through and around them, and the force of gravity, were discussing my wishes and processing them. It was like driving a fast car on a slick road in pouring rain: the wheels, the surface, and the wind have something to say, too.
I searched for general rules, for me and for my trainees. I felt that we pilots had no common language to communicate in. I turned to art, trying to draw flight. After landing, while the Fouga was refueled for the next sortie, I sat with my student on the wing and drew on the aluminum surface the maneuvers he had performed, drawing the correct pattern with a full line and what he had done with a dotted one. I tried to draw in three and four dimensions, and all the Fougas were covered with my scribbling.
In my pursuit of the art of flying I followed the footprints of former seekers of perfection. One hint was sent to me by none other than Picasso himself, in Francoise Gillot’s book about her life with Picasso. “Try to use colors at a minimum,” he once told her. “This way the painting shall acquire stored power.” Stored power, energy—that was the thing! Since then I sought that ideal: not to waste energy on futile maneuvers, to use every movement to its maximum.
In this way I discovered that the way to conserve my energy, that stored power, came from foresight: broad vision, understanding the general situation was the key to the next stage. And if you acted early, you won: something you could get from a small move early on, you could not achieve later, even with a radical maneuver.
I defined an order of things to myself: First, you must know what you want to do. Second, you have to achieve it fully; without that there is no meaning to anything. And then comes the art of flying, which is the question of the price. The art of flying, I concluded, is the achievement of the target with the absolute minimum of energy.
But there was more than that to it. One day Ali showed me a magazine interview with a famous Israeli artist, the mime Sammy Molcho. He said, “Every movement must be meaningful, but better yet if it has several meanings.” Immediately I recalled General Sherman, who stood the Confederate army on the horns of a dilemma, since his every movement had two possible interpretations and his enemies couldn’t decide which way to turn. Now I saw the wisdom behind the route of chase they had taught us in the operational training course: a sharp cut into the opponent’s curve combined threat and temptation, and the opponent was confronted with a dilemma. Molcho’s words generalized for me that actions are two-and threefold more valuable once they are not simplistic, when they create diversified possibilities. Instantly I envisioned the possibilities hidden in operating several aircraft in varying ways against one target, and I got pale with wonder and joy.
The good artist is neither simplistic nor one-dimensional. He does not do the expected and banal, does not put his nose right on the target, like a dog chasing a bicycle. The sophisticated artist divides his powers into meaningful actions, and enriches his creation with overt and subtle layers, possibilities within possibilities. And all along he builds the moment when he shall put his last brushstroke into place, in one sleek and cruel move, and finish it all with a single speck of color. And at the end of the battle the good artist shall not have all his power spent, shall not have used his entire palette. He has spare energy, fuel, and ammo, and is ready for the next fight. His creation leaves something unsaid; it contains stored power.
“There are many good artisans,” I lectured my students, “but the true artist is one who sees the whole, who can tell the geometry of the arc that hides behind the simple stones. Only in this way can he see the next phase, and achieve the result with absolute minimum of waste of effort.” Once, when I left time for questions, a young officer rose in the audience. “You were not talking about flight,” he said. “You were talking about life in general, weren’t you?”
That day I felt I hadn’t wasted my efforts.
HATZERIM WAS REMOTE, but the war found us. Regularly we, the flight instructors, were called to our operational squadrons to help with training or flying operational missions. Every few weeks I spent a busy weekend in the Sinai, on duty in Refidim. There was action all the time. Wild artillery battles raged on the Suez Canal, and every day casualty lists were published in the newspapers. The air force fought also, and all of us pilots—from the colonel to the last first lieutenant instructor—were called on to fly missions with our parent fighter squadrons.
In some strange way, the Mirage pilots among us were given some rest from the hard work in Refidim, in the Sinai. The small, dusty ready room, with its eight beds, was a holy shrine where nobody interrupted sleep. There, once you were in your gear and were ready to scramble if the bell rang, you could loaf around. Only in Refidim we could read books, prepare for our entrance exams, or just play Dominos. We saw plenty of schlocky Westerns— sometimes two, three, and more films a day—and invented gourmet dishes that no man’s palate had ever tasted. And best of all, we slept and slept.
Refidim was a crazy oasis in the middle of the desert. It was uncertainty itself, wild and heartbreaking, bursting with men, and overrun with flies. It was in the middle of nowhere—half sublime, half ridiculous. Once, all the pilots pulled emergency duty to help unload casualties from a helicopter that had come in, blackened, from a battle in the salt marshes of northern Suez. None of us will ever forget how the door opened and the doctor fell out with the dead and wounded covering him, all of them blackened and bleeding.
The atmosphere was morbid. Once, I was hanging out with two reservists making a pot of coffee near our aircrafts’ hangar. They looked ancient to me, at forty-five or fifty. I was all of twenty-eight. They invited me for a cup with them.
“You get a choice,” said one. “A son fucked up at the Suez Canal, or a daughter fucked in Refidim. Which would you choose?” Suddenly I realized that none of them laughed; this was not a joke.
On the other hand, Refidim actually had some nightlife. After dusk just two pilots had to remain on alert while everybody else could take a shower and was free to wander around. There were many attractions: visiting the Sinai Armored Corps headquarters to join the unending discussions; commandeering a jeep to radar station 511 on the hill, five kilometers off base, to peer in the windows at the girls. And there were many parties wherever lights were on; and night rides on the desert’s crumbling roads, to roll around in the dunes.
THIS WAS A GOOD TIME, except that the relations between my immediate superior, Ran Pecker, and me were going badly. I knew I had made some mistakes in the running of my unit. Some of those command mistakes were marginal, but a few were really dangerous. Ran reprimanded me, and rightly so, but he chose an annoying venue: he chose to do it in public, sometimes even in the lecture hall in front of my instructors and students. I was in trouble.
I thought I understood what he was after. I had never forgotten that talk behind the stage in Hatzor, and figured there was some plan he was working. I felt he was setting me up. The blowup came one Saturday night in Refidim, the Sinai front-line airfield. We were resting there, six pilots of the Fighting First on ready alert, when the telephone rang. Epstein gave me the receiver, his eyebrows going up.
“It’s Ran Pecker, and he wants you,” he whispered to me. “Watch it, Spike; he is really steamed.”
The voice that came out of the receiver was so loud that everybody around heard every word. “Spector?”
“Yes, Ran.”
“What are you doing in Refidim!” The sentence ended without a question mark.
“I’m on duty—” I began, stating the obvious, and then he flared up, cutting me off. He went over all the mistakes that had happened in the unit I commanded since he “unfortunately” accepted me at the school. Ran had an excellent memory for detail, and he connected every mistake with an absence of mine. Once I took leave, in another I was ill, the third time I “disappeared” to fly with the Fighting First.
“Again you’re absent from duty? And I have to hunt for you all over the country, and find you in Refidim?”
This was unfair, but I had no way to stop the harangue issuing from the receiver.
“And what about the training of the aerobatic team tomorrow morning! You got out of that, too?” I was the leader of the aerobatic team of the flight school. Every morning, at dawn, we trained for formation maneuvers with six aircraft, preparing for the forthcoming air shows. Aerobatics in formation is a hard and dangerous performance, and only the cream of the flight instructors are selected to take part in it. It also requires much meticulous drilling, over the normal daily routine of flight training.
“I postponed the training to Monday, when I am back from duty.”
“You postponed it to Monday?” his voice was hoarse, choking with anger. “And you think you are good
