MY SECOND-IN-COMMAND was promoted and Gordon replaced him, and after Gordon came Maj. Shlomo Egozi from the Bats, probably in some clandestine plot with Snir the expectant. They all were strong men and good managers, and they gave me a platform from which I could get the squadron on the right path. Briar also was promoted to a job in base technical management. Mike Lott, his deputy, replaced him as the squadron’s technical officer.
Suddenly this was a different Orange Tails, a new group of people, less stressed, brighter of spirit, perhaps happier, but I knew that deep within, the currents of purposefulness and resoluteness were still flowing, left behind from the initial establishing team. We were moving on, to October 1973, and the Yom Kippur War.
THE FIRST SPARKS OF THAT conflagration began to smolder at the end of 1972, in the North. Again, we began attacking in Syria and Lebanon. We bombed and destroyed a Syrian SAM battery in a place south of Damascus called Sheikh Maskin. This operation was deceptively easy. A few days later we attacked a terrorist training camp near Damascus, again with success. These attacks were in the SAM killing zone, but their silence encouraged those who believed that the SAM was a toothless tiger. Later there was a nighttime dogfight.
I was flying in Syria, with Oren as backseat weapons systems officer (WSO). We cruised around, lights off in total darkness, deep in the Syrian Desert, with Israel in the distance as a colorful line of blinking lights. There were MiGs in the void around us, and from time to time afterburners lit up and went out like distant fireflies. Oren managed to catch echoes on his radar screen and we maneuvered to attack, but this time the new American missiles malfunctioned. A fuse connection kept shorting out, and the missiles refused to launch once, and then again. Suddenly a fireball lit up right over our left shoulder, and turning back, we saw a long tongue of fire, striped blue and purple. We pulled up toward a slim shadow that passed over our cockpits, rolled out, shut his afterburner off, and vanished into the night.
THEN THERE WAS SEPTEMBER 13, 1973, a big day just a bit before the big war, in which the Orange Tails shared, with the rest of the air force, thirteen downed Syrian MiGs. The two kills Oren and I brought back, and another one brought by Egozi, were the first for the Orange Tails, and our joy was great even though Oren was busy pulling his long, blond hair in the backseat for having failed to lock his radar on our third MiG of the day. That MiG escaped into a cumulus cloudbank, and we couldn’t continue searching because we were alone, and our fuel— as usual—was low. We left that MiG and returned to Ramat-David, into a hornets’ nest of the local Hammers’ pilots and their mechanics, who claimed we had come from the South to poach. Only among them, in the Hammers’ ready room, did Oren calm down and finally agree that opening his backseat career with two kills was not so bad, although—he continued complaining—had we knocked down that third one, too, things would be so much better.
When we landed that afternoon back in Hatzerim, after champagne and kisses from Ali, and the cheers of the mechanics, who carried us on their shoulders all the way to my office, I found a note on my desk. “Spector, it was really something! The squadron deserved it, I deserved it—difficult to express my feelings, embarrassed at how happy I am! Simply unforgettable!” It was signed “Yankele Briar.” My tough and aggressive technical officer, a man of the original team, allowed himself only this once such an expression of feeling. His note made me happy indeed.
Whoever connected these events could see how the drum taps were quickening toward October 1973.
JUST A WORD ABOUT the men.
After my disappointment in myself over the First, I no longer sought the affection of my subordinates. I believed in command cut and dried, not in comradeship or leadership. Accordingly, I required only two things at the Orange Tails: clarity and efficiency.
Of course, the men were the principal material I had to work with and the principal risk factor, too. For that reason I was checking on them all the time. Whoever didn’t fit was promptly washed out, fast, before he put roots down and before he could do any damage. I tried to treat my subordinates hard and fair. This was the new rule of life. And to be hard I built walls to keep myself from becoming too personally involved with the men. I didn’t want to become a slave to my emotions or soften my stance. I didn’t hide this attitude from them.
From myself I demanded foresight, and the future was all in my men. The men were not just conglomerates of fortuitous occurrences. The behavior of each hid connecting lines, concealed from the untrained eye, that were the causes of all the phenomena that swirled around them. Gradually I became convinced that the men were directing subtle signals my way, calling my attention by their actions, asking me to watch them.
The men, pilots, navigators, and mechanics were many and complicated and interesting, and my memory alone was not enough. I learned to write down a plethora of details so I wouldn’t forget. I had a separate page for each aircrew and senior mechanic. There were days when I covered dozens of points in that book, and each point colored—good in green, bad in red, neutral in blue. Soon I found myself connecting dots with green, red, and blue pencils. On every Friday afternoon, when work finished and everybody went home for the weekend, I would shut myself in the empty squadron building and add new points and draw my colored lines in my notebook. Very soon I began extrapolating the graphs into the future.
I had ethical doubts. I began to realize that by just selecting the points to be written down, I was insinuating my own personality into the mix. The graphs I produced were not objective, and the forecasts of the future even less so. Was it fair to judge people, reward and punish, and even wash them out on such a basis? This was indeed a good philosophical question of the kind that interested my friend Snir. Still, I had no other database, so I continued cross-checking. And then one evening I took a big step. Looking at a page full of conflicting data I had collected on one of my more complicated officers, I shut my eyes and let my unconscious speak. My hand played with the pencil, and on the white page the curve of my emotions—what I felt about this man—drew itself. I lowered my gaze and saw a circle, but the circle was broken and I saw where the break was. This way the data porridge on the page formed a pattern, and for one brief moment I was enlightened. I believed I understood what drove this guy, and trapped that understanding in words.
The next morning I invited him to my office, and I almost shouted for joy when he raised offended eyebrows and asked, “How did you know? Who told you?” I hid my Sherlock Holmes excitement, and the next move was simple. We went on to solve a latent problem that could have led to serious trouble in the future, and perhaps even have endangered his life.
From that point on I understood that though the details were important, and I had to continue collecting them diligently, the details themselves did not make a picture. The details came from the outside, but the full picture came from within, and the picture was the important thing. Getting to a valid conclusion was not easy; it required a lot of work from me, and it was hazardous, too. I knew that in spite of all the graphs and dots and my unconscious processes, my conclusions were not infallible. Sometimes, when a conclusion surfaced concerning a person or a situation, it surprised me, too. In the beginning I used to delay it, fearing to consolidate my results, even to utter them verbally. Even formulating a conclusion in words created a new situation. But Dvorah, my second mother, had taught me that to cope with reality one has to bring things into the light. Once, when I feared to utter the word “cancer” in her presence, she said to me, smiling, “Don’t be afraid of words, Iftach. Words don’t bite.”
And so I learned to define people and situations, to confront my conclusions even if they seemed weird in the beginning, to declare them loudly, first to myself and then check them with my officers. The more I practiced the method, the better my capability to hit the mark became.
And in this way I learned gradually to “see.”
SOMETIMES A PERSON who generally was “green” showed “red” deviations, and then it was necessary to take him aside and to find out—directly or indirectly—what was going on with him, and to watch him closely. But “deep blue” also was not good enough, not combat-fit. Blues had to be shaken up. And so I was prying and digging inside myself, and the men talked to me in their secret language from the pages, and more ideas rose in my mind and I brainstormed with myself, and without realizing it I learned to command men. And only when I had finished going over the whole fifty or so pages and the darkness of Friday night was creeping from the windows into the room, would I get up and stretch, yawn, lock the notebook in the drawer, free the secretary standing by, and say good night to the readiness crew who remained to spend the night in the ready room. On the way home I would circle the aircraft hangars to wish all the mechanics a good Sabbath. Later, in the dark of night, I would see those
