hand, the aircraft were painted in great detail. I spotted the Syrian MiG with brown and black and green, but the Mirage’s skin glowed white and silver.
Big drops began falling from the clouds above us, but the gathering around us grew and grew. I drew from the Mirage’s nose a line of yellow chalk stars hitting the MiG’s fuselage. Yellow and red fire broke out with a black trail of smoke. After some thought, I drew an ejection seat from the burning cockpit, with a small pilot sitting in it.
“Mustache, mustache!” somebody in the crowd cried, and immediately a whole bunch of people joined in. The Elephant, ever responsive to the demands of the people, snatched a piece of chalk and drew on the Syrian’s helmet a large black mustache, bristling in the wind. The mob cheered and applauded, women shrieked for joy, and when I added blue and white David stars on the tail and wings of the Mirage, the money began flying and covered the picture. Our hippies hopped around us and collected notes and silver in their hats and squeezed them into their backpack.
“We could have asked for a commission, at least,” Peel scolded me when we pushed in to watch the multicolored French parade. Our work of art was already washed from the pavement by the rain, lost to humanity forever. “At least we could squeeze them for a good dinner, don’t you think? And not couscous again. Did you ever hear of Maxim’s?”
I shrugged. All I wanted was to return to the squadron and get my own MiG.
7
Savage
ONE MORE IMPRESSIVE PERSON squeezed into my life in the last months before June 1967. This was the extraordinary pilot and commander Ran Pecker.
On January 1, 1967, I was posted to the Bats—a sister Mirage squadron—together with eight other pilots of my age group who had been gathered from the rest of the fighter squadrons. We were sent there for two months to take an advanced aviation course called the senior leadership program (BBN for short). This squadron’s exceptional commander, Ran, impressed me greatly, as he did the whole air force in the coming years.
The Bats was the newest among our three Mirage squadrons. It was stationed at the large base of Tel Nof, and was tasked—besides all the normal missions—with intelligence-gathering over enemy countries. The reconnaissance flights were secret, of course, but everybody knew that the Bats were crossing borders. It was the only squadron in which pilots endangered their lives almost daily. They flew deep over Egypt and Syria and brought back pictures of airfields, army units, bridges, and all kinds of installations. Their photos were making the rounds to us in the other squadrons, with the notation “taken on the date of…” When we filed those photographs in our target packages we could only guess which of our friends in the Bats had taken it because they would never tell.
Ran was already a legend. As a fighter pilot, and especially as a leader, he was the best of the best. He wasn’t an ivory tower intellect developing theories, like Yak, nor did he have an analytical mind, like Ephraim. But he was energetic and daring, a charismatic, open man who had learned the Mirage well and who knew how to wring out of it all it had for speed, maneuvering, and range. The frequent reconnaissance operations connected him, a young lieutenant colonel, directly and daily with the gods: the air force commander, the chief of intelligence, the IDF’s chief of staff, the minister of defense, and the prime minister. They all saw him frequently, and soon his name was known all over the country. He knew everyone personally, and everyone knew him. His close friends, his houseguests, were the top military men who commanded brigades and armor and paratroop corps, the leaders of special units, politicians, and spooks.
Shortly before the opening of our course, Ran had shot down a Jordanian British-made Hawker Hunter in a dogfight that, befittingly, had to have been the hardest and most dangerous in the whole history of the air force. Under his command, the Bats shone. His subordinates admired him. Other squadron commanders couldn’t hide a bit of jealousy.
This was the man on whose office door we knocked.
A MAN SAT BEHIND A TABLE leafing through papers. His hair was dark blond, and on the white wall behind him hung a piece of art: a rusty triangular piece of iron, a broken blade of an Arab plow made into a Mirage silhouette.
Ran looked at us. His sharp, piercing stare was immediately replaced by a big smile, and he jumped from his seat and rounded the table to shake our eight hands. He overpowered us with captivating, physical warmth. He was not a particularly tall or large man, but on every occasion all eyes swung to him, and every ear listened to his hoarse, ringing voice. For me, this was the second time I met this rare human phenomenon of vibrant leadership, and at such volume. The first time was with my classmate at Givat-Brenner Daniel Vardon, the boy who could animate hundreds of schoolchildren and their teachers. Vardon owned this magic until, on June 8, 1967, he lost his life in the Six-Day War.
Ran also had plenty of this charisma. And right away, as we followed him to the briefing room to start the course, I noticed that all of us were imitating his sturdy, rocking gait, pushing our chests out like him. Even our voices sounded flattened, and we languished in his rolling, choking laughter.
HE PRESENTED US WITH an astounding agenda. We were going to visit all the important, secret installations and meet the key figures and leaders. We would visit and explore in detail the country and its borders. Divided into small teams, we would research and devise new combat techniques, and then fly and test them in the air. Our flights in the context of the course would not be confined to the regular air force limits. Suddenly we felt special, important.
And so it turned out. For the next couple of months Ran devoted himself and all his time and resources to our course. He opened his squadron to us as a guinea pig and research subject. In fact, he put the Bats at our disposal. And he kept his word—in the following weeks we lived in the eye of the storm, one event following another.
We were fascinated. When we went back to our homes on weekends, I went down to my own squadron, the Fighting First, and compared it to its younger sister, the Bats. True, my Fighting First also lacked nothing, but for some reason it looked faded and dusty. Sadly, I had to admit that though every category was okay—command, aircraft, technical support—and though one-on-one our pilots were no worse than the Bats’, the final product was somehow less convincing. Ran’s personality extracted from everybody living in his halo something extra, so that the whole was made greater than the sum of its parts. He set people in motion, he guided them, he criticized, he sometimes frightened them—he was always there. Even when he was not around, the Bats were his personification, vibrant and full of energy.
The studies were great, too. There I was exposed, for the first time, to serious discussions—led by excellent teachers—of how to run a military unit, command in battle, and lead warplanes to their targets. Colonel Motta Gur, a distinguished paratrooper who later became the IDF’s chief of staff, astonished us, urging us to stand behind our opinions and not give in, even within the chain of command, even when those ideas were rejected by our leaders.
Professors of psychology engaged us on the phenomenon of fear and discussed ways to deal with it. Senior civilian managers came to talk to us about their experience in personnel management.
Ran went nonstop. He strove to put us through every possible experience in the short time he had. Some days we flew or went traveling along the borders on foot and in jeeps. In the evenings we didn’t go home: he dragged us out (“You can sleep on Saturday,” he would say with a snarl) to join police patrols in the underworld of Jaffa, for a bowling lesson in Haifa, to take a sauna in Beer-Sheva, or for a fancy dinner on a ship in Haifa Harbor. Or he would send us to drag our wives out of the house and head together to the Singing Bamboo nightclub for an evening of dancing. Everything, everywhere, was free of charge. Everybody knew Ran and was glad to serve him, and we just blossomed in his shade. Only after midnight did we arrive home with ringing ears to read the stuff for tomorrow, prepare a project, write, or rehearse. Ran cast a spell on us all, and we all loved it.
In addition, there was the flying. Here also, promises were kept to the letter. We took off in twos and fours and went out to check the ideas and methods we invented. All the shooting ranges and training facilities were at
