THE AIRCRAFT SIMPLY STOPPED in the air, and strong braking forces hit and then bent me forward like a jackknife. With my head between my knees, I gazed vacantly for a time. Shocked and dumbfounded, I saw a strange spectacle: swarms of clear glass fragments, shining like diamonds, rose from my lap and took off from the floor below my legs, then flew up and were taken away in the rush of the wind to disappear over my shoulders. I didn’t think much, but I certainly remember that a feeling of guilt, like sharp fragments, was already there. What had I done? How could this happen to me?
This went on for some undefined time.
Then suddenly something awoke in me, a wild sense of danger. I forced myself to raise my head from my knees, clutched the sides of the cockpit, and with difficulty surveyed the scene with narrowed eyes. My Ouragan was rolling left wildly, and at the same time it was looping forward in the air. The control stick thrashed in my hand uselessly, soft as a dead fish. I looked left and saw that a wing was missing. It just wasn’t there, torn away. And still I didn’t do anything, till the roar of the wind changed abruptly. Another voice, deeper, joined the whining choir. I saw stains of red light up all the glass. A long tongue of fire slithered from the root of the plucked-out wing below me, wound itself around the body of the aircraft, and came in to lick at me. I smelled kerosene and tar. The fire burned my face. Only then did I act.
Get out of here, punch out, fast! Like an automaton, eyes shut because of the wind and fire, I performed a series of well-rehearsed steps. Sit erect. My left hand pushed a handle, and the metal frame of my broken canopy flew off. Legs back. Throttle all the way forward, to spare my left knee as I went out. Both hands up in the punishing wind, groping to catch the ejection ring handle. A hard pull.
Black canvas covered my face. Well? But nothing else happened. This was not good.
A second pull, harder, with all your strength!
A heavy kick in the ass. Then fast rolling. Heat became cold. The noises changed. Well then, I must be out.
I threw the canvas off my face and opened my eyes. I found myself sitting, tied to my ejection seat, as in an armchair, rolling fast in the air. To my amazement, I was not alone. Around me circled a threatening crowd of broken pieces and torn sheet metal, small and large pieces. I was falling in a cloud of junk. These pieces were all spinning around me and rolling together with me in a vortex, like a swarm of angry bees. I watched and waited for the automatic sequence to come in, open my chute, and stabilize my fall, but nothing happened. The Earth and the sky rolled around me in a nauseating whirl, going blue-yellow-blue, and the heap of trash in a mad dance around me.
A black mass shot into sight, and then there was my poor single-winged Ouragan No. 22, churning in the air not far away. It rolled and whirled, shrouded in flames, a long, corkscrewing tail of fire and black smoke dragging behind it. The empty cockpit disgorged a thin white line of smoke. White clouds of fuel sprayed through holes in its skin, then converted into spiraling sheets of fire. I remembered my burning face, tore off my oxygen mask, and threw my helmet away. The air was cold on my cheeks. The burning Ouragan passed near me, and I suddenly heard it growling, whistling, and whining. Then I noticed the wing, too, above me, fluttering on its own, burning through the blue sky.
And still I fell and fell, spinning in my seat, waiting for the automatic release to open the parachute at the right altitude. It was beginning to annoy me, all that crap coming close and threatening me again and again. Finally I decided to get out of there on my own. I opened the buckle and released the belts, then kicked the seat away from me. When it floated away, I caught the parachute handle under my left armpit and pulled.
Whew! The parachute opened. Far below, the Earth steadied and settled down. All of a sudden the entire swarm of airplane junk shot past and below me like a dark cloud, continuing to revolve around the falling aircraft. Amazed, I watched this small solar system of a large, burning star, surrounded by its many asteroids, all fluttering and sparkling on their way to fall like a cutting rain on the yellow fields of the Negev below.
My face burned. I looked up and saw a torn section in my parachute. I decided that would be all right. Anyway, there was a lot of time; I was still very, very high. Farther above I could still see the whole trail of smoke, beginning up there with the cloud of the collision.
At that instant I recalled the other pilot, my student. Burned and panicky, I searched for him, and was relieved to see him not far away, hanging under his own parachute. For a long time, more than fifteen minutes, I continued to hang in the air, freezing, until finally the ground grew large and all of a sudden came up to meet me. I hit and rolled in the yellow dust of a dry field, near Kibbutz Ruchama.
AFTER THIS ACCIDENT I continued flying. But ever since then, a feeling of nausea hit me when in training dogfights metal bodies materialized suddenly from nowhere and passed by my canopy, bumping my aircraft and stopping my heartbeat. Then, after a split second of freezing, ants in my skin would remind me that I was still alive and could continue fighting. The dark shadow was still there, waiting.
AND SO MY FRIENDS AND I were going out for aerial combat training flights and operational missions once, twice, and three times a day. In each of these we, young men, walked silently together on the asphalt in the sunlight, our helmets dangling, whistling to ourselves. I felt how my feet caressed the ground, stuck to it before I climbed the aluminum ladder and into the cockpit. And I looked around and saw that each of the pilots was visiting his private eucalyptus tree to pee on it, and secretly knock on the warm, sleek trunk so it would wait for him to return and pee on it again.
Sometimes this other side of our world, together with the heavy burden of the war of attrition, intensified, and small cracks opened. Once I stood in the operations room, getting from the clerk the last details before going to my aircraft. A small radio was playing there as usual, whispering, and suddenly several clear strumming notes caught my attention, and I stopped to listen. A honeyed voice came out of the box and said right to me, “Why take it to heart? I have new things in my head… ”
I thought I was fainting. A dear friend of mine, Asher Snir, also a Mirage pilot, had disappeared from his squadron suddenly and wasn’t found for some days. I waited to hear what was coming.
Then a young, happy voice came in and advised me, “Take it easy, walk slowly. After a time you’ll be able to run again.”
I took a deep breath and smiled at the clerk. The band continued strumming its guitars, and I shouldered my gear and went very slowly to the Mirage, for another sortie. When Asher returned, after five days, it turned out that he hiked to Eilat and lay there on the beach by the Red Sea, out of contact, until he was able to come back and fly again in the war of attrition.
ONE NIGHT THE COMMANDER of the Fighting First, Lt. Col. Oded Marom, phoned and asked me to come over. He and I took off early in the morning, June 26, 1969. We were a special mission team, and Marom received his orders directly from the commander of the air force, Maj. Gen. Moti Hod. That day’s mission was to go deep into Egypt, to find MiGs and shoot them down. At the time, the Egyptians were shelling our soldiers at the canal; there were losses. Our commander chose this way to pay back and deter the enemy.
Accordingly, we didn’t sneak into Egypt but flew at high altitude. Anybody with a radar set could see us. We entered Egypt at dawn and cruised directly in at thirty thousand feet. Over the Nile we turned north and then south, waiting for MiGs to show up.
Marom led beautifully, calmly, and I was on his wing in a wide-open formation—a couple of thousand meters away—watching his six while he watched mine. Dawn broke, the sky reddened in the east, and the contours of the land under us acquired a patina of gold.
Suddenly I saw a faraway twinkle—a single MiG-21, some two thousand meters behind us, coming from below and closing fast. We broke together toward him. In the middle of our turn, when Marom was behind me, he warned me, “Another MiG at eleven high!”
I raised my head and saw the MiG, now outside my turning radius, as I had turned inside him. In calm voices we divided the job: Marom would take the first MiG and I the second one, which was still trying to close on me. Within seconds Marom and I lost sight of each other, and each of us was on his own.
And now, time for a kill. Something rumbled in my gut, “Don’t blow it.”
I BEGAN WITH A DISADVANTAGE with the MiG on my six, but I was armed with the cunning I learned from Yak. I eased my turn a bit and reduced power to slow down, in a casual sort of way. Let him come in really fast.
