JULY 1970 WAS ONE OF THOSE months when joy and sadness mingled. It went so fast and was so condensed that one thing overlapped the next. That month, my story and the story of Lt. Col. Sam Khetz, the commander of the Falcons, interlocked and separated like wires in a cable till they finally separated forever.
MY INSISTENCE THAT MY PILOTS aim their missiles accurately was definitely the way to go. But there also had been merit in Baharav’s defense: the missiles he was given to do his job were worthless. We all knew it.
I went with Khetz to see the new air-to-air missiles his Phantoms had just received from America. They were heat-seeking rockets, keying on the opponent aircraft’s exhaust pipe. The Americans dubbed them AIM-9D, and their Hebrew code name was Dagger. I loved them. They looked so brand-new and shiny, unlike the scratched and peeling tubes we were carrying. Their noses were pointed, and carried a small, glassy sensor looking for prey like a gray evil eye.
Then, when we sat down to dinner at his home, Khetz opened the technical manual and showed me the specs of that missile, and my eyes widened. The launch envelope was enormous. This missile could be launched at a MiG from unbelievable distances and wide-off angles. It was exactly what we needed. I asked Khetz to lend me a few of those beauties.
Khetz grinned.
“You are as innocent as a child,” he told me. “Adaptation of a new weapon to an aircraft is not a simple thing. There are procedures, and if you don’t do every step exactly right you will have serious problems. Would you mount a truck wheel on your Sussita car?” he asked me.
“Well, if I were stuck with four flat tires,” I tried. Khetz laughed but refused my request. My idea was stupid anyway, and besides, his squadron was short of missiles, too.
But I was already fired up. As I came out of Khetz’s house, I turned and went directly to Yak’s. The commander of Hatzor listened to me pensively and aloofly. Eventually he took his pipe out of his mouth and assumed a noncommittal position. If I wish to work on it myself, he would not stand in my way. That was all I got. Yak was already in his last days on this duty, and he wouldn’t get involved in dubious things. In general, he became a different Yak than the one who ten years ago accepted me into the Super Mysteres. Many years later I recalled that meeting in his house. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps Yak’s personal deterioration was already on its way then.
SO, I THOUGHT, THIS IS ABOUT ordnance? Good. Let’s see what the ordnance people at headquarters have to say. I called them.
Major Sapir, heavy and perspiring, arrived from Tel Aviv and sat in front of me. I presented him with my idea. Still it seemed to me very simple: let’s take a few missiles from the Phantoms—not too many—and put them on our Mirages.
“Can you imagine the tactical revolution?”
“It’s not a good idea!” he said immediately. First, the Dagger was too heavy for the thin wing of the Mirage. Second, the impact of jettisoning external fuel tanks—the usual thing we all did before going into battle—would shake and surely break the missile’s sensor. When I twisted my mouth he told me that the Phantom didn’t have such a problem; it was a much heavier aircraft and didn’t shake in the air. And there was a third argument: “Do you have any idea of how expensive this missile is? A hundred thousand U.S. dollars!” Three arguments, indeed!
Although the money didn’t mean anything to me, I made out that I was seriously impressed, so that Sapir could see I was a logical person. Then, when coffee was served, I got after him again.
“We both have been familiar with the wing of the Mirage for some time,” I told Sapir, “and the Dagger looks to me like a pretty tough piece of pipe, too. I don’t see any of them breaking in the air. As to the sensor, if the cow-eyed missiles we currently carry don’t, why should the Dagger’s eye break?”
I saw his engineer’s face sour and hurried to add: “I promise you we’ll drop our tanks very carefully.”
I was deeply suspicious that all his technical arguments had been prepared on the way from Tel Aviv, and the only reason for refusing my idea was stinginess. Was the Dagger expensive? And what was the cost of a Mirage and its pilot going into battle with improper ordnance?
But Sapir shook his head and got up to leave. I understood that I hadn’t passed the first test. But there was a war raging outside, and all we had were shitty missiles that even the sternest discipline couldn’t convince to hit anything. And within two weeks we were going to be on alert in Refidim. Gnashing my teeth secretly, I set myself a goal: we would do the Refidim alert with Daggers on our wings. But how?
THE WAY TO CIRCUMVENT the system revealed itself, and amazingly it was that same Sapir, the engineer from headquarters, who in the same meeting presented me unintentionally with the solution. Sapir needed four Mirage sorties to flight-test a new pylon they invented in his department. The other Mirage squadrons, up to their necks in work, already turned him down. This was normal in the air force of the 1970s; headquarters had no aircraft for flight testing and had to use the fighter squadrons for tests. Sapir was a nice person, and he preferred to be considerate; he knew how hard we were working. He didn’t want to order us to do it.
“Perhaps the First might agree to do the tests for us?”
“For you, sure,” I fawned sweetly, grasping on the spot what a gift I was being given.
I SPENT ALL THAT EVENING at Khetz’s home. The next morning, when Sapir’s engineers arrived to hang their new pylon under the belly of one of my Mirages, a cart stood near the aircraft with one Dagger missile on it.
“When you are done with the pylon, hang this thing too,” my technical officer requested.
They checked their paperwork. “We don’t have any orders on this missile.”
“That’s just a local check we do here. Here are the missile’s technical manuals.” Engineers love technical manuals.
After some hours of work, the way to hang a Dagger on a Mirage and connect it to the wiring was found. Only then the most senior engineer looked up, and a spark of intelligence shone in his eye. “Is this okay, that’s… say, what’s the hell is going on here?”
“It’s okay,” he was told hesitantly. While they were arguing about it, over their heads in the cockpit Epstein was already being strapped in.
“I am informing headquarters!”
“Sure, go right ahead.”
In the meantime, we acted. We had a test order, four flights to do, and we had no time to waste. The new pylon had to be checked. While the senior engineer was trying to get his phone connection, Mirage No. 15 was already breaking the speed of sound at fifty thousand feet, and checking the robustness of his new pylon in sharp rolls and turns. After twenty minutes he landed. We all gathered around anxiously, waiting for him. The wing was still there, safe and sound, and so was the Dagger—small evil eye and all.
In the evening everybody came to Hatzor. The whole ordnance department left Tel Aviv and came in cars and trucks. Sapir was there, and Dekel, his superior, and even Lt. Col. Joe Aretz himself, the tough head of the department. Fearing what was surely coming for my head I hurried to summon Yak, and as a further defense armed my office with cake from the base kitchen.
A heated exchange broke out. Joe Aretz stabbed me with his spectacles like two white-hot rods of steel. “Where did this chutzpah come from?” he wanted to know, and, “I want to know from whom you stole that missile! Huh?”
