on our treads." Troubled glances around the table. Sharon turns

  to Kishote, sitting near him at the map. "What about it, Nitzan?"

  "That will grind down the tanks, sir," says Kishote drily, "before they ever fire a shot. It's a hundred thirty miles. It'll push the crews to the fatigue limit. A lot of breakdowns en route are inevitable. Traffic will pile up in the passes and the high dunes. Tanks will bog down getting off the roads. A total mess."

  "So you're against this?" The tone is calm, but Sharon's eyes narrow.

  "I'm saying what to expect, sir, but we have the best repair gang in Zahal. Our garageniks can take apart and put together a Centurion in the dark like an Uzi. What's more, transporter drivers can't be controlled. They can wander off or be commandeered. Our own tanks we can control. We'll get there worn out, sir, but we'll get there as a division, ready to fight. Let's do it."

  Among the officers, a rueful murmur and nodding of heads. Sharon dismisses the meeting, and when he is alone with Yossi he slaps his shoulder, "Well done, Kishote, stating all the objections before they could. I'll lead the first company that gets on the road. You come along with command headquarters, and check at Point Yukon yourself in the morning, to make sure that Tal's brainchild, that confounded roller bridge, is ready to go. I intend to cross into Egypt day after tomorrow."

  "What! Monday?" Kishote blinks. "Does Gorodish agree?"

  ' 'Gorodish is out of his head. The roof has fallen in on him. He's issuing orders that make no sense, and he's very self-conscious and touchy about taking advice. He served under both Bren Adan and me in this very command, and now he has to command us. He's well aware that Bren created the Bar-Lev Line, that I built up the Sinai infrastructure and road system, and that we both know ten times as much as he does about all this. Zeh mah she'yaish, Kishote. But Bren's the greatest tank man in Israel, and between us and Mandler's brigades we'll win Gorodish's campaign for him."

  Droning over the white-capped Sea of Galilee, Dov's plane and the three other Phantoms are bumping into the dense

  murk over Syria. Now Dov is locked to the dead reckoning of Major Goldstein, once his navigation instructor. Their target is a large Syrian tank force, and as Dov is figuring it the objective has to be ahead at about five miles, when Goldstein's voice breaks radio silence with one word: "Nered." ("Let's go down.") The air becomes rougher, the cloud layer thicker and darker, as they descend. At moments Dov can see only Itzik's wing ahead and to his right. Two thousand feet, fifteen hundred. Dirty mist, rain hammering on the canopy. Okay, there is the ground, glimpsed through thinning wisps of cloud and drifting rain curtains.

  Nothing there.

  Not a thing. Broken rock, greenish scrub, here and there a shallow conical hill, not a sign of war in the two-mile circle of hazy visibility. Nothing! Old intelligence? Wrong intelligence? Or has there been a sudden breakthrough, and are those Syrian tanks already rolling westward over the Purple Line forts into the Golan?

  Straight ahead a jagged ridge of low hills, vague in the mist. Goldstein: "That ridge is not on the map. The target may be on the far side of it. Forward, then."

  As they are arching over the ridge, antiaircraft fire ignites the air all around them; sudden hell of fireworks, ground twinkling below, colored balls rising up, flames exploding all over the murky sky.

  Wow, the real thing! Change altitude, jink like mad, evade, evade, evade...

  Oh God, oh God, ITZIK! No!

  It happens so close to Dov that the blast rocks his aircraft. One moment Itzik is zooming to evade, and the next second he is vanishing in a dirty billowing expanding globe of flame, with black ragged pieces tumbling away. Blown to bits! Red and yellow explosions flaring everywhere in
the gray sky, over the canopy, across the windshield. Oh, Itzik!

  Now Goldstein, level-voiced. "I'm hit, but I have power. I'll try to eject over our territory. Abort, abort, return to base. God rest poor Itzik. Abort! Dov, Avrash, acknowledge."

  "Avrash here." Very shaky tones. "Acknowledged."

  "Dov here. Acknowledged. Major, Avrash and I can still try to find that tank force. It's our mission."

  "Shlilee, shlilee! [Negative, negative!] Abort. Go home.

  That's an order. I'm turning west. Out." Dov reverses course and roars full throttle skyward, for the antiaircraft is obviously locked in on their altitude. In seconds he is over the ridge, climbing into thick clouds. He can't see Avrash. Has he too fallen?

  Whirling thoughts. Sickly urge to urinate, never mind that. Flying by instinct and by drilled-in responses. Compass course west by south and climb, climb, to get out of the overcast. Hang on to yourself. Itzik is gone, you have to fight all the harder, fly more missions. What a pitiful start for a combat career! What a difference from the Six-Day War... what a defeat... one pilot out of four surely dead. Maybe two, maybe three. Benny Luria's son fleeing for his life. How can he face his father and Itzik's ground crew? And Itzik's pregnant wife, Ida, from the same kibbutz, nineteen years old, a religious girl, no television on Shabbat... After the debriefing he'll have to walk past the apartment of big-bellied little Ida, a widow and not yet aware of it. Dov's father has talked much about the sad side of being a tayass, but not until you've seen a wonderful guy like Itzik die instantly in a midair explosion... Why not me? Just crazy luck...