At the end of 1969 the Phantoms took this job exclusively. We, with all the inferior aircraft, were sent off the field to watch from the stands the deadly game taking place. The Soviets supplied the Egyptians with more and more replacement batteries, and the missile arrays widened and thickened. Single red circles joined together and overlapped, covering each other until a big, knotty tube was smeared on our maps like a big piece of camel dung going north to south halfway between the Suez Canal and Cairo.
The air war against the missiles heated up, and the few dozen Phantoms began to absorb hits and take losses.
THE WAR OF ATTRITION was strange because the armed forces fought but Israel was not at war. The borders flamed and soldiers killed and were killed there, but inside the country, traffic moved and streetlights shone brightly. Israel’s economy bloomed. Restaurants and theaters were full. Every day the newspapers carried casualty notices, but the people of Israel just flipped the newspapers aside and said with a sigh, “That’s how it is,” and went back to business. Those few who actually fought—in the air, at sea, and on the ground—were not present in the streets, so they were unseen. Only their relatives worried for them but they kept silent, lost in the happy crowd. This was really a war—and what a war—but it was not announced as one, and not perceived as such. Just a nuisance, a fact of life, a thing one cannot change, like the rate of accidents the air force continued to produce, war or no war.
THE AIR FORCE PILOTS continued to fly combat missions, and in base family housing, the tension, like the mercury in a thermometer, rose and fell and rose again. You could return from the MiGs and the flak, drive to the store to buy bread and milk and stick them in the refrigerator for the wife, and hurry back to the squadron to take off again to battle, or disappear for a week or two to Refidim, as if you alternated between two different worlds. And whenever I returned home I didn’t know how I would find my Ali, satisfied and at ease, or withdrawn inside herself, cold and prickly, hard on herself and us for no good reason. When I found her in this mood, we would get into a cleaning mode, shaking out rugs and blankets, sweeping and gardening. She would bend over weeds and uproot them mercilessly, her mouth set hard. Sometimes we had to take a breather, and then we drove to visit the family at Givat-Brenner, or took our two kids to the beach for a few hours of relaxation. Sometimes the air force arranged free hotel stays for us—we had no money for that—and then we would go down to the street and look at the wonderful, vibrant city.
The desire to live bubbled in us until we choked on it. One Saturday night we fell into bed dead tired. Long after midnight we woke up. It was a warm early summer night, and the light from a full moon streamed in through the open window along with the intoxicating smells of flowering orange trees. Noisy dance music came from a party that banged at full power in a nearby apartment, featuring the latest Beatles numbers.
“Should we go?” I asked Ali.
“We were not invited,” she answered.
We both got up and stood on the bed, naked. We didn’t know any ballroom steps, but we danced in our room till the moon faded, the window filled with pink and rosy light, and the wail of the record player was replaced by the clink of glasses being washed. In our private memories, this magic night became “Lucy in the sky.” Not that we had any idea of what LSD was, or who were Hey, Jude and Michelle, Ma Belle.
WE ALSO DIDN’T THINK BIG. We thought just a day ahead. One day the whole government visited Hatzor, to look around and have lunch with the base officers and pilots. When our glasses were raised, the host, Colonel Yak, our base commander, gave a short speech in which he presented a strategic idea of his. “Perhaps we should consider a unilateral retreat from the Suez Canal,” he said. “If we let it open for international navigation, a partition might be created, which might lead… ”
Prime Minister Golda Meir shook her head, annoyed. Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense, rose from his seat and said in a scolding tone, “Military officers should stay out of politics.” Yak sat down again on his chair and we lowered our eyes, humiliated, into the hummus on our plates. We didn’t notice that the big-shot general Moshe Dayan was ducking a serious question instead of dealing seriously with it. We were ashamed of our commander’s question. We didn’t grasp the difference between strategy, dealing with vision and thought, and politics, which in essence is the manipulation of people. Some wise guy near me whispered that with such defeatist ideas the air force would lose part of its budget to the artillery. We all thought he probably was right. We thought Yak had lost it, and instead of devising aerial tactics he began dealing with politics.
In truth, Yak was slipping further and further away from us. In discussions, instead of taking an interest in aviation tactics, he sailed into abstract reflections on the best way of war-making, saying it was a mistake to pit aircraft against aircraft, tank versus tank, ship versus ship, like two grindstones that wear each other out. He would pull out his pipe and think aloud on “diagonals,” on “getting out of the mental box.” This wasn’t Yak the MiG-killer anymore. Instead of a fighter commander we had a philosopher. Some sneered behind his back, said he didn’t understand what he was talking about. He acquired a nickname, Yak the Clueless. Only Furman, his deputy, said it was worthwhile to listen to what Yak was saying.
MEANWHILE, SOMEHOW, the Mirages became limited, single-mission fighters. No more were bombs loaded under our wings, and except for a few night scrambles for urgent air-to-ground interventions against artillery shelling on our ground forces in the Suez Canal area, we didn’t aim our gunsights at the ground at all. We were just light fighters for daytime air-to-air missions, and that was it.
To this day I don’t know how it happened that Mirages—that only three years before had taken out all the military airfields in the Middle East—were totally excluded from the ground warfare in that difficult war. A similar thing happened to the Super Mysteres and Skyhawks. Even though they were aircraft specializing in ground attack, they were limited to second-class missions. We were ordered not to pass the line of the canal, and only Phantoms continued to penetrate deep into Syrian and Egyptian air space and attack the SAM batteries. They began to return with holes in their formations. The Phantom squadrons began to be stressed.
I was not the only one who wondered where all this was going, especially with the stress that began to show in the Phantoms and their crews. Other officers asked this question in a loud and clear voice. The commander of the Mirage squadron at Ramat-David, my buddy Uri Even-Nir, raised his voice once in one of the general briefings and asked, “What is up with those fucking SAM batteries? What in hell requires us to keep our Mirages out of the action?”
But Moti never answered this question. He wanted just one thing from us: MiGs. For Moti, our MiG kills were the only substitute for a real strategy, which he didn’t have.
MiGs were not simple, either. I was also having a tough time. I pushed my notebook with all the nice programs I had planned for the Fighting First to the back of my desk drawer. I was left with time and energy only for one thing: dogfights. I found in my squadron two serious problems: leadership in aerial combat, and the launching of our air-to-air missiles.
THE KEY TO VICTORY and survival in aerial combat lies in flight management—keeping the sections together in combat, not letting them scatter. Two aircraft can defend each other, but a lone aircraft is very vulnerable. I, with my narrow escape from deep in Egypt after I separated from Marom, learned that it is mandatory not to leave a lone aircraft in enemy territory. The other pilots understood it, too—we had a daily reminder of it: Avi Kaldes, a pilot from our squadron, was rotting in an Egyptian prison after his section had scattered and left him alone. Clearly, aerial leadership was the key to victory and prevention of losses.
The requirement was to stay together and not separate, but some things are easier said than done. The essence of Yak’s breakthrough in the 1950s was in separating the section into two independent fighters who fought individually—each one chasing another target—while coordinating their movements by radio. The separation according to Yak was very aggressive and brought excellent results in small dogfights, but led to the opening of large distances between the partners and eventually loss of eye contact between them. Those separations led time and again to total parting, each fighting on alone.
Our difficulties became more serious when enemy aircraft started appearing in ever-larger numbers. The enemy began to prepare himself in advance and to throw into engagements more and more MiGs, and every dogfight soon turned into mass confusion. Time after time we found ourselves few against many, under pressure, and finally ending up alone in enemy territory, against several MiGs. Instead of attacking, we found ourselves
