Loud and Clear

the number of holes in the target. This was a very clear lesson, and all the rest I suppressed. I was a soldier, and I was at war.

‡

TEN YEARS LATER, RAN LEFT the air force, slamming the door behind him. His leaving had no connection to the mysterious alleged murder of the prisoner, or any other moral issue. It was due to a banal struggle for control and ego. The special thing in that struggle was only that not just Michael wrestled against Gabriel, but also a whole bunch of inferior saints and demons were involved. At the end the angels won, and it all ended, in T. S. Eliot’s words, not with a bang but a whimper.

When Ran was released from military service I invited him to Ramat-David for a ride in the new F-16 aircraft I was introducing into the air force. He came happily, and we flew together. It was fun and a gift of honor for both of us. After the flight we sat in my office and talked. We both enjoyed comparing the American plane to our common love, that French beauty, the Mirage. Over a cup of coffee I tried to remind him of those two tough talks we’d had.

“What are you talking about?” he replied. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

I believed him.

Photographs

^{Zvi Spector, my father, who died at sea in World War II when I was seven months old.}

^{With my uncles, Aronchik (left), and Israel Spector, 1947. Shaike, my father’s other brother, the youngest, was killed in December 1947.}

^{Air cadets, Course No. 31, 1959. Left to right, front row: Zur Ben Barak (ZBB)*, Yoel Arad (Brutus)*, Zvi Umschweiff (Umsh)*, Yaacov Zik*. Middle row: Giora Yoeli, Yair Khativa*, Nachshon Halperin, Nir Gershoni, Micha Genosar, Ami Goldstein (Goldie)*, Nachshon Gal*. Back row: Uri Sheani*, Dan Zimmerman (Zimmer), Hannan Peled*, Dan Segri*, Iftach Spector, Yakir Laufer*. (* dead)}

^{The French-built Ouragan fighter-bomber jet was flown by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) primarily in the mid-1950s, but it served as a trainer for long after and also saw action in the Six-Day War.}

^{IAF’s flight-school Harvard trainers in formation flight, Course No. 31, March 1960.}

^{My future wife Ali, in the early 1960s. We would marry in May 1964.}

^{During the filming of Sinaya, while on a special two-month leave in 1962. For a time after appearing in this feature film, full of propaganda for the air force, I was a media item.}

^{The gray, skinny iron triangle of a Mirage III, a French-built supersonic fighter flown by the IAF in the 1960s.}

^{A Tupolev 16 bomber at Cairo West Air Base finds itself in the gunsight of a Mirage at the beginning of the Six-Day War, June 5, 1967.}

^{Attacking an Egyptian convoy between the desert forts of Nakhl and Mittle in the Sinai, June 8, 1967. We fired short bursts into tanks, trucks, and mobile cannons.}

^{Firing on a ship that carried no signs or flags clear enough for two sharp-eyed fighter pilots to discern; soon identified as the American spy ship USS Liberty near El Arish, East Sinai, June 8, 1967.}

^{Mirage No. 59 shoots down a MiG-21 over Egypt, March 6, 1970. Gunsight pictures show aiming at the MiG (left) and the successful hit.}

^{My handling of the formal flight procedures wasn’t free of problems. An extravagant Phantom takeoff in Hatzerim, in aerial display, July 1973.}

^{Sam Khetz, the first commander of Israeli Phantoms. His wit, and the special grace he radiated, brought him honor and affection all over the IAF.}

^{In the cockpit during the Yom Kippur War, October 1973.}

^{Mechanics under the wing of a Phantom. Every aircraft was loaded with some four tons of bombs.}

^{A thin bridge, very hard to see from the air, and parts of broader one, on the Suez Canal. October 7, 1973.}

^{An F-16 on the tarmac just before takeoff to Iraq, June 7, 1981. Operation Opera seriously damaged Iraq’s nuclear reactor, eliminating the threat of Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons.}

^{After landing from the attack on the nuclear reactor. From left, sitting: Ofer, Katz, Nahumi, Ramon, Raz, Maimon. Standing: Spector, Mohar, Yoffe, Yadlin, Falk, Sas, Shafir. Ilan Ramon fell as an astronaut in the crash of the Columbia space shuttle.}

^{Left to right: Iftach Spector, Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the government’s visit to Ramat David after the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor.}

Chapter 13 Authority

The Fighting First, the first Israeli Air Force fighter squadron. Established in 1948 with Avia-199 Messerchmitts made in Czechoslovakia. The planes were brought to Israel, dismantled, and assembled at Tel Nof. The squadron’s first operation was an attack on an Egyptian column on its way to Tel Aviv, on the bridge named Ad Halom (End of the Way). This aerial attack stopped the Egyptian army.

Soon the squadron was equipped with Spitfires flown directly from Czechoslovakia in a daring flight, and after the War of Independence it added American Mustangs. In the Sinai War of 1956 the squadron flew French Mystere jets, and then it was the first to absorb Mirages.