Around it stuck several inscriptions in English. I read them.
“Well, what’s up with you, Spector?” brayed my earphones. “Is your compass US or is it not US? Huh?”
Sweating, I corkscrewed myself back to daylight, yelling, “No, sir, it says ‘Made in England’!”
The aircraft and the whole world froze in the air. A hoarse whisper bellowed, “Ohhhhhh, what an asshole!”
We landed. Before I brought the Harvard to a full stop, the flight instructor jumped out of it and went contemptuously to the file room. I knew what he was going to write. I shut the engine and dragged, beaten and dejected, to ask my comrades. They shrugged. Finally Yakir appeared. As usual, he knew everything. “US? What’s the problem? The meaning of ‘US’ is ‘Unserviceable,’ out of order.” And then he rubbed salt in the wound, asking, “How could you not know that, Spike? Everybody knows that.”
SOON WE CADETS WERE SHOWING OFF with this jargon. It smelled like hundred-octane gas to us, and we practiced pronouncing its words with harsh facial expressions, spitting them from the side of the mouth, like Humphrey Bogart. You croaked “contact,” and for a moment you were Jack Robinson scrambling in his Spitfire against the “Boshes” together with Tom, Dick, and Harry Barak.
After we got our wings our pidgin language was enriched with the perfume of Chanel No. 5.
“
“
In the Scorpions they didn’t admire this colorfulness. They demanded we fly speaking only our national language.
THERE WAS ANOTHER EXCEPTIONAL characteristic of the Scorpions: everybody worked hard, trying to establish order and discipline. At noon after the day’s flights had ended, Capt. Giora Furman would assume command, and ground-school studies begin. We learned and relearned and then were tested on the minutest details of the body and engine of the Super Mystere, its gunsight and electronic range finder. We were loaded with tactics, navigation, meteorology, and more. Industriousness and discipline reigned in the Scorpions.
The best personal example was set by Lt. Rami Harpaz. He was a kibbutz kid who demanded of himself that he knew everything. Another self-taught genius was Ephraim Ashkenazi. He had taught himself engineering and sciences. For some time I was received as Ephraim’s guest in his room, with the condition that I turn my face to the wall when Lilly, an energetic, slender girl soldier, came to visit.
At night I woke and saw him through a split in my blanket. He sat, sunk in books and notebooks, filling them with drawings and graphs. At that time computers didn’t exist, but Ephraim’s natural talent for mathematics was such that in a few years he revealed a serious error in the calculations of the French engineers in the gunsight of the Mirage fighter aircraft. Ephraim fixed their mistake using only paper and a pencil.
This accomplishment was historical: until then the Mirages—which had replaced the Super Mysteres as interceptors—couldn’t hit anything. Their cannon rounds always missed the MiGs, and the MiGs always got away. Only after Ephraim’s solution did the Mirages become lethal.
So if Yak taught us how to get into firing position, it was Ephraim who enabled us to hit our targets. One cannot overemphasize the contributions of these two exceptional men to the fact that the IAF shot down hundreds of MiGs in the next twenty years.
Surrounded by supportive people, I opened up, stopped being so closed, so defensive. Slowly a new rule of life ripened in me. Initially I just felt it building up, but in time it phased itself into two words that stayed with me: “always positive.”
There was much to be admired in the Scorpions. In 1960 this squadron was a very serious outfit. It was the most professional of all the squadrons, working hard on the science of battle.
SUCH AN APPROACH WAS THE EXCEPTION in the early days of the Israeli Air Force. At that time, flying fighter planes was considered by many as an adventure rather than a profession. Flight instructors and formation leaders took their students down for mock attacks on trains, and buzzed vehicles on the roads. So when they were on their own, the students did the same thing. On one occasion I was taking a senior pilot back home. On the way he asked for the controls of the Stearman biplane, and taught me the way a father teaches his son how to fly under power lines, as “any pilot worthy of the name” should do. On the way back to Hatzor, I flew low in the Izreel Valley and brought home strips of corn straw wound around my propeller and wheels, smelling of the perfume of the fields.
Only in cases where things got too crazy—for example, when somebody once dove his Stearman on a helicopter carrying the air force commander—was some punishment meted out, but nothing too harsh. A pilot who broke all the rules with an outrageous air show right over the base was fined ten Israeli pounds, but at the same time was patted on the shoulder by his commander as a sign of manly appreciation. A few days later, in a second show, this pilot hit the ground.
We were working in an environment characterized by many so-called accidents-in-training. When somebody spoke about rules and regulations, he would get a flippant response: “Well, are we pilots or college professors?” The more sophisticated among us had more elaborate rationalizations, such as, “The security of the state demands it!” Or, in other words, to prepare ourselves properly to defend our country, we pilots had to train in outrageous ways.
We bought into this bullshit readily. Knowing the law, we violated it all the time. We loved to fly, and no one protested against the confusion of high-performance flying with hooliganism in the air.
THIS IS HOW THE NIGHT ACROBATICS scandal happened. While in the flying school, in the ground class before night flying, we were introduced to a pilot’s worst enemy: the loss of spatial orientation, the lethal “vertigo.”
Vertigo lurks in the darkness to drive pilots into the ground. Without proper references outside the cockpit—at night, or in bad weather—it is a constant danger for pilots of any experience. Aerobatics or extreme maneuvers make a perfect recipe for such confusion.
The flight instructor concluded his lecture. He bent forward over his table and said with a hiss, “No radical maneuvers at night! You can get disoriented and crash. Get it?”
We, all the flight cadets, nodded.
“Write this down: ‘No night acrobatics under any circumstances!’”
We had already been flying for six months, and felt this order was pretty insulting, but he spoke so forcefully that we felt obliged to do as he said. He scrutinized us all.
“Did everybody write down what I said?”
Again we nodded. He seemed satisfied.
“Dismissed.”
We stood up. The instructor grinned a little, and suddenly said in low voice, “Only pussies don’t do night acrobatics.”
NIGHT WITH A FULL MOON. My first night flight.
Tsutsik, my instructor, took the controls, and off we went. We flew around the training areas. The air about us was full of light and shining; moonlight spilled over all like milk and lit the world white. I could see fields below us, brooks, canals, and trees. The roofs of the houses in the villages shone under the starred, almost pale blue skies. “What a night!” said my instructor with a growl like a bear.
“Bright as day,” I said.
“Let me show you something!”
He jammed the throttle forward, and the Harvard roared with all nine cylinders of its radial engine. Six
