of the pilots’ letter—“the Air Force 28,” and used the loss of my father, Zvi Spector, at sea with twenty-three commandos who sailed to fight the Nazis, to humiliate me. The public followed through, and all kinds of people I never knew called me and sent faxes. My mailbox at home as well as my e-mail boxes began filling with trash. After some time I gave up and began separating out my utility bills and throwing everything else away.
But all the trouble of that time was nothing in comparison to the moment when my daughter Noah asked me, wide-eyed like the small girl she was, “Daddy, are you a refusenik? Is that what you have taught us?” My face fell.
“There’s no better way to wake up than a good slap in the face,” my father would have taught me, had I a father and not a shadow drowning nightly in my dreams. So I had to learn this lesson by myself.
So I stood in front of her, shocked, and tried to find something to say. And some noise probably came out of me, since my wife, Ali, raised her head from her book.
“What’s the matter?” And when she saw the look on my face, she noted, “Sour? Never mind, sour is piquant.” With all her exquisite delicacy, Ali can be pretty tough.
Noah rose angrily to my defense. “Mom, stop it! Don’t you see how bitter it is for Dad?”
“Bitter?” said Ali with a smile. At that time she was translating the cookbook
It took me time to realize how right she was.
So I had to answer her. My thoughts over Noah’s question were so painful that I even had moments from visions in the night, fear and trembling came upon me—when I wondered whether my refusal to take part in immoral and unlawful deeds was not in itself an immoral and unlawful deed. And so, wandering among the rooms in the small hours of the night, confused, washing my face with cold water, I even played out a little drama of reformation. It was so easy. I just had to enter the air force command post. Then I would say wide-eyed, with a disarming smile, “Forgive me, gentlemen. I was wrong. Just a passing whimsy. So sorry!”
And in this context, would you believe, I fully understood the meaning of faith and repentance. Uh, the security within the system. All the difficult aspects of my life—responsibility, authority, guilt—evaporated into space like purple clouds of hashish. Hear, hear, they are accepting me back into the angels’ choir. They are going to let me start the engines of the Fouga trainer. My name is going to be cleared, my family relieved of their agony, the aching knot in my gut loosened, and peaceful sleep will visit every night.
A moment later, when I saw my face in the mirror, I burst out with such a laugh that Ali rushed to the bathroom to see what had happened to me.
ABOUT THIRTY-FIVE YEARS before those difficult days related above, I was a fighter pilot in the Fighting First and found myself in a situation that seemed hopeless. I was caught alone in the heart of Egypt, between two enemy jet fighters, and my Mirage was flying on empty. The MiGs kept diving on me, trying over and over to shoot me down as I struggled to stay alive. This unequal contest continued with no end in sight. The moment came when I lost all hope of getting out alive and free.
And at that moment, exactly when I began sinking into despair and was about to lose my fighting spirit, there arose from nowhere a short sentence, only three words, that I have been cherishing since then like a mantra.
The words were “All from inside.”
Which means, “Listen well, Iftach Spector. It all depends on you. The question is only what is inside you, how worthy you are.”
And this is the whole story.
2
December 1960
ON A BRIGHT BLUE DAY flooded with sun and the freezing wind of mid-December 1960, five newly minted second lieutenants arrived at the Scorpions fighter squadron, Air Base Hatzor, in the south of Israel.
We climbed the four stairs up to the balcony of our new home, carrying on our backs rucksacks full of flight gear, and halted on the wide and empty balcony. Five doors, painted yellow, were shut. Nobody was there to welcome us.
The Israeli Air Force at that time had six fighter squadrons plus several transports and a few helicopters. That was it, and it was still a hell of an air force. Only five months before, every last one of its pilots—all in all, a few dozen—had crowded into the officers’ mess at Tel Nof Air Base for a party to celebrate our wings, get us drunk on disgusting medicinal cognac, and hoist us from the pool table to the ceiling. Fifteen graduates we were, a large bunch in those days, and we punched fifteen holes in the rotten planks of the ceiling. The officers’ mess, an old barracks left over from the RAF during the time of the British Mandate in Palestine, was spacious enough to hold the whole Israeli Air Force and even Yalo, a robust fighter pilot with blue eyes and a clownish bent, who made us bunny hop with all the girls at the party till our starched khaki shirts with the new wings above the left chest pocket were drenched with sweat and were taken off and thrown aside. The cement tiles buckled under our feet as we danced the Horah. Before morning, we had overturned the tables and broken the chairs, so our training as Israeli fighter pilots was complete.
AMONG THOSE SIX fighter squadrons, the Scorpions were the top of the heap. Two years earlier, the Scorpions had dethroned the senior squadron, the glorious Fighting First Fighter Squadron, with her aging Mystere aircraft. Only the Scorpions were lucky enough to receive the new jet, the crowning achievement of the French aviation industry, the Super Mystere. Even as air cadets we had dreamed of the Super Mystere. Unlike its elder brothers, the Ouragan and the Mystere, which looked like Dutch uncles, the Super Mystere had a menacing presence. It had the face of predator. Under its nose was a giant elliptical mouth, and inside the aircraft’s guts roared a huge jet engine full of power, with an afterburner. The Super Mystere was a large and beautiful aircraft, with elongated lines like a viper. It also flew well, breaking the sound barrier in level flight. In addition, it could achieve fifty thousand feet—seventeen vertical kilometers from Earth. We were told that the sky at that height— above most of the atmosphere—is almost black, and that if one trains his eyes well enough one could see the stars in broad daylight.
This was the ultimate aircraft, and this was the Scorpions, the new spear point of the Israeli Air Force.
Everybody knew that the Scorpions accepted only the
So we trembled there in the cold wind, proud and glad, and looked around.
On the tarmac in front of us sat five large, beautiful Super Mysteres. Their crystal canopies hung over their open cockpits, as if hovering in the air. The shining Plexiglas sparkled in the morning sun. Each of the aircraft sported two round, plump fuel tanks that peered at us from beneath the wings, their tips bulging like aroused
