Near the end of the war the drum beat faster. I find today in my logbook four sorties on October 22, two on SAM batteries in Egypt. This was the Orange Tails’ first opportunity to test the hunting tactics we inherited from the Baboons. The new tactic worked. We located and destroyed two SAM batteries unscathed.
In one of these sorties, I met Hassan again.
LOOKING BACK ON ALL THE COMBAT flights in my life, most were not difficult, especially when compared to our training flights. No MiG pilot I ever met was a rival equal to Epstein, Salant, or Slapak, and no enemy as scary as Ran Pecker. But real-life dogfights had unique elements: breaking at the right second and having a missile—or a MiG firing its cannons—overshoot and miss. Or arriving just in time to clear a MiG off a friendly tail (this especially is an emotional experience). Or to get into a hot fight and find that one external fuel tank refuses to drop from your right wing, and your Mirage—like a race car with a flat tire at top speed—rolls right on its own, and only right, spiraling almost out of control toward a MiG growing fast in the windshield—whoa! And then you hear yourself yelling like crazy, “Break right, Hassan! Yil’an Dinac, RIGHT!”
I don’t know which was my toughest aerial action, but one of them was no doubt the worst. And this one was in the Orange Tails, in the Yom Kippur War, on October 10, 1973. MiGs were active throughout that war, and huge, multiparticipant dogfights were taking place between them and our Mirages over the front lines. There were “harvest days” when Mirage pilots felled dozens of MiGs. My squadron, on the other hand, was busy attacking ground targets, and we saw much less of those MiGs, but when it happened, it was always under tough conditions, deep in enemy territory. I met MiGs five times during the war, three times in Syria and twice in Egypt, and on four of these occasions I hit them only out of necessity.
Except for that one fucked-up sortie.
That time it was a duel, a single Phantom versus a single MiG-21, nothing complicated. But by the end this dogfight was the most difficult and dangerous of them all, and overall it was bad, bad. And it occurred just due to my own personal guilt, and I got out of it miraculously. Just like our mentor from the old Scorpions Rami Harpaz used to say, “Smart enough to get out of a situation smarter people avoid in the first place.”
BUT FIRST LET US DISCUSS the order of preferences.
The moment I became a Phantom pilot, I understood and accepted that from then on I was not a hotshot pilot anymore and that my squadron and I were taking on a hard and necessary job, less romantic than air-to-air combat. We were entrusted to put ordnance on ground targets. As attack pilots we Phantoms do not chase MiGs but fly to our target, attack it, and return by the shortest possible way to reload and get ready for the next sortie. Our contribution to victory depended on us not deviating from our routes on the way to the targets.
This may sound obvious, even trivial, but it is not. Fighter pilots brought up on the tales of the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, want to shoot down enemy fighters, and they find it extremely hard to see them and still go on their way. They have to fight the desire to “clean the aircraft” (that is, jettison the bombs) and go get a fine kill. And the Phantom is certainly a good MiG-killer. Avoidance, then, is a matter of principle.
True, it is not always possible to live up to principles. There are the times when a MiG dives and threatens you or your buddies directly—then there is no choice and no argument. You give up your ground attack and take him on; otherwise you die or end up a POW. But life is not black and white, and most situations are marginal. You fly and see a MiG in the distance. He is not a threat—yet—but he could be one very soon. Then the question is whether you continue to your target, keeping the bombs on your belly, or get rid of them and go for that MiG. And there is always the dilemma of what comes first, you reaching the target or him sitting on your tail.
In such dubious moments, when one can decide this way or the other, everything depends on the formation leader, on his integrity and morality. He has his own emotional conflict. Leading your buddies on to an attack when MiGs are tailing you and not dealing with them is as hard as keeping both hands on the steering wheel when angry wasps zoom around in the car. Hard indeed!
We in the Orange Tails—and by this I mean not only myself as the commander, but also the high society of the squadron—were aware of those centrifugal forces, and thus we issued several rules of engagement to assure first of all the completion of the primary mission—if at all possible. “A pilot who shoots a MiG down during an attack mission,” said the first rule, which was written large on the blackboard, “has by definition committed an offense. His action shall be liable to immediate inquiry, and if it comes out that the situation did not warrant it absolutely, he will be washed out of the squadron.” Later, after we got into trouble, we made this rule even stricter: “Downing MiGs is legitimate only after the attack, on the way back. And even then, on condition that you are cleaning the MiG off a buddy’s six.” And for more impact, we even got to specific names: certain pilots were forbidden even to look at a MiG, under any circumstances. These were some of the hot doggers whose judgment I didn’t trust.
“MiGs are not on the menu for you,” I told them. “Your aerial kills will come during the next war.”
Those rules, which the squadron took seriously, protected operational discipline, and the Orange Tails’ formations as a rule remained tight and got to their targets. Behind all this lay a moral obligation.
SO, LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, we took off in an eight-ship formation to attack the Syrian airfield Blay, on the other side of the Golan Heights, south of Damascus. We crossed the Jordan River and in a fast, low sweep went deep into Jordan to come in the back door. When we were deep in the Trans-Jordanian Desert, we turned north and passed east of Jebel Druze, a high ridge. After that we turned and headed west, racing at full speed toward Blay from the interior of Syria, with the setting sun in our eyes. But when we finally pulled up over the target airfield, we ran into something we didn’t expect.
I never saw weather like that before or after. The moment we climbed, the air, which was normally clear at low levels, became so hazy that Blay totally disappeared. We could see absolutely nothing. A thick layer of dust engulfed us, and the sun melted into a radiant ball of red mud. The dirty air became a screen, and the ground far below first darkened, then simply disappeared.
We began searching for the airfield. We organized into pairs in a line astern and began going over the estimated position of Blay, looking down and seeing only yellow. The haze was like porridge, glittering streams of minuscule particles flowing beneath us in waves. Billions of tiny lights. Our eyes were tearing behind our dark glasses. And though we repeatedly wiped away the tears, we couldn’t see the ground. We couldn’t see anything, and began to wonder—
Suddenly somebody called out on the radio, “MiGs! MiGs! Break!”
I looked up and saw an air-to-air missile, like a blackish, thin toothpick, diving from above and dragging a fiery tail, pass inside the formation and explode near one of my Phantoms. We broke hard left, and during the break my navigator, Erel, followed the trail of the missile back up to its launch point. He located and pointed out to me sparks on the yellow background of the sky. And soon several small silhouettes materialized—black triangles: MiGs. In that situation there was no sense anymore in pursuing our former mission, just defense and get the hell out of there.
I ordered, “Emergency jettison!” Instantly bomb clusters and fuel tanks flew around like a rain of black drops, rolling in the yellow, shining air. “Everybody out! Head east!”
It was clear that our attack had failed. Now I had to get everybody home. I wanted us to fly back in the same roundabout way we had arrived, since the direct line from there to Israel was blocked by Syrian SAM arrays on the Golan Heights. We all turned east. The formation’s order was now reversed: the rear aircraft became the first, and now everybody was flying ahead of me and I was the tail-end charlie. The formation flew east, afterburners glowing on the dark background of the eastern sky like pairs of fireflies.
“MiG on our six, Iftach.” This from my navigator, Erel.
Again we broke, and the distance between our Phantom and all the others opened more, but the MiG wasn’t after us. Perhaps he hadn’t even seen us. He passed over us very fast, heading toward the rest of my Phantoms. We slipped in far behind him and saw him launch another missile in their direction.
I warned them in time; they broke, and the missile missed.
THIS WAS THE SECOND strike mission we had screwed up. No doubt some personal frustration had gathered in my gut. Additional stress was that on sound off, after we first broke away from the MiGs, one of us hadn’t answered. I had seen someone hit by the MiG’s missile, and he didn’t answer my calls. In the end it turned out to be Duby Yoffe, a tall, blond kid. He lost communication because of the missile hit but made it home with a badly damaged aircraft. But at the time I had no way of knowing that, and I was upset that we had lost a ship and two
