of this? And who were Lieutenant Colonel Spector and his Orange Tails to teach them anything here in the wilderness of Hatzerim?
I understood, and I was determined to give them a course as good as the one we got at the Bats.
AND INDEED DURING THOSE three months, until the course ended in July 1973, I gave them my all, and everything available to us at the Orange Tails. Gordon, my second-in-command, had to use the squadron in the service of the Baboons. He ran the Orange Tails’ routine in my place, and we both met only evenings to report what happened, to coordinate the work, and to set limits. I couldn’t watch the Orange Tails closely enough, so I limited it.
In the mornings, the Baboons flew first, and the Orange Tails received the remainder of aircraft, firing ranges, munitions, and the leftovers of eggs and white cheese from breakfast. When the Baboons initiated extensive flight exercises, the squadron would support them with “slaves” who drew their maps and flew under their command and according to their instructions. And when the course invited lecturers, the Orange Tails would sweep the floors, mow the grass, and serve the refreshments. I met my squadron over those three months only beyond the limits of my other life. A slap on the shoulder of a mechanic here, praise to a clerk there, an interview with a pilot at a critical moment were key elements.
But time kept heating things up, and when I delve into my logbook I find operational alerts and scrambles, and even one real dogfight, against a few Syrian MiGs in the north of Lebanon.
From my patrol area at sea, I watched the vapor trails and saw the MiGs closing on Eitan Ben Eliahu, who was on a photo intel mission over Syria, trying to cut him off. I called in a warning, but the aerial controller—far away in Israel—didn’t understand the situation developing on his screen. I made another radio call, but still getting no reply, I announced loud and clear, “There’s going to be an engagement out here!”
Still no response. So I took my four-ship section in at full speed and cut off the MiGs from their prey. Eitan sneaked out of there unscathed, and a MiG went down. But my call was heard, and Benny Peled, second-in- command and air force commander designate, thought I had decided to rebel against the air force’s central control or mount my own war against Syria. After landing I was summoned promptly (Don’t change, come right away!) to Tel Aviv.
Dark cumulonimbus clouds covered the boardroom’s ceiling, and high electric tension filled the air. Lightning was primed to strike and thunder to roar. Benny climbed the podium with his mustache bristling and called on me, and everybody waited to see what would happen. I got to my feet and explained what had actually taken place, then drew on the blackboard a sketch of the situation as I had seen it from my cockpit. Of course, I was not alone there; an additional twenty eyes had seen it all. Benny’s whiskers gradually went to half mast, and when I asked him what I was up there for, if not to get Eitan out if he got into trouble, he even said he was sorry. To Benny’s credit, he always was ready to think anew. He canceled his preliminary decision to court-martial me, and the whole thing ended as usual: no medals, no jail time.
To me, this was nothing new. Authority is what you make of it, and the responsibility ends up on your shoulders no matter what happens.
I CAN’T FIND THE SUMMARY of the advanced leadership course I published among the few papers I still have, and this is indeed a pity. Perhaps there is a copy of this document in the air force’s archives. It was a slim, blue booklet. All I can find is a letter from Benny Peled in my logbook. There, in his own handwriting, are the following words: “I trembled reading your work. In a word, ‘beautiful.’ Surely we shall attain our goal. Benny.” This letter was stuck on the page from August 1973, two months before the war. But the fact is that when the war broke out, we were not even close to the target set by the Baboons in their experiments.
AND THIS IS THE CRUX of the story. In spite of the negative opinion of the operations department, the ten trainees of my course went out to do research, trying out ways to attack mobile SAM batteries on the move. The name we invented for such creatures was Wild in the Savanna. Later this name became the official designation.
To be sure, we didn’t disobey orders this time. In a long conversation with Colonel Agassi, chief of operations and Avihu’s superior, he listened and confirmed that I had analyzed the problem correctly. Agassi even proposed some ideas of his own. But permission alone wasn’t enough. I needed vast resources for this job, mainly dummy mobile batteries that could run around the Sinai so my pilots could face the practical difficulty in finding them and devise new ways to do it. In short, I needed several dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles, drivers, mechanics, a doctor, a nurse, a ground officer to run the show, rifles for the guards, gas and oil, communication sets, blankets, food and water, and a bunch of administrative stuff. Agassi shrugged. He was the chief of operations, not administration.
My base also didn’t have this kind of ground resources. Again at air force headquarters, the training department would not accept Agassi’s oral promises.
“You are talking nonsense!” Yossi raged at me. “I have no place to get all this stuff from!” I found myself going from door to door, descending the chain of command from captain down to lieutenant and then to the quartermaster sergeant. There was no one to talk to in the air force about land vehicles, so I was sent back to Hatzerim.
I stopped the car in Beer-Sheva, at the door of Ariel Sharon’s office. Major General Ariel Sharon was at that time the commander of the Southern Command of the Israeli Army, the general responsible for the ground front with Egypt. I didn’t know Sharon personally, and he didn’t know who I was. He was ending his military service, but he was not dismissive of the story I told him. I saw before me a very-good-looking man, still not fat, his full hair white. He was wearing a green uniform with a red beret. I stood in his office door in my flight suit and no hat, and perhaps the only reason I was allowed in was my unruly appearance. General Sharon had a broad view and could make decisions. After fifteen minutes I got a division of command cars and access to all the target ranges in the Southern Command. All I had to do was instruct the commander of my “division”—an officer who came running and stood at attention in front of me—when to go, where, and what to do in the area.
I left General Sharon and returned to Hatzerim. I never met him again in person, but following that short discussion I received an interesting note from him. This was in the midst of the Yom Kippur War. Sharon was fighting with his corps against the Egyptians on the Suez Canal front. Whenever he saw the orange tails of the Orange Tails streaking over him into Egypt and out again—so was the message he sent me—he knew I was there for him.
MY COMMAND CARS, IN SMALL companies, began raising dust in the wide expanse of the Sinai Desert. They roved around and stopped in places according to instructions by our exercise management team. Then they arranged themselves in deployments similar to our estimations of how those new mobile SAM batteries would. From their hidden positions they would watch us and launch signal rockets and smoke grenades, to simulate missiles launches.
The Baboons had prepared themselves well to do battle. They patrolled outside the danger zone, and they devised methods to locate the small, scattered groups of vehicles over the vast distances (we called it independent intelligence-gathering). Sometimes we employed our Phantoms as simulated missiles. They came at us from the “enemy area” at top speed, emerging and pulling up to us. Each “damaged” Baboon left the game, made a circle to cool off and think it over, and then returned for a second try and then a third. Slowly we found ways of locating the mobile batteries from a distance. We tempted and threatened them, and the batteries reacted: they launched and exposed themselves. Only then did we go in and attack the targets. Whenever we succeeded in scoring a hit on our target, it would set off colored smoke as a sign that they were
AT THE END OF THE BBN advanced leadership course, every participant on the course and some leaders of the Orange Tails had preliminary knowledge of how mobile SAM batteries on the loose could be located and hunted down. We nicknamed our product, the method we invented, “SAM hunting.” It was an extremely difficult and challenging way of flying, and the maneuvers required of the pilots and navigators were extreme and on the edge of
