“Is there a baby?” I asked suspiciously. At last they let me watch my newborn son through the glass. He looked like a tent peg, with his big head and the pointed small cylinder that was his body wrapped in cloth. We called him Etay, after the name of one of King David’s heroes. This also was the name of one of the children of the Admons, who adopted me for three years in Kibbutz Alonim.
After two days in the hospital, Ali returned home. There was much washing of cotton diapers, and nights with no sleep from his crying, and one fine morning I collided with another aircraft. We both crashed, but survived. Again I had thoughts whether this is not the place for me, but life had to go on, and the air force was the one place that wanted to pay me a salary. The studies had to be postponed for another year, and meanwhile we became a family and began to build a home. Our baby looked like an angel, fair-haired and round-faced. Zorik came to visit us. He marveled and praised the baby, and we were filled with pride and affection. Zorik was an expert on kids, as he himself told us.
ON DECEMBER 30, 1965, on the turn to my landing approach, the control tower asked me to go around again. I opened the throttle, and my small world exploded with a bang. My plane was engulfed in flames, and before I knew what happened, I found myself rolling in the air in my ejection seat, waiting for the parachute to open. I remember with absolute clarity that very brief moment, with my eyes closed and my mind coolly asking what had happened.
My parachute opened. I opened my eyes and there it was, my Super Mystere, still not far from me in a flat turn and trailing a long plume of fire. I saw it sinking toward a house in the near village—a great fear enveloped me—and then it missed the house, hit the field beyond, and burst into flames. Another swing in the air and I smashed into the mud like a sack of potatoes.
I lay on the wet ground, struggling to breathe through this pain in my chest, and thought, “Motherfucker, that Super Mystere went up like a torch!” And then, “What luck it didn’t fall on that house.” And suddenly I got the point: this fire… there was no way I could have caused it. “Well then, this time it is the aircraft’s fault, not mine. This time I was not guilty.” I groaned. That was not the case in my former bailout, after the aerial collision. Then I was guilty. And how.
And again I thought, “Ah, this time it was marginal! The parachute opened right at the minimum height, perhaps twenty meters above the ground. And if that’s true, then I ejected from the burning aircraft in the last split second. How did it happen so fast?”
I didn’t remember any thinking or any conscious decision when the fire boomed around me. I simply found myself outside. And while I was trying to get up, pushing the mud with my boots and exerting a lot of effort just to get to my knees, a strange idea came to my mind. Was it possible that my hands were “preset” to pull the seat’s handles?
Could it be that some “actions at threshold” are hidden in my limbs and muscles, waiting to be activated by danger even without any command from the brain?
And then I remembered something I had seen once on a bus. An elderly man stood in the aisle, carrying two baskets of groceries. Then the driver braked, and the old man fell on his face and lay full length on the floor. The amazing thing was that his hands kept hold of his baskets. Did this senior citizen forget to prepare the “action on threshold,” cocking the mechanism letting the baskets go and grabbing the post?
And then I wondered whether there might be other kinds of automatic mechanisms hidden in our subconscious, waiting to activate themselves in moments of need. And if so, what are these actions, and how do they know when to deploy? How had this reaction, which had just saved my life, been programmed and set to execute from somewhere deep in my body? Those thoughts amazed me. I thought, “Here is a serious matter to be learned.”
While I was still moaning with pain and amazement, I heard a loud whup-whup above. A helicopter came to take me for a medical examination.
Benny Peled, the commander of Hatzor Base, was waiting for me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said, and immediately went on, “Listen to what came to my mind, sir…”
Benny listened attentively. When I was done, he patted my shoulder. “I understand. You are going to Mirages. Report tomorrow to the Fighting First; they’ll give you a private conversion course.”
“But Benny, I’m planning to be released.” All that time we lived on borrowed time, saving money for the release. I still hoped to study medicine.
“Good. First do what you are told.”
And so I also got to fly the wonderful triangle, and the anatomy book went into the trash.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO FLY the Mirage for the first time? Namely, the primordial experience of encountering a new world…
Forget it; it’s no use. This is a cliche that turns up in every aviation book ad nauseam, beginning with George Berling’s
Then the standard continuation: a stanza of poetry follows, complete with the sounds of engine startup, and so on till the fake climax—fake because the real thing can’t get on the page. Initially the aircraft feels like a bucking bronco, but soon enough the writer wrests control over it and they fall in mutual love, the machine becoming “a part of him.” And if you are the romantic type like Pierre Closterman, you surely won’t stop there. You will tell about your last flight, how you looped and rolled your aircraft for the last time, and the tears filled your eyes in spite of all you could do when you were listening to the growl of the engine that carried you through the blah blah blah, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, this is exactly how it was between me and Mirage No. 82. She accelerated and climbed so fast and at such a steep angle that I indeed had to fight vertigo. This aircraft’s performance was really amazing—in acceleration, rate of climb, and top speed it still could rival today’s modern fighters, and it had some interesting innovations. And as in all the stories, after a few more flights I fell in love with the Mirage, and also in love with the Fighting First, which had renewed itself with this outstanding aircraft. And the Fighting First became my new home, my true home.
The Super Mystere had been my first love, but I never flew one again. The Scorpions were already a second line unit, and the archenemy wasn’t the MiG-17 anymore, but the fast and modern MiG-21, capable of twice the speed of sound, and the pinnacle of Soviet technology. The Super Mystere had changed from a racehorse to a plow mule. I knew I owed much to the Scorpions, but from that moment on I became a man of Mirages.
THE YEAR WAS 1966, and the air was charged with energy and uncertainty.
While we were looking inward, polishing our capabilities in aerial combat and ground attacks, the world around us hissed and bubbled. Revolutions took place everywhere. Every other week a new military coup in Africa. Charles De Gaulle withdrew France from NATO, and white Rhodesia was crumbling. Indira Gandhi was chosen prime minister of India. Nobel Prizes were awarded to the Israeli author S. Agnon and the poet Nelly Zakash. Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Chicago, and there were race riots in Michigan. Mao began the Cultural Revolution, and China spiraled into chaos. The Beatles—more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon proclaimed—gave “definitely the last concert” in San Francisco. Soviet Lunas landed on the Moon and Venus, while the Americans fought back with Gemini flights around Earth and space walks. A quarter million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, heavy American bombardments hit Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor, and the North Vietnamese declared full national mobilization. The first artificial heart was implanted in Houston, Texas. Turkey and Greece threatened one another over Cyprus. In Yemen, where an endless war dragged on, Egyptian bombers dropped poison gas. Every other week a plot against Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was unearthed. Executions took place in Al Mazza Prison, Cairo. A military coup in Syria, and the Baath Party, led by Jedid and Hafez Assad, took over the government. Syrian strongholds overlooking the Sea of Galilee shot down at Israeli fishermen. The Israeli-Syrian border heated up—and the days were still so fair.
I LOVED TO GET UP VERY EARLY in the morning, before sunrise. I washed and shaved quietly and quickly, and left our small housing apartment in silence, tiptoeing carefully in my flight boots so as not to wake up Ali and the baby. Outside, I stopped momentarily on the stairs, breathing the cool morning air laden with the scent of
