radio with a large, transparent broken dial. All the air cadets used her present in turn, until one of us was caught and the thing was confiscated. Listening to the radio was not allowed on guard duty.
SHE WAS NOT ONE of my own kind.
In the evening she went to Shlomo and Adella Dgani’s room. They were Yekes—immigrants from Germany. At first I thought Shlomo and Adella were her parents. Then I learned that they had taken her into their home when she was four, after Otto Samuel, her father, was killed in 1948, and her mother, Jenny, fell seriously ill.
Shlomo and Adella Dgani (Feldblum) were different from us and even from how their own children turned out. In the Middle East, the Yekes were a strange community with different habits and a different language. They had high cultural aspirations and a deep longing to be somewhere else, in another climate, under a different sun. Most German Jews didn’t leave their lethal fatherland. They stayed and died. Those who came to Palestine remained chained to the culture and the language of their murderers. Most of them never could adapt to the melting pot that was Palestine, soon to be Israel.
Being aware of this conflict, I took measures. When finally the delicate adoptee of Shlomo and Adella invited me to their place, I was on my best behavior. I even washed my feet before putting my sandals on.
And there, surrounded by Yekes, I first came to know that miraculous powder, instant coffee. With the sure smile of a man of the world, I loaded a full spoon of the powder into the boiling water in my china cup. The powder shrank immediately and consolidated into a black, sticky ball that floated on the surface. I redoubled my stirring, but the damn ball refused to melt. Puzzled, I tried once or twice to push it down to the bottom and crush it with the spoon, but it was agile and evasive and resurfaced. Suddenly I realized that everyone was watching me with raised eyebrows, sipping their coffee seriously. I had to do something, and soon.
I trapped the slippery rubber lump between the spoon and the side of the cup, and gulped it. It leaped up, and fastened to my upper palate like bitter toffee, but red hot. In agony, I pointed to the white china pot in the middle of the table.
Adella hurried to hand it over to me.
“
I turned the pot over into my mouth, but the cursed milk stayed up there and never came out. It was the whipped cream they prepared for our five-o’clock meeting. Through a curtain of pain I saw the polite Yekes nodding at me gloomily. I replied with a stern nod of my own, my mouth tightly shut. Had I opened it even a crack, I would have breathed fire.
Sweet Ali and her brother Yair—he was the elder son of Shlomo and Adella—watched it all, bursting with cruel laughter. Those two enjoyed mostly slapstick humor, as when someone slipped on a banana peel and fell. I swallowed and ran out the door. Behind the house, among Shlomo’s well-groomed flowers, I found a hose and hurriedly put it in my mouth.
Yair Dgani was three years older than I. He was the best brother Ali could wish for, always looking after her, from the time she came to them from Tel Aviv. Yair was a hell of a guy. He played the clarinet, coached the girls’ basketball team, and later became a battalion commander in an armored division. Back in the kibbutz, he managed the carpentry shop. When we were children I used to give him a wide berth, for I feared his cynical humor.
Summer came. I arrived for a weekend, and Givat-Brenner was empty. It turned out she was sent for a summer program in another kibbutz. I heard a rumor she already had a boyfriend.
I TOOK COURAGE AND WROTE to her from the air base and asked if she would consider being my friend. After several long days a blue envelope came through the military mail. For two days I carried the envelope in my pocket unopened, and finally I tore its side bit by bit, like a girl plucking the leaves of a chrysanthemum. Somebody grinned above my shoulder. I turned around and saw ZBB; he knew beforehand.
THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT with enemy MiGs of our class’s graduates came very early, exactly four months after our first flight on the Super Mystere.
On April 28, 1961, I was put on alert. Suddenly the first pair scrambled, and right afterward my section went aloft, too.
“South, full power! This is for real! No drill!”
We raced south at full speed, Shimon Ash, the new commander who had replaced Yak, leading, and me bringing up the rear with my sixty flight hours on the aircraft.
Flying supersonic and with guns switched on, we arrived in the arena on the Egyptian border, but the dogfight had just ended. In the distance I saw a tiny white MiG-17 spinning in the air down toward the dunes. Suddenly a parachute sprouted and the aircraft hit the ground.
And then I saw a Super Mystere spinning, too, not far from the MiG. This was also the first real mission for my friend and comrade ZBB. But Zur kept his cool and pulled out of the spin. So the four of us got together and circled the defeated Egyptian pilot, swinging beneath his parachute.
Finally Ron, the leader of the first pair, said on the radio, “I’m going in to take out the pilot.”
Zorik’s angry voice broke into the communication channel, coming from the transceiver of the squadron in Hatzor, “No way! Leave the parachutist alone. All of you back home, on the double!”
The radar controller—he was the voice of the air force commander—didn’t utter a word. Shimon Ash apparently chose to obey his vice commander’s order. We left the Egyptian parachutist twisting in the air and came back to base. On the ground, an argument started.
Major Ash said, “I am not sure we did the right thing when we left that pilot. Tomorrow we will have to face him again.”
Captain Zorik was certain of his position. His green eyes flared in his round, speckled face, and he stood firm against his new commander with a restrained, polite voice. “Shimon, there are laws in the world. And there are things that one simply doesn’t do. One doesn’t shoot at people in parachutes.”
This was the first time I had heard a real, practical discussion of law and morality in war, and I didn’t know which of the two positions to adopt. Was I in favor of killing the fallen pilot? Or against it? At the end I chose to agree with Giora Furman’s response—he had a dry sense of humor, which ended the argument.
“Since we all will have to engage MiGs in the future, I, for one, prefer to fight this guy again. We all saw his performance.”
“True, especially since now he received one good lesson,” added Goldie.
And ZBB, who was in a funk for having put his plane into a spin, consoled himself by saying, “Let him share his experience with his friends.”
So the Scorpions registered her first downed MiG.
SOME NONOPERATIONAL FLIGHTS become the most serious of them all.
Saturday afternoon. The end of a spring day, and everyone was taking naps. That was life before 1967. But in the Super Mysteres’ hangar, hammers were banging away. The Scorpions had demanded that one more aircraft be serviceable for the next day’s training. Yawning, the technicians worked on. Finally, when the last screw was fastened and the sun was low in the west, the phone rang. I was called to test-fly aircraft number 35.
I took off into an empty sky. The Mediterranean spread endlessly before me, the red path in its center led to an orange sun. I turned north. The coast of Israel passed along my right-hand side. Gradually the land began to blur as a white layer of early summer clouds blew in. The sea on my left shone yellow and red. Here we were, just the three of us—the sun, me, and number 35—and we had the sky to ourselves.
What joy!
I got to forty thousand feet over the sea, north of Israel. Now I saw no sea anymore beneath me—just a white desert of clouds. This was the time to begin testing the engine, and I had to stop fantasizing about wonderful lands beyond the horizon.
First, check the afterburner. I moved the throttle forward, over the detent. A pause, then a choking sound—a sharp deceleration. I heard two loud bangs under me. I recoiled and throttled back. Then a whining sound, which slowly faded. Then the engine died.
At this altitude, forty thousand feet, it is impossible to restart a jet engine. One has to be at lower altitude, where there is more oxygen.
So I headed east, toward the coast. My Super Mystere glided slowly, the blanket of clouds streaming under
