Loud and Clear

“Yes, sir!” I was pretty proud of myself.

“For your information, you made a mistaken identification. The ship was one of ours.”

What?

For a moment I thought this was just an ugly joke. But David Ivry—a man who later became commander of the Israeli Air Force—was not the joking kind. I saw from his face that he was not kidding. I was stunned. I needed time to pull myself together.

I let my flight gear slip to the ground and left the room. I climbed up the stairs and found myself on the outside balcony, darkness before my eyes even though it was full daylight. I ended up somehow at the end of the building, across from the restrooms. I entered and locked the door behind me. There, sitting on the bowl, I put my head against the cool tiles and tried to think.

I thought I had brought disaster on everyone. It was certain. I was there, I saw the hits. How could I fuck up like that? I tortured myself, convincing myself that yes, I had seen a red “X” on white background there, and surely there had been an Israeli flag flying from that mast.

What gotten into me? What had I done?

Here, in the restroom of the Fighting First, I lived the last moments of my former life. I knew that in a short time, within minutes, the windlass of fate would begin to turn, crushing me and all I had in the world, my dear Ali and my three-year old son, Etay, my mother, and my foster parents from the Galilee. What would they all say? What would everybody who knew and raised me say? What would my friends who were fighting and shedding their blood just then, think of me? What had I done to my squadron, my Fighting First? I had shot up my friends, fact. There is no way I can live in this country anymore.

Plans began rushing around my head. Perhaps I should commit suicide? But how to do it, and where? Or maybe flee to America, Australia, or Brazil? How to sneak unseen out of this room, change clothes, change my name? All sorts of crazy thoughts, some practical and some fantastic, ran though my mind, and even one important thought, that before anything else, I had to get my wingman out of this mess. After all, he was only following me.

INSIDE THE FOG IN MY HEAD, I heard voices coming from the outside. I heard somebody calling my name again and again. Doors banged open and closed. Then Ivry was there, standing in front of the door to the men’s room.

“Spector, are you in there?”

“I’m here,” I answered after he shook the door.

“There was a mistake; that ship was not one of ours. Come out of there!”

I got up and went out. “Whose ship was it then?”

“French.”

I collected my flight gear. Before dusk I was scrambled again to patrol over the Suez Canal. The ship was still there, farther out to sea.

ONLY LATER DID I LEARN that this was not a French ship either, but an American spy vessel, the USS Liberty. How did she get there? What was she doing there? All that was none of my business, and the thing was totally suppressed during the flights and fighting that came after. A few weeks after the Six-Day War was over, an investigating committee came from the United States and I gave a deposition. I told them what I have said here, and answered their questions in my high school English. When I left the interrogation room into the light of day, the issue was closed as far as I was concerned, and I gave it no further thought. Another sad event, neither the first nor the last of its kind. In war, mistakes happen.

A decade later I learned that a conspiracy theory was being advanced about the attack on the USS Liberty. One day a friend came in and put before me a copy of Penthouse magazine. Enormous tanned tits stared at me as I began leafing through it curiously; one didn’t find such pictures in Israel.

“No, not that.” He pointed out an article. “Read this.”

I read. There was a long and interesting story that claimed Israel had attacked the Liberty on purpose. Israel, according to this article, decided to attack the Liberty to silence it, and prevent the ship from discovering Israel’s plans, such as capturing the Golan Heights. The reasoning seemed odd to me, but the story was well written, and I enjoyed reading it.

“You were there,” asked my friend. “Could this be true?”

Initially, I chuckled and dismissed the whole thing as ridiculous. But then I stopped and began thinking again. I recalled the voice that spoke to me on the radio, ordering me to attack. Had he known something he didn’t tell me? I sank in a sea of question marks.

I thought, “All in all, I was just the tip of the spear. It’s the point that pierces for sure, but it’s just a dumb point. I was manipulated by somebody from a distance.”

My friend kept looking at me, and I didn’t know what to say. As a tool, how could I tell whose hand manipulated me, and what its intentions were? Was I deceived and sent to shoot up a friendly American ship? Did they cheat Ivry, too, telling him the ship was French? For a moment I was really confused.

Then I remembered the simple fact that the Liberty had carried no signs or flags clear enough for two sharp-eyed fighter pilots to discern (and after us, several other pilots, and a number of capable sailors who soon arrived on the scene hadn’t seen anything either). So if there was a conspiracy, which in my opinion is nonsense, it had to come from the Liberty herself.

When I remembered that the Liberty did not identify herself, it cleared up the issue, because neither I nor any other Israeli pilot would have attacked a ship—even a military vessel—that flew an American flag, or for that matter British, French, Chinese, Upper Volta, Schleswig-Holstein, or the flag of the kingdom of the Martians.

I have no idea what this ship was doing there, in the middle of a war, and why she couldn’t have been tapping into our communications from a little farther out to sea. In any case, if there was no conspiracy, there was certainly a mistake. Somebody on the Liberty stuck his ship into a forbidden and dangerous place. And while he was there, he didn’t do his job: He didn’t fly a visible flag, didn’t respond in any way to our calls for identification, and didn’t signal to our jets when we circled him for long minutes. If he had gotten on deck and sent up a flare—any color would have done the trick—or just waved a white sheet, I would not have fired on him.

This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in the affair of the USS Liberty, as far as I know and remember it. And I pray for the souls of those American sailors who perished or who were injured or maimed through no fault of their own.

EVERY WAR IN THE HISTORY of mankind is full of killings of innocents. “The aircraft, the ultimate weapon that can reach everywhere, appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, when technology upped killing capabilities to levels unseen before,” taught Maj. Yehuda Massad, the chief ground instructor in the flying school. He gave me a thin black book and ordered me to summarize it and prepare a lecture for class. Such lectures were the academic summit and the final exam in our education as officers.

The name of the book he gave me was Command of the Air, and the writer was Giulio Douhet. Armed with my kibbutz English, I toiled the whole weekend on that book. I found that Douhet was an Italian general and that he had developed a complete theory of war. His idea was that airpower was the most effective of all war measures. “A war can be won,” said Douhet, “by airpower alone.”

Since I was planning to become a pilot, this was interesting.

Armies and navies, said Douhet, were nothing but a waste of resources. All they could do was crawl around on the surface nose to nose and grind each other down endlessly.

“But nowadays”—the book was from 1927—“we have the capacity to build large bombers.” Immediately after the outbreak of war, these bombers should pass over the front lines and attack deep in the enemy’s rear what he called “targets of value”: cities, population centers, intersections of transportation and railway junctions, water and electricity installations, plants and factories—in short, the entire infrastructure, public and private. These all were civilian targets, manned by noncombatants. For these aerial attacks the “most efficient” means shall be used,