was delighted to have been one of the field commanders who took the war in hand when those above us dropped the ball, and of my standing as a man in those ten days until the high command realized that the Third Temple wasn’t falling after all. And over all, I knew I reached my peak of professional capability as fighter pilot and combat commander exactly when my country needed it. That was a hell of a good feeling.
But it was hard to show pride and happiness after this war. There were too many hard feelings all around. Thus I kept silent and never shared with anybody either the pain or the personal exaltation I felt—to this day.
Ali was in the audience. She was painfully thin. Our sons stood beside her, and she held baby Noah in her arms. When I looked at her, she unconsciously squared her shoulders, like a soldier, and I recalled the old photograph of Grandma Bracha Tatar “at attention” behind her cart-driver husband. A shaft of pain ran through me. Had the wheel come around again? Doesn’t it ever end?
The short ceremony ended and the squadron’s women pushed in to hug Ali and shake her hand. I could see by Ali’s face that she also was filled with emotion. My nine-year-old son Etay embraced me, coughing deep in his throat. That nervous cough, something like a bark, was to linger until he grew up.
I REPORTED TO AIR FORCE headquarters in Tel Aviv. Everybody was digesting the outcome of the war and working on postmortems. I soon realized that not everything was open for discussion. When I asked the air force commander why he had ordered all copies of the Orange Tails’ war debriefing collected and destroyed, he answered me facetiously.
“An alien from space who decides to study human society on Earth”—Benny was renowned for his colorful images—“should better not use Walt Disney films for that research.”
“What?”
“In the Yom Kippur War,” Benny interpreted for me, “we arrived as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ air force, a grotesque imitation of the real air force we should have been. It’s no use wasting our time studying Mickey and Minnie’s love life. It’s a similar waste of time to study the lessons of this past war. We’d be better off preparing for the next one.”
He didn’t fool me. I knew he knew that was not a good excuse and that he didn’t sleep nights after the war. I also knew that some of his senior subordinates were discussing secretly how to get him out of the top spot. And I was certain the Orange Tails’ war debriefing booklet had been suppressed because it had criticized the workings of air force high command during the war. Many years later somebody sent me that suppressed booklet. I reread what I had written at the end of October 1973, and I agreed that it contained some harsh criticism:
“This war suffered from a lack of designated targets.”
“Feedback was met with negative reaction from the high command.”
“We failed in blindly believing our intelligence.”
“Headquarters lagged behind the field in tactical analysis.”
“Field units feel they can plan operations better than headquarters.”
And finally the sentence that was deleted with a black pen: “In this war, the real enemy was air force headquarters.”
Rereading this after many years, when I was much more mature and distant from the hard feelings of that time, made me able to understand a letter a former commander of mine, Gen. Rafi Harlev, had sent me: “The lessons you wrote about in the Orange Tails’ war debriefing booklet are doomed to be discarded, not because they are mistaken, but because they are written in this unique fashion of yours.” But at the end of 1973 I was on fire, and said bluntly that my commanders had failed in their duty.
I WAS NOT ALONE IN MY opinion. The whole of Israel was furious when the results of the war were known, along with the number of dead, wounded, and prisoners of war. No family came out untouched; every community buried sons. The whole nation—I included—wanted an accounting. The Agranat Commission ran its meetings behind closed doors, but the media spread allusions to leaders and senior officers. I had my own memories of the collapse above me, beginning with confused telephone calls, contradicting and ever-changing orders, and ending with letters I got from people who were inside that cauldron at air force headquarters during the war.
“As to command performance,” one wrote to me, “it was extremely bad. Your evaluation that ‘the command post was under stress’ is nothing in comparison to what really went on up there.”
And another one wrote, “One day we shall have to talk at length about the war… for reasons I am not free to detail, the air force didn’t do what it should have done. My white hairs are the result of it. But never mind,” he added with dry humor, “better white hair than a bald head.”
A third man, who spent the entire war in the air force command post, conveyed the following: “The command post was crowded, fussy, and noisy all the time. Officers and enlisted personnel ran around in the corridors, shouting. People worked around the clock with no place to eat or sleep, and became exhausted. There was no calm place to sit and read, and so information that came in from the field was set aside. Commanders didn’t look at feedback from the squadrons after execution of their missions.” When he saw my astonished face, this officer went into further detail: “Radios blared from all sides. Crazy rumors flew around. Everything was interpreted in an extreme manner, everything was black or white, and everything caused immediate reactions. When they became overwhelmed with fatigue, officers simply disappeared from their posts and couldn’t be found. The air force commander would suddenly show up and issue orders, and nobody understood what and why. There were times when arguments verged on mutiny.” He concluded his indictment with the following words: “When an operation began, decisions to continue or stop it halfway were made on the basis of casualties but without regard to accumulating results. Simply, information about losses came right away, but real results were known only much later.”
For a soldier like me, who was expecting efficiency from his commanders, such descriptions were a damning finger pointed right at Benny Peled.
TODAY I CAN IMAGINE how Benny felt when I sat in front of him demanding to know what happened to the Orange Tails’ debriefing document. I wanted to use it in my new job. Besides blaming my superiors’ performance, that booklet contained concrete lessons I, as a new staff officer, intended to use. And when I realized that I touched a nerve in a touchy person, I expected that Benny—who was known as an aggressive guy—would hit back at me. But he didn’t in that conversation.
Instead, he grabbed my shirt and didn’t let me get up. He sat me back down and began explaining and explaining. The tense atmosphere lessened with the seventh cigarette he lit, and then I reminded him of our previous conversation in the middle of the war. I had called the command post in Tel Aviv from the Orange Tails, found Benny and told him on the phone, excited and happy, “Benny, a helicopter found Yoram and got him out!”
Yoram Peled was a pilot in my squadron, a hot dogger, and his aircraft had been shot down. For a full hour there was no information on what had happened to him.
Benny roared back at me, “Stop filling my mind with crap!”
“But Benny, it’s about Yoram—”
“To you I am the air force commander, not Yoram’s father!”
I hung up silently and said to myself, “Benny is a damn fool.” Then I cooled down and understood what was going on in his head and said to myself, “All right, then, for now I am Yoram’s father.”
I reminded Benny of that conversation and we both laughed a little.
In the end, he entrusted me with changing operational training in the air force. I hesitated.
“According to the lessons of the war?”
“Yes,” he finally conceded, halfheartedly. “According to the lessons I shall confirm.” I understood that instead of fighting we had to turn a new leaf together. I shut up and went to work.
AFTER TWO YEARS OF CHANGING our operational training, which involved hard work from a military organization recovering from war and dealing with a host of problems, I was sent for an advanced degree in the United States. There I found out that war had more dimensions than a clean shot or getting the bombs on the target. For instance, I discovered the economic side of war.
The understanding began with a deeper look into the issue of the missiles. Missiles—all types—could be thought of as unmanned aircraft drones, weapons that could be launched from a distance and could fly
