ON DECEMBER 5, 1971, we called in all our men from around the country and opened the new squadron. It was a cold, blue, winter day. A hundred people—pilots, technicians, and clerks—met on the truck parking lot. I sat all of them on the asphalt and told them for the first time why we all were here in Hatzerim, and what I expected from them. They came to a drab and distant place, but the things they heard were clear and resolute.
We took them on a tour of our assets, which were unlike anything they had known in the places they came from: a lone, battered building at the end of the remotest runway. Inside it, in the briefing room, instead of the briefing center with boards and charts, they saw a blackboard standing in front of a line of plastic chairs with metal pipe legs. The temporary operations office was near the rest rooms until the end of renovations of the underground floor and consisted of nothing more than a hand-cranked field telephone on a chair. But the rooms were washed and clean—the setup team had cleaned up the night before.
Our base had no housing for our people, and the Oranges’ mechanics were issued large army tents. But before the arrival of our people we all got together, officers and pilots, and fixed up their quarters. We assembled bunk beds for them, brought mattresses and blankets from the quartermaster stores, and on every bed were put two clean blue utility uniforms.
FIVE DAYS LATER, ON December 10, our six borrowed Phantoms landed in Hatzerim—tail numbers 43, 44, 49, 59, 65, and 67. All six, with their twelve noisy jet engines, rolled down the slope, entering what was definitely the cleanest, most efficient, and best-looking subterranean hangar in the whole Israeli Air Force. The domes were all whitewashed, with plenty of mercury lights. All the required installations—refueling, air pressure, tool storage, office space—were new and perfect. Everything gleamed.
A short ceremony took place, and the flag of the new Orange Tails was raised for the first time by the air force commander, Maj. Gen. Moti Hod, and handed to me. This was Friday noon, and when the sodas and peanuts were consumed and the few guests had gotten into their cars and headed back north, we all changed clothes and washed our new Phantoms with water and soap until even the sooty metal of the jet pipes shone. When Saturday dawned, everyone scattered to his quarters or tents, but not before the hangar floors were washed again. From now on, we all knew how things should look in the Orange Tails.
When that Saturday’s morning I couldn’t restrain myself and dragged my two small boys down to the squadron to look at my new aircraft, I found a crowd assembled at the hangar, and the guards struggling to keep them off from touching “the dirty half dozen,” lest they spoil their virgin beauty.
ON SUNDAY WE BEGAN TO FLY, and from then on we squeezed those six Phantoms to the utmost. All we had were those six, and right away we stripped one of them for disassembly in the service hangar—the technicians had to learn the guts of this large and complicated monster—so we were left with five, and no reserves. On these five ships we intended to build the infrastructure for a standard Phantom squadron, equal in size to its three elder sisters. A month after the opening of the midget squadron we became operational. With a bit of chutzpah, we viewed ourselves as “The squadron of the South,” the first line of defense against the Egyptian enemy. Though operations were managed via a field telephone on a chair, in early January 1972 we mounted our first operational flight. I led a four-ship flight patrolling the Egyptian border, covering the First, which was going farther in. The Mirages were doing a real reconnaissance mission, and we just flew along as insurance. We didn’t delude ourselves that something was going to happen this time, but we briefed the flight as if we were going to fight the whole Egyptian Army and Navy. As we returned proudly from the long, eventless patrol, we knew that on the control map in the air force’s command center, the symbol “1/Orange” had crawled down the Strait of Suez, and we had been visible on radarscopes in all the radar units. We were on the map.
AND THEN THERE WERE THE DAYS when we had only two or three aircraft available for training. The mechanics stayed up nights and worked selflessly to fix every problem and have every aircraft ready to fly every morning. Most of our technicians were young and inexperienced, airmen eighteen or nineteen years old, and when I passed the hangar at night to see what was going on, I found the few veteran technicians with their heads in the fuel tanks or lying soaked with black oil under the bellies of the aircraft, while a circle of the new techs stood around and repeated for them in loud voices, in broken English, procedures from the technical manual for the Phantom. When I first saw it, I was worried.
“Is this the way to get it done?” I asked Briar. But later I was amazed to discover the dialectical beauty of our situation: since our squadron was new and inexperienced vis-a-vis the other squadrons, we gradually developed a strong technical culture built on a fresh and stable foundation.
THE PILOTS HAD NO TIME for self-pity, either. We all were new on the aircraft, and it was necessary to get flight time. We were flying all day, every day of the week. In January we went farther, adding six flight nights, but after we realized that everybody was falling off their feet, we went back to one night a week. To get in even more time, we began flying double shifts. This was a way of getting in two sorties for the price of one: after landing, instead of returning the aircraft to the mechanics for maintenance, we parked for refueling without leaving our cockpits or shutting the engines off, and in essence stayed aloft. When the aircraft was refueled, we took off again for another round. In this way—it was at the edge of the margin of safety—we could get five or six sorties from each aircraft daily instead of two or three. When we didn’t have enough aircraft to get a flight of four airborne, we asked other squadrons to join us, either to fly with us or to compete against us in the air.
OUR ORDER OF PREFERENCE was clear—first of all, operations and training, while living conditions were not a topic of discussion yet. The room slated to become the squadron’s ready room remained bare. In its center stood a Formica table, and breakfast was jam from a jar and sliced bread. In the hot summer hours at about noon, pilots would nap sitting on chairs in every room, facing the wall, or lying on the cool floor of the corridor. At night, the readiness crews slept on beds near the door that led to the hangar, covering their heads with military blankets against the mosquitoes.
WE THOUGHT UP NEW WAYS to improve our flight performance. We divided ourselves into fixed crews of pilot and navigator—not common in the IAF, which prefers standardization. My own partner was Roy Manoff, a thin, dark junior officer who had joined us after his initial training at the Falcons. Manoff knew the Phantom better than I, and I knew more about flying. And so we got together, a twenty-year-old second lieutenant and a thirty-year-old major, planned the flight, and for the next hour shared the work as equal partners. After landing we split up—me to command the squadron, and Manoff to the navigation room to draw maps. He was a serious young man, very reticent; perhaps after five years in Israel—he had come from Argentina—he didn’t trust his command of Hebrew. Instead he would smile with a mouth full of gleaming white teeth. While he rarely spoke, his short comments were always on the mark. Soon we all realized that he understood things in a different, deeper sense. At that time I didn’t yet know about EQ, emotional quotient, but I began rethinking my former opposition to the two-seat fighter.
We wanted to improve our teamwork and thought that introducing our navigators to the pilot’s functions might help. There was a rare asset next door—the flying school with all its two-seat Fouga trainers. The base commander, Colonel Bareket, agreed to approve some flight hours for us. He only asked me, “What happens if all the Phantom squadrons want this, too?” I answered him with the same language I learned from his friend and colleague at Hatzor, Colonel Harlev. He laughed, and then for a while our navigators flew as pilots in Fougas, and trained simulating attacks on each other, operating the gunsight and struggling with pilot emergencies.
IN MARCH 1972, FOUR MONTHS after our inception as a squadron, we checked and decided we had finished the initial stage. Then we wrote and published a thin booklet announcing the completion of a new Phantom squadron. At the end of the booklet we added a plan for new staffing procedures that was designed to direct everyone—from headquarters down to the floor sweepers—regarding how to establish a new fighter squadron. We gave lists of equipment, timetables, goals, and targets—including those we hadn’t reached yet. Our booklets came back with a contemptuous dismissal: who are those nobodies so pretentious as to dictate procedures for IAF staffing? Well, perhaps the process was flawed, but for us the writing itself was a binding public declaration: “We said it, we did it, and we will do more.”
