of the complete system would be a quarter million dollars, but the system would be built of independent subunits that could be sold as modules for a much lower price, and deliver partial services.
A second major hindrance was the system’s weight: all existing aerial instrumentation—computers, scopes, gauges, etc.—were heavy. A fighter aircraft that carries four tons of bombs can easily carry a few hundred added kilograms of radar, computers, wiring, screens, terminals, and even electronic external tanks. Helicopters, on the other hand, are sensitive to every extra kilogram. So I decided that the complete system could not exceed twenty- five kilograms. The modules, some of which had to be on the pilot’s body and helmet, were limited to grams. In this way I defined more parameters and Halo began to take shape. I finished when I knew exactly what I wanted.
When functional requirements were completed, the general system designed, and the parameters set, I couldn’t do any more by myself. I needed an engineer. My discharge bonus arrived, and finally I had some money. I contacted engineering companies and bought data and technical help.
AFTER I GOT BACK TO ISRAEL, my mother died.
As if she waited for me to return, she collapsed the same night I arrived. Ali and I spent the next ten days taking turns at the hostel, and at home with the kids. During the long nights, when my mother was unconscious, I sat by her bed, and there I completed the functional engineering description of Halo.
One night I dozed off in the chair. When I woke I saw Shosh looking at me. At first I thought she didn’t recognize me, but her eyes were again bright and steady. I rose and approached her.
“Go home. Get some sleep, Iftach.”
“Do you need anything, Mom? Shall I bring something, or call somebody?”
For a long time she didn’t answer. I thought she had fallen asleep, but then I heard her say in a weak, almost inaudible voice, “Those last years… were unnecessary.” She sighed and then whispered, “I am so worried.” I could imagine what was worrying her. It was not her future, not even mine.
A nurse came and took over. I went home. In the morning they called us from the hostel. She had died.
SHOSH LEFT GIVAT-BRENNER in 1962, after she realized that the Zionist-socialist community had ceased to be her home, if it ever had been. She was named administrative manager of the Naval Officers’ School in Acre, in the north of Israel. That ancient city, a mix of Jews and Arabs, was very similar to the Jaffa of her youth. At the school she worked with the school head, Maj. Gen. (Res.) Shmuel Tankus, a former Palmach soldier and former commander of the Israeli Navy. In her ten years at the Naval Officers’ School Shosh was an excellent manager, and to this day I receive greetings from students who respected her tremendously. During her service there, she changed the name of the school, and now it is named after the lost Palmach Twenty-three. In the mid-1970s she retired and settled in Ramot-HaShavim, a village in the Sharon Valley. She was still active, and began to work as a volunteer in the plant development nursery of agronomist Dr. Yosef Shuv. She was a clever and industrious worker, and under Shuv’s direction she worked in developing new varieties of the flower gerbera.
Shosh was a feminist before feminism was popular, and a committed Zionist. She named the twenty-two new varieties she developed after Palmach women soldiers who fell in battle. Among them were ‘Haviva’ and ‘Hanna’, after the two parachutists who jumped behind Nazi lines in World War II and were caught and executed. And there was another gerbera flower named ‘Zohara’, after the Palmach pilot Zohara Levitov, who was shot down in her plane during the War of Independence in 1948. And there was ‘Bracha’, after Bracha Fuld, who was shot by the British when she stood, hands raised, between them and the illegal immigrant ship
And more new kinds of flowers bore more names, and each had a story behind it: ‘Shulamit’, ‘Miriam’, ‘Naomi’, ‘Laila’, ‘Leah’, ‘Bilhah’, ‘Esther’, ‘Tamar’, ‘Hava’. In her way, Shosh immortalized the role of women in the establishment of the State of Israel. After her death on February 19, 1984, Dr. Shuv completed the development of the last flower she had been working on. It is a red flower with a black heart, and Yosef called it ‘Shosh’.
We buried Shosh in the cemetery at Ramot-HaShavim, the village where she lived out her last years. Some hundreds of her friends and our own friends assembled to pay their last respects. On her gravestone we engraved a line from the Palmach anthem: “Our heads shall not be bowed.” When we finished shivah—the ritual seven days of mourning—I went through her things. The clothes, furniture, and electrical appliances were donated to charity, and we kept only the beautiful mosaic table she made with her own hands. It is in our kitchen to this day.
I don’t think I ever really knew Shosh. She, like the maze in her eyes, was a mystery to me. In the picture before me I see a young woman about thirty, very straight and serious. On her face I see keen attention, and that tense, alert, and clever expression that characterized her throughout her life. Her mouth is closed, but her lips are relaxed. It is closed because this is how she felt at ease. Only the corners rise slightly, gracefully—not quite a smile. She wears no jewelry, no makeup, and no earrings, only a large ivory brooch in her collar, with the head of Pallas Athena, which she always liked. Her eyes look straight into the camera lens. The picture fails to show the sharpness of her bright eyes.
When I opened one of the drawers in the empty house, a wave of letters poured out. I opened one of them and instantly closed it. Outside, in her garden that already had begun to go back to nature, a light rain was falling. It didn’t dampen the bonfire I lit, burning all her papers to the last one. I believe that’s what she would have wanted. All remained inside.
THE PROBLEMS I FACED in the technical characterization of Halo were far from trivial, and every iteration sent me back to basic definitions. Every problem was intertwined with other problems, and sometimes the whole thing seemed a bag of snakes. None of my helicopter pilot friends could help me figure out where the main flight difficulty was, to enable me to build my system along an order of preference. The most complicated of all was the decision about the flight profile according to which the system would be built.
Was the main problem the loss of spatial orientation? That loss—and the resulting vertigo—were closely associated with looking at the outside world through artificial screens and night vision goggles. In the Jordan Valley stands a memorial for fifty-three soldiers and pilots who died in a crash due to loss of spatial orientation of the crew of a CH-53 Petrel helicopter. I thought I had found a solution for that—a new optical lens that would put all the instrumentation data right on the pupil of the pilot’s eye. Then I found that describing the lens was easier than making it. There was no lens in the world that could spread the required data on twenty-eight degrees of the area of the pilot’s goggles. I had to invent a new kind of lens.
But then, maybe the main problem was in geographical orientation? At low altitude, especially at night, it’s very easy to get lost. And the area would be full of hidden dangers, enemy forces, and power lines that lurk in the wadis in the dark to snare helicopters. If you got lost, you had to gain altitude, and then you were exposed to the enemy’s antiaircraft and missile batteries. A navigation system was definitely a priority, but no existing system fit helicopters. They all were not accurate enough—they talked in miles, whereas helicopters needed meters—and they all were very expensive and very heavy, way beyond the budget for my complete system. So for navigation I had to break new ground, too.
Another problem looked even more important to me. I called it the living map. I thought that this was the main problem with military helicopters, if not with any military system. I am talking about the distribution of enemy threats in the area, including mobile ones. This was the same problem that made things difficult for us, the fighter pilots, in our wars against the SAMs. And when you talk helicopters, the problem is twice as difficult. Threats were not limited to few dozen mobile SAM batteries, but included every ground unit. When crossing enemy territory a helicopter must avoid any contact with enemy forces of any kind. They all can do harm. In short, the pilot needs an updated and current battle picture. And my problem was that there existed no precedent nor any idea of how to create such a detailed living map. This problem was really tough.
The solution to the living map occurred to me suddenly at night, like an epiphany. I was awestruck—how clear it was! I was thrilled.
During those months of definition it was easy to lose hope. Almost nobody understood what I was after, and whoever did understand, didn’t believe it could be done. There were nights when I felt I was wandering in a maze with no exit. But I believed that the spring did exist somewhere inside me, and at the end it would break out. I would get up from bed and go back to my desk, pushing, pulling more and more out of myself. When my release bonus money ran out, Ali sent me to the bank, and I borrowed against my retirement pension.
At last, after four months of work, I could hire a typist to type three copies of a fifty-page booklet that
