by Roni Eliav
“But I don’t have any more space.”
“Pass this to Amir, he has some space left and he’s strong,” I moved on to the next one.
“That’s too much food, throw half of it away.”
“It’s a shame to throw food away…”
“Then eat it now.”
After roll call was over, we made final preparations, last attempts to reshuffle the gear between packs, discarding some gear we might regret leaving behind. The soldiers helped each other load their gorged packs onto their backs, we hopped on the truck, and were on our way.
We reached our starting point. The soldiers quickly unloaded the truck, took off their winter coats, and loaded their packs on their backs again. There’s a moment right before you step out of the warm truck when you are confronted with a clash between despair and motivation. But once that moment passes, you are filled with a mad desire to get started. Rain was drizzling, but it was nothing more than a slight nuisance; once we started walking, though, the floodgates opened and the rain came pouring down. But we were already in our stride and didn’t mind getting wet.
Once we reached our destination, we stashed our packs, split into small squads, and went off on our first assignment. The rain came in handy here. There wasn’t a soul to be seen out during such a storm, and the electric fence was going haywire because of the rain, allowing us to easily slip in undetected. We quickly stole the information we were assigned to obtain, and were out of there in a flash.
We got back to our packs, regrouped, and started snaking our way down the Carmel mountains. The soil was muddy from the incessant rain, and we constantly slipped over the wet rocks. The increasingly heavy packs made it difficult for us to get back up onto our feet.
Just before dawn, we found cover and camouflaged ourselves in some shrubbery overlooking the road to Yokne’am. We wrapped ourselves in our ponchos and tried to get some sleep. We were exhausted, but the cold was relentless and the shivering prevented us from sleeping. The rain stopped when day broke, and a nice winter sun emerged. We finally got some rest and gathered our strength for the night to come.
At last light, we packed our stuff and started moving. We ran across the road and climbed the opposing ridge, a short but very steep incline. We practically ran across Menashe Forest. It was cold, but dry. We kept our water breaks short so we wouldn’t lose body heat.
During one such break, Sharon came over to me and reported his arm had gone completely numb. I took most of his gear myself, and divided up the rest between the others. He continued the exercise carrying only his combat vest and rifle. He didn’t get the feeling back in his arm until some weeks later… Luckily for him he did get it back eventually, because years later he would become a famous mountain climber.
After gobbling up 18 miles of ground, we reached our destination before daybreak— a series of caves not far for the Arab village of Zababdeh near Camp Bazak, the Golani Brigade’s home base. We were supposed to conduct a simple live fire raid exercise. We reached our staging position, took off our packs, and loaded up all our ammo. We set off towards our target. I positioned the holding force and started off in a stealthy rightward flank. We stopped at an acute angle from the entrance to the caves. I took the radio handset from Jacob to give the holding force the command to open fire. But then Jacob urgently whispered: “There’s somebody there…” I picked up my night-vision goggles and couldn’t believe my eyes: sleeping bags and military equipment. A whole company of Golani soldiers were camping in there.
I delivered the message as quickly and sharply as I could: “Do not open fire! Under no circumstances are you to open fire! Disarm your weapons!” I led the force back. We unloaded our weapons, gathered our gear, and were off as quickly as we could go. The soldiers were clearly irked they didn’t get to shoot off some ammo weight, but I shuddered at the thought of the disaster we’d just avoided. To this day, the soldiers of that company— who had camped in a cave without coordinating with the base— have no idea how close they’d teetered on the brink of death.
That day, we hid ourselves in the basement of an abandoned house. We were pleased to be somewhere warm, but we were even more elated to be somewhere dry. I didn’t allow the soldiers to light a fire, but a partying atmosphere prevailed nonetheless. It felt unprofessional, but I didn’t feel like being a killjoy.
We left the basement when it was dark out, a group of tattered soldiers with humungous water-soaked backpacks. We placed a roadblock on a side road not far from the entrance to a godforsaken village in the middle of the West Bank. We dressed up as Military Police, with the white armbands and peaked caps, and waited for a truck that was sent out from the unit. In the truck was an operations sergeant who was wise as to what was about to happen, and a driver who wasn’t.
The truck arrived and we pulled it over. We played the game, speaking only in Arabic. The driver believed this was an attempted hijacking, and feverishly tried to roll up his window. We smashed the glass and pulled him out through the window. He desperately held onto the steering wheel as if it were life itself, so we had to beat him a bit to break his grip. We put a hood over his head and tossed him in the back. The soldiers mounted the truck. Regev, one of my soldiers, had exceptional driving skills, so he took the wheel and we hit the road. The soldiers in the back couldn’t help themselves and kept up the act. The poor guy was certain he had been kidnapped. When the exercise was over, I was sternly reprimanded and my team was ordered to pay for the driver’s broken glasses. I had an officer’s salary, so I covered the bill. In retrospect, we were let off easily; had it been today, we would have been tossed in jail for such a stunt.
I found a packet of cigarettes in the glove compartment, which I sucked down readily. We weren’t allowed to take cigarettes with us, but I enjoyed breaking the rules. Regev drove expertly, and within two hours we reached the vicinity of Jericho. I looked for our starting point on the road. Once I found it, we loaded our gear, got off the road, and disappeared into the darkness.
After an hour of brisk walking we arrived at a firing range for another live fire team exercise. This time the company commander was the controller, and we did our best to impress him. When we finished the exercise, we completed a quick retreat to where we had left our packs, loaded them up, and were about to head out— when the company commander announced we had a wounded soldier.
We cursed under our breaths, knowing exactly what that meant. We opened a stretcher and volunteered Adi, the lightest among the soldiers, to play wounded. Make no mistake, though— being on the stretcher when it’s cold out is no free ride. For those on the bottom, however, the old standard issue backpacks— with a metal frame and protruding horns on top— made it impossible to carry the stretcher. So four soldiers took off their packs and carried the stretcher, while four others carried two packs. Each pack weighed about 90 pounds each, reaching over 130 pounds together with the combat vest and rifle, so those who carried two packs were carrying something like 220 pounds on their backs. We had to climb up to the hilltop fortress of Sartaba Alexandrium, a hefty challenge even with no weight on your back. The company commander walked behind us up the steep hill and left us at the top. As soon as he left, I “revived” Adi; he was delighted to put his pack back on and regain some body heat. Luckily for us, it wasn’t raining. We were exhausted, but still had another 6 miles to go to reach our hideout. We were hungry, our bodies were scraped and bruised, our clothes were torn, we were dirty, stinky, and soaked in sweat.
I walked at a medium pace, just fast enough to keep us from freezing. My feet hurt like I was walking on a bed of coals. An hour later, it started raining again. We picked up the pace. At the end of the road, a 6-mile ascent up a steep incline, was tomorrow’s target: Camp Katzif.
We bundled up in our ponchos and spread across the ravine. It was cold, and the rain was relentless. We still managed to get some sleep. During the day, I occasionally woke up to muscle pain and spasm
s, shook them off, and dozed off again.
When night fell, we crawled out of our burrows. Every muscle in our bodies was screaming in pain. We slowly mounted our gear and focused on getting out of the ravine. We looked up again: a 6-mile-long ascent, albeit on a proper road this time. Every time a car drove towards us, we’d quickly get out of the way. We could see practically all the way up the road, meaning we’d spot the headlights of a vehicle from miles away. In fact, one was making its way down towards us at that very moment.
The soldiers all looked at me, and I knew exactly what was on their minds. One of them eventually said: “It’s a commando initiative.”
“What better way to infiltrate a base than using one of their own vehicles?” another said.
I was sold. We set up a makeshift blockade, while the rest of the team hid by the side of the road. We waited for the vehicle to approach, and to make sure it stopped, I stood firmly in the middle of the road. Eitan and Amir stood at my sides.
The truck stopped in front of us, and the entire force stormed at once. We pulled the driver out of the cabin and interrogated him. It turns out he was sent to pick something up from another base. We made it clear we were hijacking him, and he laughed. I slapped him forcefully, and two other guys pinned him down.
“This may look like a joke to you, but we’re not here to play games,” I said.
Eitan grabbed him by the neck with his huge hand. “Got it?!” he snarled at him. The rest of the soldiers surrounded him threateningly. We were blackened with mud and ash, reeking of sweat, caked in mud and blood, desperate. He got the point.
The team split into small squads I’d designated beforehand, when it was still our intent to sneak in through the rear fence. We got on the truck, and I crouched in the cabin by the driver’s legs, pistol in hand.
“I won’t shoot you, but I won’t hesitate to break your leg,” I said sternly. He believed me.
He turned the truck around and made his way back up towards the base. He slowed down in the middle of the road. I hit him forcefully in the shin with the handle of my pistol. He screamed in pain, and I gestured for him to keep driving. We reached the gate. The guards wondered what he was doing back so soon. The driver mumbled something. I tapped him on the shin again, and his imagination sprang to life.
“I-I forgot my coat,” he told the guards.
“You’re wearing it.”
“No, not this one. My raincoat.”
“What do you need a raincoat for?” they wondered.
That was enough for us. Four soldiers jumped off the back of the truck, snuck up from behind and incapacitated the guards, covering their heads with hoods and zip-tying their hands behind their backs. The rest of the guys rushed to carry out their assignments. Within minutes, every important building in the base was rigged with dummy-explosives. The driver fled the truck, and Regev took his place behind the wheel. He put it in reverse and swiftly spun it around while we all tried to jump on, but he hit a huge boulder, grounding the truck. He called on his full repertoire of maneuvers, but try as he might, the truck was truly stuck.
I leaped off the truck. “Everybody off!” I screamed, “we’re walking.” We had to get out of there before a reinforcement squad of paratroopers arrived from the nearby base. The team unloaded the truck like wild animals. We formed a single line on the road and started running. We were in a tight spot— this part of the road was carved straight into the mountain, and we were boxed in between two high-rising stone walls. On the next stretch of road, things went from bad to worse: on one side was a natural stone wall, while the other was a precipitous drop. We ran with all our might; we ran on fumes, but ran nonetheless. I could see headlights down the road heading in our direction. We kept running in the dark, and the bright lights got closer and closer. Endless scenarios flashed through my head as I tried to plan for the inevitable ensuing confrontation, but just then, the stone wall to our right dropped off and gave way to a mild slope. I hurled myself down the slope and the soldiers followed suit. We dropped off the road just in the nick of time: seconds later, a truck came flying around the bend where we had just stood.
“We have a new member in our team,” Amir said. It turned out a magnificent German Shepard had accompanied us out of the base, and trailed us all the way to the slope on the side of the road.
“He’s a warrior. He knows true warriors when he sees them,” I said, and even though it wasn’t the best of jokes, we all burst out laughing.
I signaled to the team that we were moving out. We still had another assignment to complete that night. We were very pleased with ourselves, and our spirits couldn’t have been any higher. The soldiers started cracking jokes, and the discipline we had so carefully maintained was starting to slip. I stopped the party; I informed one of the soldiers that he was wounded, and that the rest of the team would carry him on a stretcher. They laughed while carrying out my order. Nothing could faze them now.
We walked slowly, weighed down by the double packs and the stretcher, but we were way ahead of schedule anyway. After a couple of hours, we reached a hill overlooking the “Atarot” airfield. We descended the hill and snuck into the airfield. After quickly jumping the fence, we huddled our backpacks at the end of the runway, split into squads and took over the airfield.
The control tower, who’d been expecting us, seemed amused by us and happily played along. We drank their coffee, and I bummed a cigarette off one of them. That was that. All we had to do was wait for the Hercules aircraft to land. We set up makeshift runway lights, to simulate a real-life scenario. The advancing plane asked the control tower to turn on the runway lights. I told them not to. The person in charge of the tower said: “You’re taking this too far, buddy. This is a safety matter.”
That sentence snapped me back to reality. I really was a little too deep into the exercise. But then again, had I not been, we would not have been able to pull off what we did that night.
The plane landed, and all of us— including the dog— hopped on. We lay strewn across the floor like sacks of potatoes. The flight engineer gestured for us to sit in the side-facing seats. We gestured him back that he could sit down himself if he liked. It’s impossible to sit with your gear on. He tried to convince me, screaming over the harrowing noise of the engine. I turned my back to him, and he went to consult the pilot. The pilot summoned me to see him. I laboriously climbed into the cockpit with my combat vest and weapon on.
“So take off your equipment,” he rationally said.
“We don’t take our gear off until the assignment is finished,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, you can leave us here. We’ll walk back. We’ve already walked over 200 miles, what’s a few more.” Eventually the pilot gave in, closed the ramp, and took off.
We landed in the military airstrip in Lod. We alighted the plane, and I announced the exercise was officially over. No one had any energy left to celebrate. We dragged ourselves, along with our canine companion, onto the truck that was waiting for us and headed back to the unit, to begin the arduous process of cleaning our gear and weapons. When that was finished, we had a steaming hot shower waiting for us, and the ultimate luxury: beds with blankets in a heated room.
The next day, a message came from Camp Katzif: “Okay, you got us, but please return the dog.” We tried to resist, but we had no choice, really. We said goodbye to the dog, and went to prepare Friday roll call before going home for the weekend.
Chapter 10
RETURN TO OPERATIONAL DUTY
Twenty years later, following the tremendous loss he had suffered, Erez volunteered to reenlist to the army.
Neta stood in the renovated office she’d taken care to organize over the past week, and looked over the camp where she served. About 6 miles south of Nablus was an old camp which once served as an infantry school. Following the Israeli-Palestinian accords, the school was relocated and the camp was repurposed as division headquar
ters. Neta had recently finished officer training, and was stationed at the division. A month prior, she’d been informed that a new headquarters would be established to coordinate the division’s special units, and she was appointed to serve as office manager. She had two secretaries, an intelligence officer, an operations sergeant, an administrator, and a driver. She had everyone but a commander. Every time she asked, she was told he’d be coming any day now. The days went by, and she did her best to collect all the information she thought might be relevant.
That day, she had grown so exasperated from waiting that she decided to ask for a transfer. She even thought of asking her dad to call on his connections in Central Command. Just when she finally made up her mind to make that call, she noticed a black Chevy pulling up in front of the office.
A tall man emerged from the car, with broad shoulders and a slight sway in his step, as if he were walking on the deck of a ship. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a short, untrimmed beard that looked like he had just grown it out. He came into the office, said hello without shaking any hands, and kept his answers short. “Erez,” he said simply, and asked Neta to show him the materials she had gathered. He listened with a sealed expression as the excited intelligence officer briefed him, and didn’t correct her when she got some places’ names wrong.
He went about his business incisively. He asked questions, and he requested materials. He didn’t give any orders, nor any grand speeches. He simply came to work. That afternoon, he asked to see the most-wanted list. The files followed the American system of personality identification playing cards, in which names and faces of wanted terrorists were printed on a deck of playing cards. He read the files thoroughly, occasionally taking notes. Suddenly Neta felt a chill in the room. She looked up at Erez; he was holding the profile of one terrorist, his jaw tightly clenched. His hands firmly clasped the file, and Neta could see his muscles tense up.