Our altitude was gone and we leveled out above the surf and dark blue water. The aircraft felt tired and wanted to sink, but I held it with a firm hand and did not let it go down. I sensed the airflow swishing and growling on our wingtips, threatening to flip us over head down, as Hassan had done before our eyes two hundred kilometers and eons past. Then the coastline slid under us and everything got big real fast. I lifted my aircraft’s nose even more to the sky. Nose up, we floated, hurtling, another half kilometer with the wheels caressing sand dunes and rush thorns, totally concentrated on the short runway before us. The stick was already pulled fully back, pressing my belly, and all of a sudden a line of rim stones passed below us.
Airbrakes! We fell like a stone to the tarmac. I deployed the brake chute, and felt with relief its pull take hold. And now the brakes! And again—one more time. Then there was no need for more. My lovely Mirage stopped gracefully a long way before the runway’s end, its nose nodding.
I opened the canopy to the oven breath of the morning hamsin. The hot, dry wind hit hard on my wet back. Let me get down and sit on the tarmac near my Mirage. Let me wait for somebody. Somebody will come sooner or later. Let me get down.
I tried to get to my feet but couldn’t. My knees trembled and folded under me.
12
Nissim
AERIAL COMBAT IN THE WAR OF ATTRITION became more frequent and more difficult. In November 1968 I had an especially tough dogfight that in time influenced my thinking on the matter.
I scrambled with a younger pilot, Gordon, against some enemy aircraft penetrating our area in the northern part of the Suez Canal. The controller sent us to chase them, and we crossed over the Small Bitter Lake and pulled up but saw no MiGs. The interception was so lame that when we looked around, we found MiGs on our tails and launching missiles at us. We broke and separated, each of us carrying on alone.
I closed rapidly on one of the MiGs. He went high and I followed, and we stopped in the air with me close behind him, but before I could finish him off, I received a call for help. I left the MiG immediately and went to help Gordon get a MiG off his tail.
Suddenly the skies around us filled with enemy aircraft. The feeling was like being in a cloud of wasps: I saw targets in every direction, but every time I looked back there was a nose pointed at me with four missiles under its wings, one of them already spitting fire on my six. I broke, and broke again. A missile passed and exploded very close to my cockpit. Another break, and the MiG came in on me. We locked horns. It looked cool: a new, shiny aircraft painted in dark colors. For a moment we came so close I could see that the pilot wore no helmet but only a black leather hood, similar to those we had worn in the Stearman trainer in flight school. As I was lining him up in my sight to take a shot, another MiG came in on my six and spoiled my aim.
This battle was nasty. Throughout the fight, Gordon and I were trying to look out for each other, but we were two against ten. We were forced to fight separately, unable to support each other. The battle was full of action and a strange excitement—many targets passed before my eyes—but the pressure was unrelenting, and I couldn’t concentrate on any particular one.
Finally, after I had shot at four MiGs and missed every one of them (my aim was way too hurried), I decided that discretion was the better part of valor. We both turned east and dived to maximum speed. On disengaging we received a parting gift: a Russian Atoll missile hit Gordon’s aircraft and luckily caused just minor damage. After landing, I found a long, deep scratch in the Plexiglas of my canopy.
“This is becoming dangerous,” I wrote in my report. But it took me some more time till I came to do anything about it.
IN APRIL 1969 I WAS TRANSFERRED to the flying school to instruct air cadets. The flying school wasn’t in Tel Nof anymore, but had moved down south to the Negev, to the new air force base at Hatzerim.
I didn’t want to go. The war raged on in the Golan Heights and the Suez Canal. My Mirages fought night and day. My comrades were being worn down with the strain. I felt that the Fighting First needed me, especially since some of our best pilots, especially the deputy commander and my friend Sam Khetz, had been sent to study the new Phantom aircraft in America. Their departures had left a big hole.
But there was something else, too: I was worried about another run-in with Ran Pecker, who was now the commander of the flight school. I tried to avoid it and stay in the Fighting First. But Yak, who was now the commander of Hatzor, refused to listen to my pleas. “We need pilots. You are needed at the flight school. Get over it.”
Ran Pecker received me in his office as a friend. Our last conversation seemed to be forgotten. Puzzled, I kept my guard up.
We flew small twin-jet Fouga trainers, the student in the front seat and the instructor behind him. To my total amazement, I found flight instruction interesting and enjoyable. Even more than that, I enjoyed commanding men. I was given a pretty large unit to manage; there were fifty cadets and twenty flight instructors, and a new class came in every four months. Certainly the workload was heavy here, too, but the operational tension was less. We lived in a calmer atmosphere. Hatzerim was at that time just a couple of runways in the desert, with a few concrete buildings nearby, which housed the training squadrons. A little farther on, beyond a dusty Negev hill, three rows of housing were squeezed in, surrounded by yellowing attempts to grow lawns. The wind blew dust and weeds on the roads. The job came with a car, so we could go out on Saturdays for trips in the Negev, or for a dip in the salty, heavy water of the Dead Sea, or to fill bottles with the multicolored layers of sand in the Negev’s craters. Sometimes we even drove north to visit family.
MY JOB IN FLIGHT SCHOOL was comprehensive and hard. The air force needed new pilots badly, and we were the production plant. We flew a lot. I was in the air every day, all the day. In my logbook I find months with seventy-five training sorties, plus dozens of operational flights and transport sorties in light aircraft. My subordinates, the young instructors, certainly flew even more; after all, I was a manager. In the evening, when there were no night flights, I had my chance to help Ali feed and wash the children. Ali was also tired after a long day of work and studies in the institute for training for librarians in Beer-Sheva. So after we put the kids to bed— now we had two, when Etay became five we had our second son, Omri—we looked at each other, and instead of going to sleep summoned our last reserves of strength and went out to a show in Tel Aviv, a restaurant with friends at Beer-Sheva, to visit Ilan and Judy in Hatzor, or to sit around Nissim’s bed. In the small hours we returned home and hung on to each other with our fingernails.
BEING A FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR captivated me. I became a researcher, breaking new ground. I wanted to explore the secret of military flying and the way to break it down into its component parts, using short, clear, and accurate words and phrases so my students could understand them and later elaborate on their own. I strove to reveal the clean, perfect lines beneath the rococo overlay of operational flying.
I began to sense that behind the rules I had learned hid unplumbed depths. A successful, efficient turn of the aircraft was much more complicated than just manipulating the controls the way they taught me at school. I would input a clear requirement and get back complicated, delicate responses. Sometimes the craft gave just hints; on other occasions it opposed my will by certain side skids, or abruptly tightening its turn, even raging and bucking at me. And if I used force on the stick to compel it, it would take its revenge and put us into a spin. I began to realize that I had partners in the art of fighter flying: the airframe and the engine, together with the air that streamed
