birds. I entertained new career possibilities. I thought about going back to get a Ph.D. in the United States. I sent a letter to UCLA, and to refresh my English I translated a book about American fighter pilots in Vietnam from English to Hebrew. Then I reconsidered. I rejected the idea that I would go back to the issues I had left behind, justifying and formulating reasons for the failure of my main intellectual achievement. Then winter came, and the pruning of the apple and plum trees. The mornings were misty, and the chill air between the rows of bare trees cleaned my lungs gradually of the residue choking them.
The family gathered in the chill evenings around the tiny kerosene stove. This was our time for closeness. I got to know my three kids. Ali and I talked, grew close again. She became pregnant. Spring arrived, and optimism sprang anew. I hummed songs to myself to the rhythm of the tractor hopping over the terraces, mowing and spraying the orchards. I connected with friends, discussing, writing, and weighing many ideas. The world was full of exciting choices. I waxed passionate; there were so many new prospects.
And then one day the chief of staff of the IDF, Raful, showed up in the orchard.
It was the spring of 1979, and the days were bright and blue. I led a group of young volunteers from America in thinning out the flowers on the peach trees to assure that the remaining fruit grew out to commercial size. This is great work, the peach trees in full pink bloom, and it almost hurt to extend the hydraulic shears into the tree and cut entire branches with one trigger pull. The boys and girls carried ladders and climbed into the trees after me to complete the final pruning, using manual shears.
The tractor behind me roared, and due to the noise I didn’t hear anything, but suddenly I saw blue working shirts crowded around a stranger in a green uniform. I went to see, and the commander of the Israeli Defense Force was standing on top of a ladder, pruning branches. Lieutenant General Raful refused to get down, and he didn’t stop working with the shears he took from one of the girls until we broke for breakfast. We went some distance from the volunteers and sat together on the green, warm grass, eating sandwiches and sipping tea from styrofoam cups.
“You’re coming back in the service.” I grinned. I told him that rumors had reached me already, that command of Hatzor Air Base would be offered to me, and I had turned it down.
“I am not going back,” I told him, “I have other ideas. And,” I added angrily, “it’s time you told them to release my retirement pension account. I need the money to start my new life.”
“You’re not getting a penny. First, go talk to Ivry.”
“Ivry has nothing to say to me.”
“Ivry is waiting for you. Go talk to him.” The chief of staff rose, brushed the back of his pants, put on his red beret, and walked to his car, which waited near the orchard.
“WE DECIDED TO BUY F-16 fighters from the United States. The aircraft will arrive within the year,” Ivry said. “I want you to come back and take command of their integration and assimilation into the air force.”
My jaw dropped.
“And you’re to command Ramat-David Air Base, too.”
When I could breathe again, I said, “David, how can you do this, after what happened? Didn’t I let you down?”
“This is for the Orange Tails,” he answered, “for the Yom Kippur War.”
I don’t remember if my eyes filled, or if I managed to control my emotions. I was moved indeed, but not because I was hungry for compliments. I was moved because during all those years I learned not to expect any honors from my superiors. No commander of mine had ever bothered to mention, one way or another, the principal occurrences, decisions, and risks that had shaped my life. Not one of them said a word about the establishment of the Orange Tails, or its performance in 1973. Ivry’s saying that was completely unexpected, and the more so from such a closed, critical guy, stingy with his feelings. It was like getting a love song from anybody else. To this day I am grateful to Ivry for that single sentence.
And still I knew that what was proposed was conditional. The air force hadn’t called me back so I could preach heresy about its future organization and equipment. Intellectually, I received a proposal to turn the clock back ten years. For a moment I sat and weighed it. I was aware that it was absurd. I—who declared from every podium that the air force should change direction from fighters and invest in other alternatives—had received a proposal to take command of the newest fighter force.
At last I decided. In one stroke I buried my strategic ideas and all my other plans for life, and chose to take command of Ramat-David and the new Israeli F-16 force. The cost was removal from the circle of those who influence the agenda and future of the air force, but a romance with the hottest plane in the world, and living a few more years among the best people Israel could assemble, was going to be a great joy, a dream of any combat commander. And more battles were in the future, for sure. How could I turn this down?
We shook hands and I rose to go. At the door I stopped, turned back to Ivry, and said, “Ivry, you know well that I’m coming back for one more hitch, that’s all. In two years, three at most, I will leave the service for good. We both know that I came on a mission, and I am not out for command of the air force.” He looked at me with his blue, hard eyes and waved his hand. Ivry didn’t like pompous declarations.
AGAIN THE MOVING VAN. We left our friends in Kibbutz Tzuba, who had given us a home in time of need, and on a blazing noon in the autumn of 1979 loaded our tattered furniture for the umpteenth time, and after a four-hour drive arrived in family housing at Ramat-David Air Base in the Izreel Valley, into clouds of stinging gnats. It was harvest time, and almost without a breath I was hurried back to military command and into the cockpit of a fighter. Here we go again.
22
Halo
AFTER TWO YEARS AT RAMAT-DAVID came three years more in command of Tel-Nof Air Base, and my military service finally ended for good five years later, in October 1984, when I turned forty-four. My picture was added to a long line of yellowing faces on the office wall in Tel Nof. I said good-bye to Abraham Yoffe, David Ivry, Ran Pecker, Avihu Ben Nun, and the clerks, entered Ali’s car, and we drove together home to Ramat-HaSharon, a suburb near Tel Aviv.
On the next morning I went to my mother. I found her sitting outside in the autumn sunshine, wrapped in a blanket.
“Shosh,” I asked her, “how much money do you have?”
The bright eyes looked at me uneasily. Cancer had already destroyed their hard, self-assured clarity.
“What do you need money for? What do you intend to do?”
“I want to go away for several months. I need time for myself, to think. There’s no silence here.”
“Listen well, Iftach. I am not so healthy anymore… ”
I understood. “I’ll pay you back to the last penny when I get back.”
“Where are you getting money?” I saw before me a very sick, scared woman.
“I will have money. From my discharge bonus.”
“Ach, why did you have to leave? What will come of it?” She dug deep in her closet and produced ten thousand U.S. dollars in bills, folded with rubber bands. I knew it was all she had.
I was going abroad for an undefined period of time, for as long as it would take, as far as my mother’s money would get me. I had no other cash resources. I had a list of addresses, and an introductory letter from air force commander Amos Lapidot.
Ali took me to the airport. When we kissed good-bye, I told her, “I’ll come back with something good. I’ll get it from inside.” And Ali said, holding our little Ella’s hand, “Go in peace, don’t worry. Don’t think about us here, we’ll be all right.” And she added what I didn’t ask from her. “I’ll take care of your mother.”
I spent the ten hours on the plane browsing in my small notebook, erasing, correcting, and adding lines to the fifty-odd I had already put there in the past few days. Each of those lines was a possibility for new work, for our next life. Some of the ideas were interesting, others curious, and others totally crazy. I was going to check out
