AND NOW THE TIME HAS COME for me to reveal my own secret, one I have kept inside for exactly twenty years.
“As everybody here knows,” I said, “I missed the target. I was the only one of us whose bombs didn’t hit Tammuz. I was very disappointed that I missed, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that I avoided telling the truth about the reason for that miss. Now you shall be the first to hear it.” I saw them perk up, and everyone was watching me.
“On the pull-up for the attack,” I told them, “I was blind—blacked out.
“I was not at the peak of health then. A few months before, I had begun having asthmatic symptoms. I was in denial, didn’t believe the doctors, and convinced myself this was just a ‘passing something.’ I was taking pills to ease my breathing at night, and only later learned they thinned the blood and lowered my resistance to g- force.”
“Until this flight to Tammuz, I had done my flight training with no physical difficulty, so I didn’t expect what was coming. Then, on the night before the mission, I had breathing difficulties and couldn’t fall asleep. After takeoff the next day I felt very tired, and throughout the flight to Iraq I kept nodding off.”
I remember this long flight as an unending nightmare. It dragged on for more than ninety minutes, eight aircraft wobbling slowly along at low altitude, saving every liter of fuel. First I felt okay, but after ten minutes, when we crossed the spectacular Edom Mountain ridge close to Eilat, the view turned flat and monotonous and I began to feel tired. Gray, barren expanses crawled along, cut at times by wide, dry wadis, and it went on seemingly forever. My aircraft crept along on its own. Lying on my back, strapped in the comfortable armchair of the F-16, I caught myself time and again dozing off. It was awful. I tried slapping myself the way I did that night in 1973 over the Red Sea, but I couldn’t overcome it. Simply, there wasn’t any danger in the air, all around was just nothing, and we were gliding through a gray, hazy, totally empty nowhere. I didn’t even need to navigate to stay awake; the goddamn F-16 did everything on its own. I knew it was bad. I took off my gloves and pinched my thighs with my fingernails. I tried to move around in the seat, to inhale deeply, and still my head fell, rose, and fell again. From that whole trip I can visually recall only some low, hilly crests that appeared from nowhere and passed slowly beneath me, then were lost forever into another nowhere.
At last, when we had crossed into Iraq, jettisoned our external fuel tanks, and turned onto the last leg approaching the target, I woke up. When we accelerated over the fields of the delta of the Euphrates, I was again alive and alert, but an ugly flaw lay curled inside me. When the time to pull up came, I pulled up, and to my surprise found myself totally blind. I didn’t lose consciousness, my brain continued working all right, but I was climbing fast and all I could see before my eyes was darkness.
All pilots know the blackout phenomenon, when the g-load of turning acceleration forces the body’s blood down to the legs, leaving the head with diminished blood pressure. The first thing that happens is that vision becomes blurred, then totally lost, and the pilot becomes temporarily blind. Sometimes it can result in fainting. This is a similar phenomenon to what we experience when we get up too quickly after a long period of lying in bed. We sometimes black out. Recovering takes time—long seconds. Blacking out in flight can be real trouble. Fainting can be fatal.
“So when my vision came back,” I told them, “I found myself diving in a wholly different direction and not at the reactor’s yard. The reactor itself was way outside my line of approach, and I couldn’t get my bombsight on it. I thought about circling back and making a second pass, but I couldn’t forget we had orders. Ivry had absolutely forbidden us—the trailing section—to make a second approach. ‘One pass and out of there’ had been his order. Ivry hadn’t wanted a lone aircraft straggling ten or twenty kilometers behind the main force, getting everyone into trouble.”
Ivry nodded sternly.
“And I understood that. And also I wasn’t a wild kid anymore. I was a high-ranking officer and was supposed to set an example. There was no way out. I saw my target was out of reach, so I dropped my bombs on what I could in that Tammuz yard.”
I heard Nahumi gasp, and then he said, “Iftach, you have no idea the weight you took off my heart right now.”
All those years, as I hid my secret, Lieutenant Colonel Nahumi had been hiding his own secret. Nahumi, the commander of the second F-16 squadron, had led the second section of the attackers. I was his wingman. It came out now that he had blamed himself for my miss—he thought that the way he pulled up had interfered with my approach, and this was why I had missed the reactor. I hadn’t told the truth, and for twenty long years he kept his guilt inside.
Zeevik Raz said, “I’ll never forget Iftach’s face after we landed. I thought, Why is he so sad? The mission is done, and we are all back safely. What is that?”
And truly, I was very sad. And since then, whenever asked about this mission, I would answer, “Let me tell you about some other good misses. I have quite a few.” But in my heart I knew that missing the target was not my problem. The real stone that lay on my heart was not the missing, but the silence.
“I WAS SO HUMILIATED and ashamed,” I told them. “How could I miss such a big target, as big as Madison Square Garden? And so important?” For some inner reason the fact that my body had failed me was the worst part. I was a forty-one-year-old male. A psychologist might make a big deal about what had bothered me so much, but I just couldn’t share the fact that my body had betrayed me with anybody else.
“I buried this story, and you, my friends, are the first to hear it.”
Looking at Ali, who sat at the back of the room, I concluded my confession. “To this day, I hadn’t even told Ali, the same way I just kept her in the dark about the whole Baghdad mission. She never knew before the flight that we were going on that flight and that I was going there, too.” I looked at her. She looked up and sent me a quiet smile.
A GOOD WORD CAME FROM Duby. He, who had fought with me in the Yom Kippur War, on whom I inflicted many punishments when he was a young, wiseass pilot, was sensitive. He saw my face after we landed, approached, and said, “Iftach, your two bombs missed, but we stuck seven bomb loads out of eight in the bull’s- eye. As our commander, look at the final result. You should be proud.”
And again Raz recalled something: he produced the champagne bottle I had bought for the team after the operation. On it was written, in my handwriting, a mysterious mathematical formula that even Einstein couldn’t have grasped: “7/8=100%.”
All of us in the room laughed.
I knew some people thought I shouldn’t have flown that mission in the first place, and in hindsight they may be right. Some of them told me their opinion straight out. “High-ranking officers,” they proclaimed, “should manage, not fly.” There is some truth in that, but still I want to add something I didn’t say that evening. I had a friend from childhood, Daniel Vardon. He had personality for sure, and he also crawled into the enemy’s fire not once, but several times. Danny was decorated for heroism in battle not less than three times, the last of them after he was killed in the Six-Day War, when he tried to break through enemy fire to pull out wounded soldiers. He acted knowing his duty from inside, and doing without asking “What for?” and “How?” and “Why?” He didn’t pass the buck to others or bother his commanders with questions such as “Which way?” or “When?” or “Who?” I believe that even if there were radar screens in his time to sit behind and send others forward, he wouldn’t have used them. Danny was my example, and a reason for many things I have done in my life.
KAREN YADLIN SAT WITH folded legs on the table at the side of the room, among all the artifacts. Karen is also a character, and wanted to say something different, “to burst this heroic, happy macho bubble.” Her own secret began with the two-family house at Ramat-David housing. On one side the Yadlins lived, and on the other side the young family Ben Amitay.
Udi Ben Amitay was not there. One of the first F-16 pilots, he no doubt would have flown to Tammuz had he not been killed some six months before, in an aerial collision. Udi was the first loss in the new F-16 force. His widow, Esty, and their daughter, Maya, who was a just a newborn when he was killed, were there in the room.
Anyway, Karen, after asking for pardon from Esty and Maya, continued, “On January 20, 1981, I got home
