THERE IS ONLY ONE SQUADRON I’d care to command: the Fighting First, the one and only, the First Fighter Squadron of the IAF. My squadron.
On May 27, 1970, my wish was fulfilled. I stood opposite Marom on the taxi strip at Hatzor. The hundred-odd men of the squadron stood in ranks of three, facing us at attention. The pilots’ platoon wore their usual gray, wrinkled flight suits, and the mechanics their well-worn fatigues, black oil staining their elbows and knees. I squinted at the mechanics’ platoon, and suddenly I realized I had become their commander, too, responsible for the preparation and maintenance of the Mirages, not just for flying them.
I saluted Maj. Gen. Moti Hod, the air force commander, and he took the squadron’s black-and-red flag, with the winged skull, from Marom’s hands and gave it to me. Moti and Marom returned my salute, did an about-face, and marched to Yak’s car. The three senior officers then drove together to the base commander’s office. I was left with my men. My squadron, finally.
Soon I will enter my new office and sit in “Zorik’s seat.” Above my head will be the picture of the first and for always commander of the Fighting First, the young and handsome Moddi Alon, who crashed his Messerschmitt and died in the 1948 War of Independence. And serious faces will watch from the walls, among them a boyish Ezer Weizman, looking into the far distance, his curly hair waving in the wind. Benny Peled, too, the squadron’s commander in the Sinai campaign, who was shot down with his Mystere in enemy territory and rescued in an amazing operation. Many others, too.
And now it’s my turn.
I took a deep breath, took a sheet of paper out of my pocket, and cleared my throat to get their attention. This was going to be my first speech as a commander. I was full of plans and intended to read to them the outlines, where I was going to take this squadron. Just then, a blast of compressed air shot out of the readiness hangar. The whole parade froze. A hundred heads turned around to see what was going on. Then a siren screamed, and two jet engines huffed and puffed, accelerating their turbine revolutions. A pair of Mirages emerged from the hangar and sped to the near runway. The pilots lit their afterburners and took off. Another roar of thunder, even louder, rolled in from the other runway, and two F-4 Phantoms from our neighboring squadron—the Falcons under the command of Sam Khetz—scrambled, too. The black trails of the smoking Phantoms stretched behind the little Mirages, diminishing in the western sky.
“Who is in that section?” I said with a questioning look at my new deputy, Capt. Menachem Sharon, who stood in front of the pilots’ platoon.
“Reservists,” Sharon said, hurrying up to me. “All the active service pilots are here at the ceremony. We put the reserve pilots on alert.” And suddenly he asked, “I hope that’s all right?”
Hey, I was being asked.
“All right, all right,” I answered cautiously. “Let’s continue according to plan.” But my legs were not steady. I folded my paper, put it back into my pocket, and kept my remarks short. I kept quiet about the ideas I had been working on during the past year, how I would change and improve the Fighting First, put my stamp on it. No time for this now. Let’s go.
“Attention! Dismissed!”
The parade scattered in all directions, everybody running to his working place, and only the new commander of the Fighting First walked slowly, restraining himself from running. He has to show everyone that everything here is in order, that he trusts his men, that he is cool. I descended the stairs to the operations room slowly when everybody was already there, crowding around the humming radio.
“Well,” I thought, “I haven’t been given any hundred-day grace period, not even fifteen minutes, actually. “In the evening,” I consoled myself, “there will be some quiet, and then I will find time to sit in my new office, think, organize my thoughts… ”
I had no idea.
MY FAMILY, ON THE OTHER HAND, had a smooth landing at the new housing.
That same morning, as the truck unloaded Ali with the kids and the furniture near our new apartment in Hatzor, I was still checking out an air cadet on the Fouga trainer. At noon I waved good-bye to Uri Sheani—they were back from Africa and lived next to us in Hatzerim—and took off in a Piper Cub to Hatzor, together with the family cat, Cleo, who hated flying and all along the way glided among the seats, cutting long scratches in the tough seat covers.
Both Ali and I were very happy to get an apartment next to Sam and Rana Khetz. This was good luck indeed; the four of us had been friends for a long time, and our children played well together. Dedi, their firstborn, was about the age of our Etay, and Uri and Omri—the seconds—were both babies. Right away they invited us for dinner.
I HAD KNOWN SAM KHETZ since childhood, long before military service. We both grew up on kibbutzim, and met in youth camps in the summers. There was some similarity in our personal backgrounds (what we called mockingly “our stolen childhood”), and there were always things to talk about. Khetz was a year senior to me, and when I arrived at flight school as a new cadet he helped me adapt, and used to lend me his notebooks. In the evening he sometimes came to our room to help us with the more difficult material.
His simple and direct manner couldn’t mask his depths. Khetz had a complicated and interesting personality. His wit, and the special grace he radiated, brought him honor and affection all over the air force. At the beginning of the War of Attrition we served together in the Fighting First. Once we drove together to air force headquarters in Tel Aviv for a briefing. When the meeting ended, he told me, “Come, let’s visit Moti.”
“Visit whom?”
“Moti, the air force commander.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“What? Of course not. But if one passes by, one should drop in and say hello.”
Moti’s secretary, of course, knew Khetz. She cleared the general’s agenda, and Captain Sam entered Major General Moti’s office, and they sat for an hour. While they discussed matters there, I sat in the entrance and read magazines.
AMONG HIS MANY FRIENDS, Khetz had one best friend, Yitzhak Arzi, Aki. Aki was an athletic, handsome guy—very unlike Khetz, who was skinny with a hook nose. These two, from the moment they met each other in the flight school, were always together. When they arrived at the Scorpions, exactly one year before I arrived there, they were given a common nickname, Khezarzi. Everybody thought it was a good name—two for one, as it were. Around this double star we, the newcomers, revolved like satellites.
Then Rana appeared. I met her first in the back of a transport leaving Tel Nof. She was a very slim, black- haired soldier—dark eyes in an exotic face. “Wow, what a beauty,” Ali said. Rana had two sisters, both beautiful, and a father, Papa Saul, who had a special sense for finding and picking mushrooms in the fields. We brought the onions and potatoes, and together we made a good dinner and became fast friends.
ON DECEMBER 1, 1967, Aki died. He went down in the Gulf of Suez and vanished, like all the unfortunate pilots who went down there. Zorik and I were in Refidim, and we flew around like mad over the ever-widening petroleum slick in the blue-black water, searching for survivors, annoying ships, and chasing them into the Egyptian harbor at Adabiya to see if they raised anything or anybody, then expelled by ack-ack fire and hanging out again until dusk came and we had to return to Refidim with empty tanks. Nothing was ever found of Aki and his navigator, Raz. From then on, whoever had used the name Khezarzi didn’t mention it again. Khetz got another, single nickname, Khetzkel.
He returned to the Fighting First as second in command to Marom, and Khetz and I worked together. He never talked about Aki. I didn’t kid myself into thinking I filled the hole in his life. At about this time Rana and Ali became close friends, and remain so to this day. After a short time Sam Khetz was selected to head the Phantom mission—an indication of the regard the IAF had for him—and I took his job in the squadron.
Rana and Khetz went to America to meet the new aircraft, and we in Israel went on fighting. Now the few
