come to us, just hiding in your holes and shooting, not aiming and hitting nothing. All you do is make a lot of noise!” When he came back he was asked why he had endangered himself for nothing. He answered, “What do you mean for nothing? I stopped their shooting, didn’t I?”
I wonder why this young man, who didn’t need to seek adventure, for adventure sought him, volunteered to command that boat to Lebanon. Was it just for the love of danger, for “nothing?” The original commander of the operation, who had trained the crew for the mission and was slated to go, refused at the last moment, just two days before the departure date. He argued that the operation was too dangerous, with no reasonable chance of success. Perhaps he was right. No doubt Zvi, who was an experienced fighter, understood it, too. And more: “Nobody expected Zvi to take this mission,” Yitzhak Sade tried to comfort himself. “Recently Zvi had been injured in a motorcycle accident. His broken leg was still in a cast.” But Zvi Spector needed no order to take it on. He always rose with danger, like oil on water. “Even lame,” said Sade, “it was hard to imagine a better commander. And the group was worthy of a commander of his caliber.” He took command, and they went out and were lost in the sea.
ALL MY LIFE I HAD FOLLOWED this man, searched to find more about him, and after many years—this was after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, I was thirty-four already—a stranger told me the end of his story. This happened in the oddest place, on the road, on my way from air force headquarters to my home in Ramat-HaSharon. Suddenly a voice came from the radio, high-pitched and tortured, calling to me in English, “Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made.”
I was shocked. I stopped the car on the shoulder and sat frozen. Outside was a dark, rainy evening. A lonely child lies on a faraway, deserted seashore. A clown is bent over him, telling him the news in a choked, hoarse voice. In this way, from Shakespeare’s “Sea Dirge,” I learned the end of my father and his twenty-three comrades. “Full fathom five thy father lies,” said the shrill voice, in an unbelievable lullaby or ancient legend. “Of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that does fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.”
Children are the loneliest creatures in the world. A child is weak, poor, and ignorant. He is yet to find his only true friend; himself. With no spine of experience, no power, he wanders about in an unknown land like a lost prince, waiting for his father, the king, to come and take him back under his wing, to the light and the warmth. Instead, that horrible joker whispers in his ear, “Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Hark! Now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.” Now I knew he was gone. And when I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I wept there in the car, on the side of the road, for the first time in my life.
But when it had all sunk in, Shakespeare’s language had lifted the tragedy of my childhood and immersed it in a larger story. I sat there crying for my lost father and for my lost friends.
ZVI SPECTOR, TOLEDANO, grew in my mind until he became a saint. I saw my mother’s eyes examine me, criticizing, comparing. Around me, the large kibbutz of Givat-Brenner was full of fair-haired boys who ran faster than I, jumped higher, and knew how to whirl the girls around in the big dining hall at the Friday night parties, and then take them out on the grass. I became a closed young man with a moody streak, and became more serious the more I grew up.
The traumas of adolescence drove me farther from my mother. Perhaps she guessed my problem—that being a living person she could not compete with a saint—but we both were weak and had no tools to find a way out of the thicket. I was an innocent boy, a virgin, and the discovery that she had her own sex life, without any intention of marriage and with no love or future, shocked me.
As an adolescent I was very confused, torn between high ideals and low self-esteem. I clung to one rule of life I had learned from my mother, “All inside,” and it protected me. Whenever people approached, I would become silent, turn my back, and hide. Time and again I reminded myself that I was not transparent, that as long as I didn’t open a window, nobody could see what I kept inside me. I decided that only I would decide whom to let in, and Shosh was especially not included. Never again did I let her into my life.
I volunteered for military service as early as I could, at age seventeen and a half. She signed my permission for pilot training with her lips tightly clenched. Afterward she snapped, “An orphan is not handicapped.”
11
From Inside
AFTER THE SIX-DAY WAR, even as the terrible strain on Israel was lifted, the burden on our shoulders, the soldiers and fighter pilots, increased. The Egyptians and the Syrians started a war of attrition on our new borders, which had suddenly become much longer and farther away. Our country wasn’t a small piece of land anymore that a Mirage could cover from one end to the other in a few minutes. We found ourselves scrambled for missions, or patrolling at long distances, burning flight time.
The war over the Suez Canal flared up, and the air force command deployed a forward fighter station in the formerly Egyptian airfield at Bir-Gafgafa, in western Sinai. The name of the airfield had been changed by somebody to Refidim, after some obscure location from the Book of Exodus. In the following years we, the Mirage pilots, were held in constant readiness at Refidim for weeks at a time.
The workload was enormous, but it got my motor going. The more the pressure, the more momentum I developed. Work was abundant, but I asked for more. I didn’t notice I was neglecting my family, that Ali and little Etay were leading a life of their own, without my involvement, a life I knew almost nothing about. I left early in the morning and returned late at night. I hung out in Refidim for weeks on end, not understanding why my gentle girl was changing, becoming cool to me, snapping sarcastic remarks, demanding, and getting angry. What was going on? I worked so hard, and whenever I came home I took off my flight boots and tried so hard to be nice. Ali was becoming thinner and thinner, and I didn’t know why. I even liked it, and used to call her jokingly “my skeletal friend.”
One evening, when I came back from Refidim after a long absence, I found my four-year-old son, Etay, sitting on the outside stairs. I stepped over him, not noticing the bowl full of wet sand with dry canes he tried to show me, and went in. I didn’t even imagine that this was a “bouquet of flowers” he had worked hard over for my twenty- eighth birthday. I hadn’t even remembered it was my birthday.
In the squadron I had found my own separate world. A great love and a deep trust grew between me and the Mirage, this gray, skinny iron triangle, light of movement and graceful as a coquettish girl, as lethal and loyal to me as Jonathan to David. Through the development of these new, intimate relations, which worked by physical touch, the Mirage taught me to court her every hour of every day. I found myself speaking to the Mirage sometimes in the masculine, but mostly I thought of her in the feminine.
The more I knew about her I realized that the Mirage could not be forced, and it was no use pushing her. All you had to do was ask, but ask in the proper way, politely. Just think first, don’t try to hustle her with hurried, hysterical demands. If you prepared her in a nice way and gave her time to warm up, she would go all the way with you, ready and hot, and cut like magic any way you wanted. Thus the Mirage taught me gradually to think things out first, and not just react after the fact.
AND IT CANNOT BE DENIED: there always was the other side, the dark side of our profession, the shadow hanging over our lives. This demon was there, too, hiding like a horror inside me, terrifying, since that aerial collision I had four years before.
I screwed up badly. My Ouragan, an old French attack plane, was rolling slowly on its back, listlessly, and I was hanging head down in my straps. Just then another aircraft hit me. There was a loud bang. I was thrown forward in the cockpit, and my head smashed into the instrument panel.
Somehow I didn’t lose consciousness. What I remember was the wind that suddenly tore in all over me, my ears deafened from its screams, the skin of my face torn, and the cloth of my flight suit shaving my cheeks and whipping abruptly into my eyes.
