attacked simulated enemy opponents in the air and on the ground. We trained new Mirage pilots, and our level of flying was high, with no accidents whatsoever. The squadron was in excellent condition. Still, I got no enthusiastic feedback from my pilots. What else could a squadron commander do? I began doubting myself.
I concluded that in everything involving flying I knew what I was doing, but on the command side something was missing. I felt stuck. I didn’t know how to command. I understood I had to go.
It was clear to me that I was to part with my beloved Mirage and the green lawns of Hatzor. This change was taking me down a new path in life. I knew that from now on I would not be dancing in the air anymore, but would be attacking ground targets with heavy bombs and struggling with SAM missile batteries. I knew Ali didn’t like it at all, though she said only a few words about it.
And I was leaving someone else.
“Goodbye, Hassan,” I thought. “Now we are done forever. I shall leave you in the capable hands of Gonen, Epstein, and their friends.”
Well, what did I know?
I DID ONE IMPORTANT THING in the last weeks at the Fighting First: some serious soul-searching.
I opened a new notebook and wrote on the cover: “Establishment of the Orange Tails.” The first pages were devoted to a severe self-criticism of my first tenure as squadron commander, where I had succeeded and where I had failed. For some deficiencies I could devise possible remedies, but on a few I just threw up my hands—they seemed to be faults rooted in my nature. It was my capacity for leadership that remained a mystery. So I decided to stop agonizing and moved on. This will take care of itself; time will tell.
Then came the list of decisions: against each line item I wrote what I was going to do differently in the Orange Tails. This process reminded me of my youth, when I had devised my “decisions for life”—always positive, all inside, etc.—but now these weren’t decisions of a young dreamer anymore. I was thirty. I had made mistakes in the past; I analyzed them and drew appropriate conclusions, and I was going to do something about them.
WHEN I LEFT THE PODIUM after I had passed the squadron’s flag to Maj. Avi Lanir, there were cheers and affectionate cries from the mechanics. As anticipated, the pilots stood silently. On my way out I stopped my car near a Mirage hangar. I climbed the ladder onto one of them, and the gentle fighter nodded its beak to me, as always. The Phantom that I was now learning to fly was cumbersome and heavy, and when I climbed aboard, it didn’t notice my coming at all. I patted the Mirage, and drove down to Hatzerim.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE Orange Tails fighter squadron was difficult and full of problems.
First, there was a delay in the arrival of the aircraft we were supposed to get from America. The Americans were annoyed with us for some reason by then, and at one time they even announced that the contract for the Phantoms was canceled. The whole concept for establishing the Orange Tails was shaken, and my small team, which assembled every Thursday in a small office in Hatzerim, wondered whether our transfers from our units, and all the work we were doing, was going to be for nothing.
And the work was endless. We had to build a fighter squadron from scratch. There were the five of us, each coming from a different part of the air force—three pilots, one technical officer, and one nineteen-year-old female adjutant. No one had Phantom experience, so we started by deciding that each had to go out to see what people were doing in the other Phantom squadrons.
The stationing of the new squadron at Hatzerim was another problem. The Negev base lacked resources for our incoming personnel and their families. In the early 1970s Hatzerim was just five years old, a small, dusty place, limited in just about everything. The roads to the Negev desert were few and patched. There was nothing green or shady there, and the nearby town, Beer-Sheva, was just a border town, with a few narrow streets in which our women could find no shopping. The best restaurant was Romanian Maurice’s Chorba Soup Corner. As a substitute for theater and dancing you could wait in line at Sarussi’s slaughterhouse till the chicken you had selected for Friday’s dinner flew out of the door headless to dance its last in the yard among the rubble and the putrid puddles. No wonder almost nobody in the Phantom community wanted to join us.
Our main lack was in professional air and ground crews. Air force headquarters supplied us mainly with rookies who had just finished flight and technical school. Instantly, even without seeing them in Hatzerim, we directed them to the older Phantom squadrons for training on their jobs. We, of course, had no Phantoms or professional technicians at our disposal. Everybody was aware of our questionable future. Would we be a squadron or not? When I came to our sister Phantom squadrons to learn to fly the aircraft, I was met by standoffish looks. They thought, Who knows? He might use his time with us to steal our experienced crews. Similar suspicions followed the other members of my team. These were false suspicions. I didn’t try to lure anybody, and I strongly forbade any of my men even to allude to anything like that. I had no interest in anyone who didn’t ask to come on his own initiative. They should come and beg.
WE HAD NO IDEA WHEN—or if—we would get our promised Phantoms so that we could create a new squadron. And so, in some perverse exercise of logic, we worked even harder. We wanted to create facts. Our efforts bore the stamp of a challenge, as if everything would be created from inside us. We strove to be seen and heard, and turned our lives exemplary. We wrote everything and published lessons and conclusions immediately after every stage. People laughed at our openness, but the materials that accumulated began to create a clear agenda of the process of creating a squadron, and every decision we took we could base on preceding actions.
Our base had several subterranean hangars for the new aircraft. Those hangars had been standing empty for a long time, and the systems of infrastructure—fuel, electricity, communication—were out of order. Some were just big holes in the ground, their concrete floors covered by sand dunes brought in by the wind. Then we brought back to Hatzerim all our people who had found no place to study the Phantom, and established a company of renovators. They put on utilities and began cleaning, whitewashing, and pulling electric cables. When parts and supplies began to arrive, we opened a warehouse in one of the hangars and then a shop for treating Phantom components.
We got base housing for our squadron offices. It stood at the far rim of the base, past the runways. It was a lone, empty building, vacant perhaps from the time of its construction, and the rooms were deserted and shabby. There was no telephone or electricity, so for the time being the virtual Orange Tails squadron continued to be run from a small office at base headquarters, near the offices of the rabbi and the welfare officer. In the whole air force there was no written material that could teach us how to build a squadron from scratch. No guru knew what was needed and from whom to get it, what should be done, and in which order to do it. The base commander, Col. Shaike Bareket, was very smart and didn’t try to interfere in the process. He would smoke a cigarette with us, listen for a while, and leave with a few words of encouragement. We had been thrown into the water to sink or swim, and it was no wonder that at times we felt alone.
THEN AIR FORCE HEADQUARTERS saw there was no end in sight and decided to give us two Phantoms from each squadron, to start us off with six aircraft. Then the opposition to the Orange Tails peaked. Everybody was short of aircraft, professional teams, equipment, munitions—and money. At staff meetings in Tel Aviv we were openly characterized as a “toy squadron” that was screwing things up for the other Phantom squadrons. Each time we were called to discuss another facet of the Orange Tails’ establishment, the participants would produce lists of their own needs, and somehow they always matched what we were to get. Staff officers began to vaccilate, and soon I felt a lack of assurance spreading. Orders to pass men or equipment to us were delayed.
Once, I entered the office of my former base commander in Hatzor, Colonel Harlev, and told him that in spite of a clear order from headquarters, we hadn’t gotten a shipment of Dagger missiles from his base. These missiles were needed to enable us to enter operational readiness.
“You’re not getting them,” he told me.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Major Spector, I suggest you take care of your squadron and I’ll take care of my base,” he lectured me. “Everyone should mind his own business—this is the way to have the air force be successful.”
On the way out I met Nathan, the longtime head of Hatzor’s construction team. He was a civilian, a gentle giant, a very sensitive guy who always knew how to help and advise the young, confused couples who arrived at family housing.
“What’s up, Spector?” he asked me in his Polish accent. Before his warm smile, and the concenetration camp
