When I finally shut down my engine and ran back to the ready room in the freezing night air, the search had already begun. The officer on duty counted us once and twice, talking nervously on the phone. Somebody was overdue. Who?
Our commander, Maj. Harry Barak, arrived from home, his big mustache wispy and the pleasant smile gone. Then other men arrived, and the ready room of the basic training squadron filled with noisy people. It was late when the last of us landed, the last engine coughed and choked in the line, and silence enveloped all. We cadets wandered about on the outside balcony, freezing, waiting. Finally somebody noticed us, and sent us to our rooms to get some sleep.
As we marched on the wet asphalt, Brutus nudged me with his elbow. “I fucked you over, eh?”
“What are you talking about, Brutus?” I asked. “Where the hell have you been?”
“For by wise deceit shall thou make thy war,” he answered me with his brutal sense of humor. “When you grow up, you will learn to switch your lights off at night, and you will not be seen. Why are you opening your baby blues at me?”
IN THE MORNING, we were called to the ready room.
We already knew that Khativa was missing. Outside, it was raining. All of us, all the Harvard squadron’s instructors and students, were pressed into the small briefing room, whispering.
“Attention!”
The air force commander, Gen. Ezer Weizman, strode in, followed by our base commander, the school commander, and many others we didn’t know. The number of big brass squeezed inside the room that morning was greater than our number. The floorboards creaked.
Only Weizman spoke. It was evident that when he talked, others shut up.
“Cadets, has anyone here done night acrobatics?”
Our instructors squinted at us. Our commander, Major Harry, looked at us, his mustache twitching. Colonel Shieh, the flight school commander, kept shifting from leg to leg. We knew that death and life lay in the power of the tongue. We kept silent.
“Sheani Junior, on your feet!” Weizman already knew our names.
Uri got up, stretching his short, stout figure.
“Did you do acrobatics?”
“No, sir!”
“Spector?”
“Not me, sir!”
The general turned to the instructors, to our commanders. They all shook their heads no. Some kept their eyes on the floor.
“Is there anybody here who wants to say something?” For the first time, a tone of hesitation was heard in that energetic voice. Nobody answered.
Weizman waved his hand: “All right. Officers, all of you, out of the room. Leave me alone with the cadets.”
After Weizman gave us his word of honor that what we said would stay in the room forever, and that no action would be taken, we broke our silence. And the general kept his word.
That day and in that room, we buried Air Cadet Khativa. Nothing was ever found of his body or his aircraft. Seemingly they joined the silent flotilla in which my father’s boat sails. But his parents, whom we were sent to visit all ironed and polished, were never really told why their son died.
6
Bastille Day
THE AIR FORCE WAS A GREAT PLACE, but it was not heaven. True, the majority of us could be called good guys, but there were exceptions. One of these was a classmate at flight school. Let’s call him Hal.
Hal was a very good-looking young man, and girls were crazy about his fair hair, his oily-brown eyes, and the polite, smooth sound of his voice. In our own eyes—his fellow cadets in the class—Hal seemed simply a sycophant. The trouble was that soon other qualities, much more repulsive, were apparent in him.
It began with his habit of disappearing in the evenings on his own business instead of working on his studies. There were many exams in flight school, and so on the morning of the test Hal would appear and suck up to people, looking for someone he could copy from. In flight school of that day, a code of honor was expected from the students. True, that code was not always observed; in one of the previous classes, students were caught stealing advance copies of tests. And there was even a case of one student who tried to cheat on a flight examination. But as a rule, people could tell right from wrong.
Hal, on the other side, had no moral compass. He didn’t hesitate to get us all in trouble. You could try to evade him, but nothing helped. He would rub himself against you and finally take a seat next to you and begin winking. The moment the examiner left the classroom, you felt a hand on your knee or a paper ball landing between your shoulders, and Hal’s voice whispering in your ear. If you turned away from him, he might even raise his voice and demand the answers from you, calling you a coward and guilty of “betrayal of comradeship.”
Besides being a nuisance, Hal was selfish and a liar. His word was worth exactly nothing. In short time, we all hoped that this guy would wash out of our class. Unfortunately for us, it seemed he was not going away. He flew well, as far as we knew. At least that is what he told us, bragging how he “gave lessons” to his instructor. Among the base personnel he had many, ever-changing girlfriends, and they passed around bizarre stories of how he, with his courage and wit, saved his aircraft and landed safely with a fainting flight instructor. At the end we gave him a ridiculous nickname: the Perfect Pilot. Those girls, who had many times defended him, began to tell about nasty things he had done, some financial and others uglier still.
In short, if in the beginning we were just chuckling about “Hal’s pranks,” the more we came to know him, the more he annoyed, repelled, and shamed us. When we were still many in number, and four or five boys crowded in each room in the barracks, a volunteer was needed to share a room with Hal. His personality became such a social distraction, that evenings before going to sleep, you could hear in each of the rooms, discussions not of the eternal subjects among our kind of young men—girls and flying—but about “the Hal question.”
One of the evenings we all got together to discuss this issue seriously. Hal was not there; as usual, he had disappeared after dusk.
First there were the usual discussions, and somebody asked, “Can this guy be the image of the Israeli pilot?” This question put the argument on a higher level. Others said, “Can we trust a guy like this? Can we go to war with him?”
Some criticized our instructors and commanders. Why couldn’t they sense what type of person they were dealing with here? And then one of us stood and said, “Enough complaining. The responsibility rests with all of us here. If class thirty-one resents Hal that much, it’s our duty to act and bring about his dismissal from the air force.”
