eucalyptus trees, feeling the clean cloth of my flight suit on my skin, and seeing the pearls of dew glittering on the lawns.
One by one we gathered near Hatzor’s old cinema and waited for the truck to take us down to the Fighting First. Then came a morning full of action and light, working with young men and fast aircraft that smelled of burned gasoline. This smell was sweet in our nostrils. In the afternoon, after debriefing two or three training flights, the workday was over. Only the men on duty remained in the squadron building, preparing to sleep in full gear with their boots on, and everybody else searched for a lift back home to base housing. We usually got home before sunset.
The world was an orderly place, and step by step we settled in. We skimped and saved on my military salary and Ali’s work as a typist. Her mother, Jenny, helped us buy our first car, a blue Citroen Deux Chevaux, well used, and soon I found myself lying under it on Saturdays, greasing, changing oil, installing lamps. In the nearby town of Gedera we got seeds and planted a large garden behind the house: tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, green onions, lines of dill and parsley for our own salads. I built a hut from planks of wood I found in base salvage, and creepers with bottle gourds, good for drying out and making into artifacts, soon covered it. I began flirting with painting. I painted aerial landscapes that soon became abstracts. I couldn’t get rich colors, so I used hued white toothpaste. With it, I dotted carpets of shining points over a black velvety surface, and created a vista of the breathtaking coast, hovering in oblivion, as seen coming home from a training flight on a dark night far away over the sea. But after a while the toothpaste absorbed moisture and disintegrated, and the pictures were lost.
On one summer Saturday we succeeded in getting a military pickup truck—a great coup—and the three of us drove north to Kibbutz Afikim, on the Sea of Galilee. There, in the salvage of the kibbutz’s plywood factory, we loaded the car with a huge slice of a tree trunk prepared for us by Aki. After lunch with Aki’s family in the kibbutz’s public dining room, and a swim in the Kinneret, we drove back to Hatzor, the pickup swaying under the enormous weight. It was two hundred kilometers of bad road to Hatzor.
We placed the wooden slice on our lawn, among the blue eucalyptus trees, and used it as a large outside table. We hung over it a lamp I made out of a burning jar taken from a jet engine I found in the dump. On this round table we feasted occasionally on Friday nights with our friends Nissim and Etty, Sam and Rana Khetz, Judy and Ilan. Mossik was dead by then. He was killed in an accident.
These were wonderful evenings, with every couple bringing a dish from their small kitchen, and the kids romping on the grass. When the children fell asleep, we put them to bed and continued the evening in one of the apartments, cracking sunflower seeds and chatting into the night, the men with the men and the women with their own interests. By today’s standards we were miserably poor, but that’s how it was for everybody. Our lives were on a small island detached from the world, where jet engines roared day and night until we no longer noticed them. Sometimes we went off base to the short main street of Gedera, to dine at Auntie Leah’s, a shabby roadside inn run by a grumbling old woman, to chew shreds of burned rubber with onion that she insisted was steak.
The greater world around us became French, and Paris was its center. The lingo changed, and the accent. The American hits that had melted our hearts in the fifties on Radio Ramallah from Jordan (“Caroline Husseini sends her wishes to Diana Nashashibi, on her birthday, with Paul Anka in ‘Diana’”) were replaced by the hoarse, smoked humor of Charles Aznavour, the sophistication of Montaigne and Edith Piaf, the lyrical choir Compagnon de la Chanson.
Ali was ready to invest a full month’s salary to see Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petite performing in the Hall of Culture in Tel Aviv. When we managed to get places for Maurice Bejart with “The Rite of Spring” and “Bolero,” we both felt on top of the world and couldn’t sleep the whole night after. Money was scarce, and we stood with empty pockets eyeing mouth-watering miracles such as the newly introduced pizzas, hamburgers, or whipped Italian ice cream dispensed from a machine.
At that time there was still no television in Israel, and on Saturday evenings we all gathered and danced with romantic lighting around the record player, necking in the dark to the sounds of the Platters and the Golden Guitar, coming with “My Prayer.”
NOT THAT THERE WERE NO security issues. The Syrians kept shooting at us, and even tried to divert the source of the Jordan River to dry us out. There was a lot of rapid arming of our aircraft, many ready alerts, and a lot of scrambling aloft. One time I was scrambled with a four-ship formation of Ouragans, loaded with bombs to hurry north to attack the Syrians. On the way I heard Goldie’s voice on the radio—he had led four Mysteres and hit the Syrian post Khamra at the source of the Dan, a major tributary of the Jordan River. Before we could get there, too, we were called back, to our great frustration. On another occasion some Super Mysteres—Nissim and Umsh were in the bunch—had an inconclusive scuffle with some MiGs. All such events excited us. We young pilots all hoped to get a piece of the action.
We Mirage pilots had our special dream: MiGs. Every one of us was praying to his God that his MiG would appear, the one designated just for him. But at the end, one day of training followed another, and the important fight was that of the next morning, against the one comrade who shall be set against you. The wars of the mid- 1960s were still in the future. The days were fair, nice days of the end of autumn, before the storms came.
Only at headquarters in Tel Aviv serious men sat, watching with somber eyes the Arab military buildup. They felt the sky darkening; they planned and worried. And somewhere in Tel Aviv, in his apartment, Yak was turning over restlessly in bed, sleep elusive. He drew from his stormy brain various ideas—some of them a bit crazy—and proposed them to his superiors, endangering his reputation and status.
At the end he stood before the commander, Ezer Weizman, and presented him with the answer.
AND JUST LIKE THE SHOWERS of an early autumn, a small series of air battles and victories began. Each case was single, as if it were the last one. When the first ever shooting down of a MiG-21 occurred, an Israeli Mirage of the Fighting First, my squadron, did it. It happened on July 14, 1966, Bastille Day.
I was in Paris then. I met there with Peel, nicknamed Elephant, a friend from the squadron. We both were in Paris on our way back to Israel, after short courses abroad, and luckily we happened to be there on the French national holiday.
We wandered, happy and excited, on the sidewalks of Boulevard Houseman, among a large and colorful crowd streaming toward the Champs-Elysees to watch the grand military parade. Loudspeakers on the chestnut trees trumpeted military marches. We were dizzy. Paris was colorful, noisy, and tempting.
In front of the supermarket Prisunic, a small gathering crowded around a couple of hippies, a young man and a woman, who painted flowers on the ground and collected donations. Passersby threw centimes for them. In Israel you didn’t see things like that. After watching, I told Peel, “I can paint better than those two.”
Exactly at that time the music stopped, and a loud voice broke out over the loudspeakers, speaking with great excitement. The entire crowd froze and listened. The speaker got enthusiastic and shouted in a high-pitched, breaking voice, and suddenly everybody around began to yell and whistle. They all jumped up and down, cheered, waved their hands, hugged, and yelled. We looked around, amazed. We could identify a familiar word—“Mirage”— over and over, but it made no sense. We looked at each other. What did all this mean? Was it a joke? What was the big deal? And all the time the hoarse voice kept shouting, “Mirage! Mirage!”
“Le Mirage is a French-made fighter,” they informed us, “and the MiG-21 is the best of the Soviet industry.”
“It’s ours! A French fighter did it!” yelled a man in a fancy suit.
“Not an American!” cried his wife, and he spun her in a dance. Everybody around jumped and applauded. “On Bastille Day!”
Peel and I looked at each other in amazement. Who made the kill, the French? Bullshit, it was us!
“Paint it!” roared the Elephant, and so our demonstration began.
I grabbed the box of chalk from the surprised hippies and began stretching fat yellow lines along the walkway. The crowd backed under the physical pressure of the Elephant, whose name reflects his bodily measurements, and left us an elliptical space of ten or fifteen meters.
Soon the lines of the long bodies of the fighters were drawn on the pavement; the MiG in front with the Mirage sitting on his tail. I didn’t bother much with scenery and clouds; general outlines were enough. On the other
