thought that dilemmas like this one might help the education of our pilots. Although I remained content with my decision to abort in this particular instance, the discussions of the event were hard for me emotionally.
BUT BACK TO THE ORANGE TAILS, before we landed after the aborted flight to Damascus. There was an interesting sidebar to that flight, which the squadron never bothered to advertise. On our way home I called the northern controller and reminded him that we still had sixty-four five-hundred-kilo bombs, and asked for an alternate target.
“Find out where we might be needed,” I told him. “We’ll stand by for orders.” And for added impact I told him, “We have time—plenty of fuel.” We had very little fuel by then, but no one in my formation demurred. So we circled over Galilee, conserving fuel and waiting for a target. At last the controller came back on and passed us over to ground army control in the Golan Heights. A familiar voice answered my call on that channel. It was Sivron, a veteran from ops. His voice was excited when he came on and said, “You’re a gift from heaven!”
I had no fuel for friendly banter, and I cut him short: “I have thirty tons of ordnance for you. You have a target for us?”
“I sure do! I have a fat target for you, Ascot!” Sivron’s voice was different from his usual slow talk; he spoke fast.
“Then let’s have it, and fast.” Sixteen pairs of eyes were watching fuel gages. Sivron directed us to use this and that map.
“Look,” I told him, “we have no maps and no time to waste. Get us there somehow, and quick!”
“I’ll find a way,” Sivron answered. “Stand by.”
We kept circling over the northern part of the Sea of Galilee, with engines on minimum. I refrained from asking my pilots about their fuel levels, so as not to require them to answer. I was waiting for the first of my pilots to announce “Short on fuel, returning to base.” We were all below the required minimum to continue, and I imagined how the dropping out would go. But my sixteen men were still with me, mouths shut. I kept my mouth shut, too, using all my willpower to avoid bugging Sivron down there. He was doing his job, and it was better not to interrupt him.
As far as I was concerned, we were going to attack in any case. If Sivron took any more time we would have to penetrate and attack in a more economical way, at lower speeds. This would be more dangerous. But I didn’t care about danger anymore. By this time I almost wanted to pay. I guess all my pilots were aware of what was going on, and I was becoming prouder—in a dark and bitter way—of my men, with their hearts in their mouths, still silent.
Sivron came back on, gasping for breath. He was a great navigator, and had found a way to direct us to the target without maps. He gave us a starting point—the estuary of the Jordan River into the Kinneret—and calculated for us headings and time to target. When we finished writing down the numbers, he described the target itself. This was the main axis of attack of the Syrian Army going from the east toward the Jordan River.
“When you pull up,” he explained, “you should see before you two black hills, between them a road, and on that road and around it there should be massive Syrian forces moving west—tanks, artillery, trucks of all kinds, everything. Those forces are the target,” he said. “Divide your fire, hit as much as you can.”
“And where are our own forces?”
“Far to the west. No sweat; you won’t hit them.”
I replied with a laconic “Thanks” and went to work. I had no time to waste. I ordered the formation in line behind me. I gave brief instructions and hurried in first. They followed me one after another, each aircraft taking a slightly different heading—two degrees right from its predecessor—and so we penetrated into the Golan spreading like a fan, each Phantom racing toward another section of that axis to engage another Syrian target. We all flew very low because the whole area was covered by SAM-6 missiles. It was more than an hour and twenty-five minutes since takeoff, and we were really short on fuel, and avoided lighting our afterburners, because it was fuel that was going to dictate how this improvisation turned out.
On the way, Sivron suddenly broke in on the radio and doubled our flight time—he had made his first calculation with the wrong scale and discovered his mistake at the last moment—but the change came in time. We just changed the clock, and when my second hand reached zero I pulled up from among the basalt rocks and thorn bushes, looked down, and there it was.
Here was the road, and there were groups of vehicles and tanks scattered on and around it like black flies on a cord. Field artillery flashed, leaving black clouds. I rolled over, put my sight on the largest group of the lot, and eight half-ton bombs made a line of bursts on the ground, blooming with clouds of dust and smoke. With the last kick I turned immediately west, reduced power to the most economical setting, and circled a little to see my men coming out one after another. Finally we all were out, and the touchy question could be asked. Those with less than 1,500 pounds of fuel—that is, several minutes left to keep airborne—were sent to land immediately at nearby Ramat-David to fill up and return to our home base. The war was still on, and we had to get ready for the next mission orders.
When I got back from Ramat-David and entered the squadron building, there was already a call for me. Sivron was on the phone. His pleasant voice had resumed its regular slow, drowsy rhythm, and I tried to cut him short again, thanking him for the extraordinary efficiency in the planning of that attack, and to please go away, I had work to do. But Sivron had a lot to say, and before he got to the point Maj. Gen. Moti Hod got on the line, too. I gathered that our former air force commander was now working in the northern command post. I had difficulty in understanding their voices; they both spoke as if they were a little drunk.
They enthused, blessed me, blessed the Orange Tails, described again and again how tough the situation was on the Golan, our ground forces almost breaking under the ferocious Syrian attack, and how they kept calling for air support and there was no support to be had. The air force didn’t have anything to spare—and then, when hope was almost gone, the Orange Tails had appeared. Suddenly, as if from nowhere.
“You came to us right from heaven! Eight Phantoms!” cried Moti, and said, “Do you understand what that means?”
Yes, I knew what eight Phantoms were worth.
“And what an attack it was,” he said, “right on the money! You completely broke the Syrian attack. Don’t you understand what you did?” Sivron asked me. Embarrassed, I admitted that no, not really. The Damascus fiasco was still filling my head.
New, deeper voices joined the telephone conversation. It happened that our unexpected hits had halted the Syrian ground thrust to the Jordan River along that axis. Some of the senior officers in the North wanted to add personal praises and blessings for saving the day. Someone remembered the Ad Halom Bridge, where Israeli Air Force Messerschmitts had stopped the Egyptian Army on its way to Tel Aviv in the War of Independence in 1948. Baffled, I asked permission to hang up the receiver. I had a war to fight, a squadron to run, and already a new mission order was coming down for the Orange Tails.
Even years after that, people kept appearing to visit me, men who were there, from simple soldiers to major generals, to tell me what happened there, to say thanks, how lucky we were to have you in time. I answered them all, blushing, that I got there only by chance.
Yes, luck is important, too.
20
Hassan Again
IN THE NINETEEN DAYS of the Yom Kippur War I flew forty-two combat sorties. Some of those were simple flights, but quite a few were complicated and dangerous. The summit of my personal efforts was on October 10, when after two attacks on airfields in Egypt and Syria, and two more on ground forces at the Suez Canal, I made a fifth sortie, late at night. We patrolled over the Red Sea, south of the Sinai Peninsula. It was pitch dark and we were both dead tired. Ofer, in the backseat, was alternately snoring and waking up. I was so wasted that so as not to sleep at the stick I scratched my thighs with my commando knife.
