squadron briefing rooms and hopped about on the balconies. In military housing, women cleaned their homes and filled their refrigerators with new products from the grocery store.
Everyone was standing in line to use the phones, and the military telephone system crumbled under all the personal stories—who had done what in the war, and how he had done it. Then the voices were lowered for stock- taking—who was still alive and who wasn’t. In every gathering, people looked around to see who was there and who was gone. People were afraid that someone they expected would not show up, and then they’d be told about his death. And sometimes the opposite happened and the “dead” showed up, causing embarrassed laughter.
In spite of the pain—everyone in the country had lost either a friend, a relative, or a loved one—at that time, we experienced great joy and relief. From a country surrounded, whose neighbors had threatened it daily with extinction, we suddenly felt a great release. The enemy had melted before us like ice in the rays of the sun. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, resigned his office, and after changing his mind and taking office again, he executed his vice president, General Amer. Syria’s president Sallakh Jedid lost his job, and his days were numbered. Hussein, the king of Jordan, admitted in public that it had been a mistake to attack Israel.
Vast spaces were opened to us. In the beginning we called them the Conquered Areas, and then the name was changed to Liberated Areas. In the North, our planes danced in the air over the peaks of Mount Hermon and did aerobatics over the Golan Heights. And in the South lay the widest expanses. We made long navigation flights circling the whole Sinai Peninsula. We rejoiced in front of the black mountains of Santa Katarina and delighted over the long, colorful coral reefs that crowned Sinai’s long beaches of white sand dozing in emerald waters. And in the vast spaces of the Sinai I found something else.
On the fourth day of the war, I was attacking a retreating Egyptian convoy on a desert road, between the desert forts of Nakhl and Mittleh. During this flight I was on strict firing discipline. My wingman, Poraz, and I fired our guns meticulously, sending short bursts into tanks, trucks, and mobile cannons, setting them on fire and sending defeated soldiers scattering into the hot and dry hills. Poraz was already out of ammunition, and I was pulling my last bullets off their racks when the formation behind me called me on the radio.
“Armchair”—this was my call sign that day—“where exactly are you now?”
I had to vector him in so he could continue my work. I unfolded the map and began reading it, and finally I found a name over a long line that crossed the Sinai horizontally from the west to the east: “Darb el Hajj” was written above it. When I said these Arab words on the radio, I instantly realized that I knew these words from somewhere in my childhood. Yes, they had been written in longhand, with blue ink, on an old, lined page. But where?
On the long flight back I remembered. I saw this name Darb el Hajj, the road of the celebrators, in my mother’s father’s notebook. Nathaniel Tatar used this name when he told how he drove his cart on this way some fifty years before.
This was the second time I came down from the sky and walked in his faded footprints in the sand.
THE AIR FORCE CELEBRATED wildly. We were proud of the wings on our chests. It was we who had broken the stranglehold and removed the threat from our nation. We went nuts with festivals of victory, and indulged in massive singing and dancing.
But Ran Pecker’s Bats squadron outshone us all; it was the jewel in the crown of the air force. Its battle performance was above and beyond that of all of its sister squadrons. The entire air force, and gradually all the IDF and the whole country, reverberated with the war stories of this wonderful Mirage squadron and leafed through the photographs of the Pyramids her pilots took passing by. Luck, as usually is the case, also played into the hands of this squadron.
“The Bats is the only squadron that didn’t lose a single aircraft or pilot,” said the air force’s commander, Maj. Gen. Moti Hod, when he visited us at the Fighting First. And we, with our three fallen pilots, bowed our heads and felt almost reprimanded. In the gallery of the gods, one step below Moshe Dayan and among very few others, Ran Pecker reigned supreme with his outstanding command. Perhaps only we BBNs, the graduates of his leadership course, were not surprised. We knew in advance.
And then a small, black worm got inside the golden apple, and its poison did a lot of damage for many years.
For me, it all began when A.—one of my friends and a pilot in the Bats—tugged at my sleeve. We, all the pilots and senior officers of the IAF, were squeezed into the entrance of the Hatzor cinema, waiting for the doors to open and let us in to attend the general debriefing of the war that was about to be held inside. This was a few days after the end of the war, and most of us hadn’t seen each other since the fifth of June or even before. And so, until the locked doors opened, we were exulting and slapping each other on the back.
A. had something he wanted to tell me, but quietly. His face was grim. We went off to the side and began to talk. Suddenly we were not alone. More pilots of his squadron came and joined us, among them another A. And what the two A’s told me, whispering and looking around like conspirators, was not a story of heroism but of murder. The murder of a prisoner. And they blamed their commander, Ran Pecker, for it.
I couldn’t believe my ears. “A., what are you telling me? Did you see this with your own eyes?”
“Not exactly,” admitted my friend. “But it did happen. Immediately after the war Ran took us all for a short trip into the conquered areas, to see everything. We stopped somewhere near Jericho. A unit of paratroopers appeared. They had some prisoners of war. According to them, one of their captives had taken part in the murder of a downed Israeli pilot, Ben Aaron. Ran wanted to interrogate this prisoner.”
The pilots of the Bats crowded around us. They also were there.
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing. Ran took the prisoner and left. Evening came. Ran returned, alone.”
“And on this evidence you say the prisoner was murdered? By Ran? You’re nuts!”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Ran himself told us. He boasted about it.”
I was shocked. Ran was my hero.
“Maybe the prisoner attacked him?” I was trying to find an excuse for him. “Perhaps Ran had to defend himself?”
“The prisoner was handcuffed.”
WE ENTERED THE CINEMA. The general debriefing of the war began, and lasted for the whole morning. Actually, this was not a real debriefing. It was more like a show, a happy chain of success stories and deeds of valor. It started with Gen. Moti Hod, who told us about some of the tense moments at central control. He had sat in his chair, in complete silence, as the leaders of the State of Israel stood behind him, waiting for the first radio calls from deep in Egypt, to know if Operation Focus had worked or if the population of Israel must be sent into the bomb shelters.
Then each of the squadron commanders followed in turn. They all projected chosen gunsight films with bombings and aerial kills. Each touted his own squadron’s achievements. In fact, this was an audition of different actors competing for stardom, everyone rehearsing the same Shakespearean speech. It was good fun, but I can’t remember even a single word from that whole show. Until the end of the debriefing came.
When the presentations were over, and before we were all to leave and have a festive lunch, the air force commander stood up and turned to the audience. He asked if anybody had any remarks or additions. I looked toward A., who sat with his friends a few rows in front of me. He noticed my signal and shook his head.
“This is it,” I whispered to him, bending forward. “It’s now or never. Stand up!”
“I’m no fool.”
“Then if not you, let somebody else from the Bats speak up.”
“Are you crazy? Shut up and sit down, fool!”
The second A. looked away from me, as if he hadn’t heard. People around began looking at us, raising eyebrows. My heart pounded. I raised my hand.
When I received permission to speak, I asked, stammering, if the high command had heard the scuttlebutt. No, I had no details, but I had heard that somebody had done something—I don’t know for sure… .
I could see that everyone knew what I was talking about. I finished suggesting that the matter be investigated, whatever it was. “Just to know what happened, if anything had really happened.” I stopped timidly and sat down.
The hall was dead silent. All eyes left me and looked to the podium. At last General Hod answered. He was
