The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

by Steven Pressfield

  We drop Bikel off with Dr. Ginat and start across an open space toward an area of dark buildings. I have Barry, with Bikel’s radioman, plus my own operations sergeant, Leizer Lavi. Suddenly voices call from the shadows.

  “Barkai! Barkai! Help us!”

  The men are from one of our companies. As battalion operations officer, I have little contact with individual troopers, so I don’t recognize anyone. But they know me. They’re begging me to take over, to lead them.

  “There’s a house back there . . .”

  “We attacked it . . .”

  “Two of our friends got shot on the stairwell . . .”

  “They’re still there, Barkai!”

  This is not an easy thing to hear. The men are racked with anguish. Soldiers, without someone to command them, often cannot organize themselves to act, even though they know they must and they wish desperately to do so. But as soon as someone gives shape to their problem and puts forth a solution, they respond with will and courage.

  I can see the house. Its roof is not burnt.

  This is not my assignment. It is not the task Uzi has set for me. But I am an officer. What comes before me, I must act on. I cannot pass up a wounded man or turn aside from an emergency.

  I organize the men quickly. I will get to the House with the Burnt Roof later.

  We attack this other house with rifles, machine guns, antitank guns, and hand grenades. I and two others scramble up the staircase where our two men have been shot. We get them out. They’re alive. One is David Giladi, whom I don’t know but who, it is clear from the men’s concern, is a favorite among his platoon. He has been shot in the head.

  The staircase is slick with blood. I cannot believe that men can bleed out so much and still be alive. We have no stretcher. We break down two wooden doors and carry the men on these.

  As we’re stumbling toward the casualty collection center, my radioman asks if I’m okay.

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Your back.”

  My shirt apparently is dark with blood. I remember a grenade exploding earlier and feeling a sensation like needles striking my back.

  It’s nothing.

  I’m fine.

  The firefight continues around the House of Death. My party has not been able to overrun the place. But we have got our wounded men out, and I have organized the soldiers to keep the building under fire without letup. Dawn is coming. The enemy will either be killed or run away.

  Moshe Peled is deputy commander of “C” Company:

  What is our advance like? Little wars. We are fighting little wars all over the field. A house, a bunker, a machine-gun position. Each one is a war that is fought by a platoon, a section, sometimes just three or four men. What keeps them together? They are friends—simple as that.

  In American movies you see the typical squad of GIs and dogfaces: the wisecracking guy from Brooklyn, the corn-fed kid from Kansas, the handsome lieutenant from Tennessee. They fight as one. But when the war is over, each man, no matter how close he has been to his buddies, will go home to his town or farm or city. He will never see his friends again.

  It’s not like that in Israel. My officers, my men, I have known them my whole life. I will call them friends till I die. We will fight this war together, as we have fought the one before that and we will fight the one after that, all in this same battalion, this same company.

  When I call to a man, “Assault that house from the north side,” I do not call him “corporal” or “sergeant.” He is Mickey. He is Avi.

  Shai Hermesh, bazooka man in “A” Company:

  Finally our “lost patrol” has found somebody. A Recon team is leading us toward the breakthrough point.

  Hurry! We feel desperate to help our friends, who are under fire and need our heavy weapons.

  The hours have been a nightmare. Bazooka and mortarmen are supposed to be issued light weapons to defend themselves with—Uzis or at least Webley pistols. You can’t protect yourself against an Arab Legion patrol with a bazooka. But we have nothing. The army is so poor.

  “Don’t worry,” a sergeant told me three days ago at the supply depot. “You’ll find plenty of weapons on the ground once the killing starts.”

  Meir Shalit, nineteen-year-old sergeant in “B” Company:

  03:40. Our company has formed up on a road. Which road? I don’t know. Heading where? I have no clue.

  I’m still carrying my bangalore torpedo. Why? Because I can’t find anyone to give it to and if I throw it away I will get in trouble. Where are we? Two minutes ago some guy from “C” Company moved past and said in an excited voice, “Look up there—that’s Mount Scopus.” I suddenly realized we’re in Jerusalem. I’d forgotten completely. This is how dumb you can get.

  My job now is messenger for Lieutenant Menachem Reineets, Uzi Eilat’s second-in-command. I’m supposed to run with dispatches. Carrying my bangalore torpedo.

  We advance along the road, step by cautious step, in two columns, one on each shoulder, weapons facing outward, with a wide interval between men. It’s still dark. Mortar shells are dropping, making sharp, hard bangs; machine-gun and sniper fire comes from scattered directions.

  I have learned one thing from this, my first experience of war: Leaders are everything.

  Individually, we soldiers may be brave. Collectively, we may make up a skilled, well-trained unit. But without a strong hand to guide us, we balk and freeze. We become confused and surrender initiative.

  I can see Uzi Eilat up front, leading the column. This is Israeli style: The company commander goes first. Is this crazy? He makes himself a prime target for a sniper. But by his presence, in the lead, we in the column are made strong.

  I know nothing. I can see nothing. But if Uzi tells me, “Do this,” I will do it.

  Uzi Eilam, Battalion 71 commander:

  We have reached “the Springboard,” or the place that the men are calling by that name. It’s a wide spot, with a gas station, at a junction on the Nablus Road. From here I can see the field. To my right the road runs south toward the Rockefeller Museum. Good. The junction beneath the museum is one of our objectives. I have sent Uzi Eilat’s company forward to seize it. This force is not actually Eilat’s company, but elements of “B,” “C,” and “A,” with no small smattering of paratroopers from Battalion 28 who have gotten separated from their units and have latched onto any formation speaking Hebrew and wearing red boots.

  To my left, in the first glimmers of daylight (which works against us because it will help the Jordanian gunners see us) I can make out the western terminus of the dry riverbed of Wadi Joz. The Jordanian mortars are down there somewhere. I have sent a force, and will send another if I have to, to locate this position and destroy it. Once that post has been silenced, half the danger to the battalion will be over.

  A residential street, also called Wadi Joz, parallels the ravine. I will take a company myself—Yoram Zamosh’s “A” Company—and advance down this axis. This street will take us to the forward edge of our other objective: an imaginary line facing the high ground of Augusta Victoria Ridge.

  Ten minutes ago, I had to lead my own command group to knock out a sniper. This is insanity. But there was no alternative. We were under fire; it would have consumed minutes to organize another group to do the job. When we finished with the first position, a second machine gun opened up on us from another house. We had to take care of that one, too.

  This is how the struggle is playing out in all quarters. Each company, each platoon, each squad is fighting its own war.

  Zeev Barkai, operations officer:

  The sky is getting light. We have brought the wounded men from the House of Death to the medical station. Bodies of paratroopers lie in a row on the ground, covered by blankets. A pile of no-longer-needed weapons grows beside them.

  The casualty collection station is in the home of an
Arab family. The owners remain, scared to death, though our guys are treating them with great courtesy. I ask the father’s permission to enter the kitchen for a drink of water. “Go in,” he says in Hebrew.

  In the kitchen I come face-to-face with my reflection in a mirror. Can that be me? I’m so pale! My shirt is soaked with blood. On a whim I decide this will be my lucky shirt. I will not take it off till the war is over.

  A joke pops into my head. The one about the officer who deliberately wears a red shirt into battle so that if he gets wounded the blood will not show. Then he gets into a particularly terrifying firefight. At the height of the action, he looks down at himself and shouts to his sergeant, “Bring me my brown trousers!”

  Dan Ziv, deputy battalion commander:

  I believe in being stupid. You have to be stupid in war because if you were smart you would never do what you need to do to survive. That’s why being young is so important in soldiers. When you’re young, you don’t know the horrible things that can happen to the human body and the human mind.

  At Mitla in ’56 I drove down a road and they gave me a medal. Was I brave? I was stupid. I am not so stupid anymore and not so brave, either. But here and now I know one thing: I have three recoilless-rifle jeeps with their crews and I must get them to the junction of Sultan Suleiman Street and the Jericho Road, beneath the Rockefeller Museum, where the northeast corner of the Old City walls juts out. And I must get them there before full daylight.

  What is a recoilless rifle? It’s the poor man’s Sherman tank.

  The rifle itself is just a tube, like a big bazooka. It’s too heavy for one man to carry. You need a jeep. A recoilless rifle fires a 106-millimeter shell that will blow the third story off a three-story building or the turret off a Patton tank. Already this night our recoilless rifles have taken out three positions of enemy machine guns.

  The problem with a 106 mounted on a jeep is it makes an irresistible target. On the training range, a recoilless rifle crew sights carefully (this is done by firing a .50-caliber tracer round, as a marker, from a barrel that is calibrated to be precisely parallel to the recoilless cannon’s barrel), then fires the actual 106 round. In combat if you did that, you and the crew would be dead five seconds after the enemy spotted you. So what we do is dash the jeep into position, leap off and take cover, make sure we haven’t been spotted, then spring back out onto the jeep, sight quickly, fire, and get the hell out.

  The reason these recoilless rifle jeeps are needed at the intersection of Sultan Suleiman Street and the Jericho Road is to stop any Jordanian tanks that might be coming from the east and south, from the Jordan Valley, to reinforce their Arab brothers. The topography of Jerusalem is such that the enemy can advance along this one road only.

  We must get our 106s in position to fire down that road. We won’t last long, slugging it out with Arab Legion tanks and their British-trained crews, but maybe we can knock out the first one or two and jam up the road with their wrecked hulks.

  Zeev Barkai, battalion operations officer:

  I have found the House with the Burnt Roof. This was my original assignment from Uzi, what seems like two days ago but was actually only ninety minutes. Dawn is coming; the sky is starting to get brighter. I have lost Bikel to wounds. My other guys—Barry and my operations sergeant and Bikel’s radioman—have gotten lost along the way.

  It’s just me as I creep up behind the house.

  The heavy machine gun in the house has stopped firing. At this moment I hear nothing.

  Suddenly I see soldiers, paratroopers from Battalion 28, in several shallow trenches only a few meters behind the house. I recognize one. He’s from Beit Hashita. Years later, he will be elected mayor of the town next to mine. “What are you guys doing here?”

  No one answers.

  I know what they’re doing. They’re keeping alive.

  I tell them they’re coming with me into the house. But when I look, the rear door is solid iron. “Look at this! How the hell are we gonna get in?”

  “You wanna get in?” says the future mayor. And he screws a rifle grenade onto the end of his rifle and blows the hell out of the door.

  “Follow me!” I shout and dash into the house.

  No one follows.

  Two Arab Legionnaires pop from a doorway. It’s like an American Western. We all go for our guns. I win. I don’t even stop to look. I sprint up the stairs to the room with the machine gun.

  The soldiers out back have not budged.

  The upstairs room is charred black and reeking of smoke. The roof and one whole wall are gone. I think, Dan Ziv’s guys must have knocked this post out with their recoilless guns. That’s why our guys are calling this the House with the Burnt Roof.

  Outside, the paratroopers from Battalion 28 look relieved to see me emerge in one piece. They ask what they should do. I point them toward the front, or where I imagine the front is now.

  You have to understand how soldiers are. The Jordanians inside the house were not about to shoot it out with the Israelis outside, and neither were the Israelis about to burst in and start a war with the Jordanians. Why should they? They might get killed.

  A smart soldier, if he has not been ordered to go inside a house, won’t go. He will get ready, he will clean his rifle, he will take cover. Until an officer comes along and tells him to do it.

  Shai Hermesh, bazooka man in “A” Company:

  Finally we have caught up with our company. For hours I have had no thought except to find my commander and dear friend, Yoram Zamosh. A bazooka man does not fight on his own. You don’t say, Oh, look there, let me shoot at that machine-gun nest. Your commander directs you. Your job is to serve him.

  On Wadi Joz Street, a Ford three-ton truck suddenly appears, packed with Arab Legion soldiers. Zamosh points and shouts, “Shai, shoot!” What am I thinking? Nothing. There is the enemy. Hit him. I barely feel the rocket blasting from the tube.

  A second truck appears.

  “Shoot again!” shouts Zamosh.

  Uzi Eilam, battalion commander:

  The last big fights of the night take place in Wadi Joz. In the first one, two truckloads of Arab Legion soldiers have descended from their positions on the Augusta Victoria Ridge, attempting to counterattack along Wadi Joz Street. One of Zamosh’s young bazooka men, Shai Hermesh, who will later become a distinguished member of the Knesset, fires a rocket into the first truck’s engine, killing a number of enemy soldiers and stopping both vehicles in their tracks. Zamosh’s troopers have finished off the rest in an hour-long firefight.

  The other shoot-out occurs in the wadi itself. A squad led by Lieutenant Arye Dvir, whom his men call “Kooshie,” comes upon a burial cave in the wall of the dry riverbed. Arab women and children have taken shelter inside. They are terrified, begging the paratroopers not to shoot. Kooshie comes forward to help. A Jordanian soldier stands up from behind the women and shoots Kooshie through the cervical spine. He drops, permanently paralyzed.

  Yoram Zamosh, “A” Company commander:

  A bluff overlooks the dry riverbed of Wadi Joz. I put four MAGs at the brink. A MAG is a Belgian-made light machine gun. Our gunners fire box after box of ammo, covering Kooshie and his platoon.

  We can feel the fury of the night beginning to ebb.

  Just after dawn, a few minutes before the fight with the Jordanian soldiers on the two trucks, one of our heavy weapons teams, which had been lost, catches up with us. My friend Shai Hermesh is the bazooka man. We embrace, he and I, so relieved to see each other alive. Shai’s face is white. I see he is holding back tears.

  “Zamosh, I just came from the casualty collection station. Someone directed us there, saying we would find discarded weapons that we could take so we could defend ourselves . . .”

  Shai struggles to control his emotions.

  “What a terrible sight, Zamosh! On the ground . . . a line of blankets . . . twe
nty, maybe more. Red boots were sticking out from under the blankets. Beside these was a pile of helmets and Uzis and FNs. ‘Help yourself,’ said the medic.

  “Zamosh, I couldn’t make myself take a weapon. Not from our men who had been killed. So many! Zamosh, there were so many!”

  I see that Shai has gotten a rifle from somewhere.

  “Are you all right, Shai?”

  “Yes . . .” He clutches my arm to steady himself. “But I never want to see such a sight again.”

  Our battalion has gotten off easy. Most of the dead paratroopers that Shai saw were from Battalion 66, from the night-long carnage on Ammunition Hill. Shai could not know that when he saw them. It will be days before any of us learns the true tally.

  Our battalion commander’s plan has worked. Uzi has picked a smart place to make the breakthrough, and we soldiers have crossed no-man’s-land fast enough to get behind the Jordanian defensive positions before the enemy could inflict heavy damage. The sun is up. Most of the Arab Legionnaires have melted away, to save themselves.

  Our sister battalions have not been so lucky.

  Battalion 28 has suffered terribly in the initial mortar barrage on Samuel the Prophet Street. Their companies, advancing toward the Rockefeller Museum, have lost many more in an ambush after taking a wrong turn in the dark between the Nablus Road and Saladin Street. Even now most of the battalion is pinned down by enemy fire from the Old City walls.

  In daylight, above Wadi Joz, I am standing with my radioman, Moshe Milo, when we see Yossi Yoffe, the commander of Battalion 66, come up to our battalion commander, Uzi Eilam. Yoffe’s face is black from burns and dirt. He speaks privately to Uzi. From the two commanders’ grim postures it is clear that each is asking the other about their battalion’s respective casualties. How many men have you lost this night?

  Battalion 66’s sector of responsibility was immediately north of ours. Their assignment was to assault the Jordanian Police School and the enemy positions atop Ammunition Hill. We in Battalion 71 will not learn till evening of the hand-to-hand struggle for that objective and of the terrible slaughter that went on for hours in those trenches.