did all this with a complicated aircraft he didn’t know and had never flown before. Ran took off into battle almost immediately, without any grace period.
Truly, when he first harnessed himself in the Phantom, the War of Attrition was close to its end, and he had only three weeks of fighting before the end came. But neither he nor any of us, who watched him admiringly, could have known that. Battles raged daily, and the end was not in sight. The fact is that the moment Ran took over the battered Falcons, this squadron was energized and continued fighting. They didn’t win over the missiles, and they suffered additional losses. But they returned to being a squadron, a fighting unit.
THE FUTURE HAD MORE TROUBLE in store for this interesting and problematic squadron, and in 1973 she would need one more Frank Savage. But at the end of the war of attrition, in July 1970, it was Ran Pecker who grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out of the deep mud she was stuck in.
15
Comradeship
A FIRST OPERATIONAL EXPERIENCE with this missile was attained in 1958 over the Strait of Formosa, when Taiwanese fighters launched Sidewinders against Chinese MiGs. One of the American missiles fell into the hands of the Chinese and was transported to the USSR, where a Soviet imitation received the name Atoll. The basic design was used all over the world for the development of many similar missiles, including the Israeli Shafrir. The Sidewinder and its derivatives are the most common air-to-air missiles in the world and are used in most air forces.
The advantages of the heat-seeking missile are its simplicity, low cost (“electronically sophisticated like an ordinary radio set, and mechanically complex like a washing machine”), and independence. Once the seeker is locked on a target, the missile goes for it without any need to enslave the shooting aircraft or its radar to direct it to the target. The limit of the missile is the necessity to have visual contact; thus it is useful mainly at shorter range.
ONCE MORE I HAVE TO PRESENT a fair picture. The world is not perfect, and so when the air force’s pilots were fighting, getting killed, or falling into enemy prisons, not everybody in the air force behaved exemplarily. One day, when I was still in the flight school in Hatzerim, we drove up to the base for lunch. Near the dining hall there is a large field, and some air cadets were playing soccer on it. Among the players was one black-haired, handsome officer, tall and well built. He took balls on the fly and converted them into goals. I remember his happy face and his big laugh. He and his way of playing were very impressive. I shall call him Eddy.
We stood near the field and watched. Suddenly somebody slapped me on the back. I turned and saw Asher Snir. I jumped for joy: where did he come from? Snir was not stationed at Hatzerim, and lately we saw each other rather rarely. As a substitute, we wrote letters. He used to call me Baller and I called him Brainer and we both were happy, since we thought we both had this and that. So we stood there gabbing.
Suddenly, when he saw me watching the game, Snir said in contempt and anger, “Come on, let’s go away from here. I can’t look at him.”
“At whom, Eddy?” I asked. “What the problem with him?”
“Don’t you know?”
I admitted I didn’t. I had no notion of what he was talking about.
Snir told me that this Eddy, a navigator and instructor in the flight school, had refused transfer to Phantoms.
The new aircraft, already involved in a very tough war, were critically short of navigators. The navigator in a Phantom is the operator of many instruments and weapons systems from the rear seat. It is a special and vital job, and at that time and for years later, too, the shortage was so serious that sometimes the squadrons had to put pilots in the backseat as “weights.” The Phantom squadrons were screaming for navigators, and the air force scraped them from the bottom of the barrel and from every hole and corner. Navigators were created from the aging, stiff-jointed transport crews yanked from their seats in Dakotas. Navigators were produced by shortened courses in flight school, kids not yet ready to shave. They were put in the backseat and sent, a day after they got their wings, straight into the maelstrom over enemy territory, to find their way and sometimes death or imprisonment.
“Eddy,” Snir told me, “decided he was not ready to go to Phantoms.”
“So what is he doing here?” I asked.
Snir didn’t understand my question: “He instructs, he gives classes. On the evenings he goes to class at the university.”
“That’s not what I asked,” I corrected myself. “How come he is still here?”
“Fact.”
Indeed a fact. Eddy would go on as an educator, sending his friends and students to battle, until he finished his full hitch and retired honorably, handsome with his unused wings, and with all the academic titles. To this day he continues publishing his Zionist articles in magazines.
BACK TO JULY 1970. Again, we are in the War of Attrition, and I am just a major, the new commander of the Fighting First Mirage squadron.
The one Dagger missile I got from Khetz was still being test-flown on our Mirages, and it was doing well in spite of the hard time we gave it—jettisoning tanks and so forth. On Tuesday we launched it against a decoy. It launched well, hit the target, and that was it. We typed a one-page report and got it to Joe Aretz’s pals at headquarters, asking for approval to use the new weapon in flight operations—and for some supply, just a few of the missiles. No answer.
On the other hand, Khetz’s promise was kept in spite of his death. On Thursday, five days after his death, carts arrived from the Falcons carrying six long, grayish tubes. The First flew down to the Sinai, to take over the ready line at Refidim. Three of our seven Mirages carried Daggers, two on each. My direct superior, Colonel Harlev, and all the headquarters staff knew about it without knowing. My squadron was armed with the new unauthorized weapons, and my commanders sat in their offices, keeping silent and waiting to see what would happen.
ON JULY 27, BEFORE DUSK, we were scrambled to the northern section of the Suez Canal. The controller directed us to search the area thoroughly: “There are MiGs!” The haze was heavy, and the setting sun in the west added to the difficult conditions and created a brown, blinding halo. We kept a safe distance, and the water of the canal looked like a shining strip.
My wingman, Yaari, saw them first and called them out, “Bogies at eleven o’clock!”
Immediately I saw them, too—two small, black silhouettes with swept-back wings. The planes rose from the ground and climbed. It was hard to discern in which direction they were flying, toward us or away. They rolled over in front of me and dived, dropping black dots, and straightened over the Egyptian sands to flee home. In a minute I passed over the blast of the bombs they left behind.
At low level, my Mirage was wild and wanted to go. My speed indicator ran up fast and reached 750 knots —more than 1,300 kilometers per hour, high over the speed of sound. We raced deeper and deeper into Egypt, like tornadoes over the surface of the delta marshes, skimming the water plains that in the setting sun were painted with different textures by slow currents of water and wind. We buzzed dozens of boats with their white sails. The low sun blinded us with reflections in the water, broken here and there by wide, muddy expanses. The closest MiG
