“No, no. Look, we’re already loaded up with countermeasures. If one won’t work maybe another will. Anyway, we’ve drilled and drilled at missile-evading maneuvers, and to Azazel with the Styxes. We’re going after the Syrian navy.”
General Luria has to brief a crowd of nonplussed Phantom pilots, all suited up and ready to go, on a last-minute change of targets. If war actually breaks out now, he explains, the reserves will need two or three days to mobilize. Meantime the small regular forces will have to hold off the Arabs north and south. The Egyptians are two hundred miles from Israel, whereas Syrian tanks are just a fifteen-minute run from some Jewish settlements on the Golan. Egypt remains the chief target, and the air force will certainly smash that missile screen along the Canal, which by doctrine has been first priority for any outbreak of war; but now, with the short warning time, crushing the Syrians’ offensive capability becomes more urgent. New target for the first strike, therefore: the Soviet missile batteries covering the Golan front.
Eagerly the pilots man their planes. Dov Luria runs through the checklist strapped to his knee, jet engines roaring all around him, his nerves taut. Like his father he is at last being locked into the cockpit by his ground crew to take off for a preemptive strike! He has been drilling for this since getting his wings, and he is hot to take off. But it turns out that the strike will hit Syria, not Egypt, and for that there have been no drills, unfortunately, and the intelligence map is sketchy, the weather report vague. He is exchanging final instructions with his radar man when — “Attention! All air-craft! Attention!” The controller’s voice in his earphones, agitated and urgent. “Abort, I say again, abort. Operation cancelled. Acknowledge and return for further briefing.”
What a rotten letdown!
Back in the briefing room his squadron leader explains that reports of bad weather over the Golan have caused the abort. While new intelligence maps and an op plan are improvised, the fliers wait a whole hour; then they return to their planes, digesting the information thrust at them, and much less eager. Change of target yet again; instead of the missile batteries, some airfields deep inside Syria, where skies are clearer. Trundling his huge howling machine out to the runway in a lineup of Phantoms and Skyhawks, Dov is rattled by these sudden alterations in long-laid, well-rehearsed plans. Once more ready to take off, he hears a sudden sharp call from the controller “Abort, abort! Return to hangars!”
WHAT TO ALL THE DEVILS IS GOING ON?
Not only Dov is thinking this. So is his father, shouting at a hapless army telephone girl to connect him to General Peled, the new air force chief. Luria knows that Peled will level with him, if only he can get through! This on-and-off pushing around of nervy fighter pilots is horrible, and surely not Peled’s idea. At this rate the air force will start the war, if one is about to break out, not with another glorious MOKADE, but a bloody fashla.
“You’re through, sir!” exclaims the girl.
“Luria?” Peled comes on with a note of gruff affection.
“Sir, I called off the preemptive strike on the airfields, but barely, let me tell you. They were warming engines on the runway.”
“And you’re not happy.”
“Not dancing with joy.”
“Luria, Dado ordered the scrub at the last second, and he didn’t dance with joy, either. Golda and Dayan made a political decision not to strike the first blow.”
“But why? Why?”
“You know why — ‘What would the Americans think?’ ”
“So what’s the mission, if it’s war?”
“The mission? We absorb the first blow, to satisfy Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger. What we do next depends on how the attack unfolds.”
“Maybe it’s not war, sir.”
“Well, we’ll know by six tonight.”
They know earlier, because the sirens sound all over Tel Nof shortly after two. Within minutes the first wave of Phantoms and Skyhawks is in the air heading southwest: back to the original plan! Five successive strikes, north to south, to destroy Egypt’s missile batteries at the Canal. Dov Luria, in the second wave, rolls his Phantom out to the runway, heart beating fast and mouth dry, ready to take off against the flying telephone poles, about which he has heard a bit too much.
From Weizman’s Piper Cub thrumming south above the sea-coast at five thousand feet, Kishote can see Yom Kippur dissolving all over the sunlit Jewish State. When they took off, the roads outside Haifa were almost empty, but more and more vehicles keep streaming into sight, and by the time the gray spiky blotch of Tel Aviv looms ahead, the thoroughfares are becoming clogged. “Look, I’ll fly you down to your division,” Weizman says.
“You don’t have to do that, sir. Plenty of cars heading south now.”
“Well, I will. I shouldn’t be in the air anyway, I might as well be useful.” The plane banks steeply, bumping in air currents. “You have to fight. I’m out to grass. All I’ll do is kibitz in the Pit.”
“It’s not war yet, sir.”
The ex–air force chief, his hatchet features half-hidden by helmet and headphones, makes a face. “This is it, Yossi.”
When Kishote arrives at the frantic division HQ, the duty officer tells him that General Sharon has checked in, looked around, and then driven off to Gorodish’s command HQ in Beersheba. Arik and Gorodish! thinks Kishote. A small war starting before the big one.
Though General Sharon has charged off into Israeli politics like a rhinoceros, he has never lost touch with the troops. A month ago he ordered an exercise in countering a surprise attack, and Kishote staged two days of drills, complete with a mock battle and live fire. Today he finds the headquarters staff repeating these drills in high spirits. He makes a jeep tour of the sprawling camp. Order is emerging from chaos in a cheery if horrendous racket, as thousands of lawyers, teachers, garage mechanics, shopkeepers, and other assorted civilians go about forming up into an armored division of two hundred tanks. In fact an air of make-believe pervades the camp, because it is all so much like the recent drills. The threat of war seems very remote here. Many soldiers are still fasting.
In his office in the command hut he finds on his desk the latest intelligence summaries of Egyptian tank and troop movements; veiled jargon, full of unit names and coded locations. Having followed these reports for two weeks — especially of the positioning of new Soviet bridging equipment all along the Canal, and the visible massing of huge water cannon and motorized rafts — Kishote has long since guessed that this is to be an attack, astutely planned to look like training maneuvers to the last moment, so that a preemptive strike by Israel will raise a world howl of “Aggressor!” But intelligence is not his job. One thing is evident: for this round of war, if it breaks out, better brains, Arab or Russian, are at work in Egypt than in 1967.
“Well, the top brass have royally fucked it up again.” A recognizable abrasive voice speaks behind a thin plywood wall. “And so our asses are back on the line.”
“Exactly so.” Another familiar voice. “And they’ll be shot off on day one if it’s up to Sharon. Tough to be a Jew.”
First voice: “Well, at least that fat son of a whore knows what he’s doing. Not like those fuck-headed politicians of ours.” Crash of falling signal equipment. “Hey, easy! That receiver’s not one of your shitty ceramics, it’s valuable.”
“No harm done, you can drop this thing off a cliff. You’re right about the politicians. Golda’s been a major disaster.”
“In what way?” Yossi inquires, walking into the signal room next door.
Unshaven, in ill-fitting uniforms, the two reservists get to their feet; Shimon Shimon and Yoram Sarak, pals in the army as at the Jericho Cafe. Equipment is piled in disorder around them for transfer to field HQ signal cars, and coffee cups and remnants of sandwiches litter a table. Though still fasting, Yossi is not offended or surprised at this pair of scoffers. They are both keen signal operators, which is all that concerns him, rosh katan enlisted men who ducked officer training during compulsory service
; better at the job than the kids in the regular army, but with other things to do except in war.
“Is it the real thing, sir?” inquires Sarak, with a nice mix of deference and friendliness. From his viewpoint, Brigadier General Nitzan is a good reserve boss. Some officers enjoy lording it over well-known civilians doing their miluim (reserve duty), but this Don Kishote is all business, very sharp, now and then slipping into tart humor with the journalist under him. Also Sarak, a notorious skirt-chaser, can respect Nitzan’s rumored success at that game.
Without replying, Yossi looks to Shimon Shimon. “In what way has Golda been a disaster?”
“Sir, that’s a large subject,” says the ceramicist. “I don’t want to commit treason while on active duty.”
“Frank talk isn’t treason,” says Kishote. “Go ahead.”
Shimon glances at Sarak, who grins and shrugs. “B’seder, sir. I think she’s weakened Israel, if not destroyed it. From 1948 on we lived by a consensus just to survive, and to convince the Arabs to let us live in peace. But she and her gang — that foul Galili and the rest — decided after the Six-Day War to be a big little country, and hang on forever to the Sinai, the Golan, and all the rest. The national consensus is kaput. We’re split down the middle. Frankly a lot of us sympathize with the Arabs, sir — me included — and if this is a war, we may be too divided to win it.”
“I could hardly say it better myself,” says Sarak, “though in fact I have. I wrote that column six months ago, Shimon.”
“Well, are you two guys ready to fight?”
They look at each other. “What’s that got to do with it?” says Sarak. “En brera.”
“Good enough,” says Kishote, and he goes out to an orders group of brigade and battalion commanders. He is still addressing them in bright sunshine about plans for a night advance to the Canal in case of war, when at 2 P.M. the sirens go off.
In the smoky gloom of the Tel Nof fighter control center, operators closely watch the radar scopes for the approach of enemy aircraft, while noncoms wearing headphones mark the progress of the war on the big table map, and others chalk Hebrew cabalisms on blackboards and Plexiglas panels. Benny Luria paces amid busy officers, awaiting word on the effectiveness of Egyptian antiaircraft against the first wave. A girl brings him a phone on a long cord. “For you, General.”
“Luria?” Peled sounds hoarse. “Pick up the red telephone.” He dashes up two flights of stairs, down a long corridor, and through the side door of his inner office. “Luria here,” he says, out of breath from tension, not exertion.
“Trouble, Benny. OC North is asking Dado for close air support at once and at all cost. The Syrians threw a giant artillery barrage for an hour, and now they’re clearing the minefields and bridging the antitank ditch. They have eight hundred tanks in the jump-off zone. We have about eighty there to stop them till reenforcements and reserves arrive.”
“Rough.”
“Very rough. In a few hours their armor can be running all over the Golan and down into the Galilee. What planes do you have ready to go?”
“Six units of four, set for the second strike against the Canal missile batteries.”
“Wrong armament. Switch them to antitank and strafing ordnance.”
“Sir, unloading those heavy bombs has got to take a lot of time.”
“You’re right. Send those aircraft to drop their bombs in the sea, and return to rearm.”
Luria is taken aback. It is an emergency procedure for a plane in trouble, otherwise unprecedented. “Sir, are you seriously telling me to order my pilots to jettison their weapons?”
“Luria, Dado has ordered immediate air support in the north. Immediate is immediate. Last time we surprised them, now they’ve surprised us. That’s how it is. En brera. Central Command will give you latest enemy movements and weather in the north.”
With heavy foreboding Benny Luria issues the order: Urgent. Second wave jettison all armament at sea and rearm for close air support north.
Of all commands Dov Luria could receive, even Proceed alone to bomb Cairo might be more welcome. He takes off sick at heart. Jettison his bombs! What a contrast to MOKADE, the great triumph his father led six short years ago! But he does as he has been told, roaring with Major Goldstein’s unit of four out over a blue sea wrinkled by a strong offshore wind; and as his first act of war, with a sense of nightmare, he drops into the water weapons worth millions of American dollars. His radarman, a dour young moshavnik planning to go back to dairy farming, says as the bombs splash far below, “Well, sir, don’t feel bad. Maybe some Arabs are swimming around down there.”
Circling to land at Tel Nof, Dov sees ground crews waiting beside bombs all laid out in the well-drilled pattern for rearming planes fast. Here at least is an echo of MOKADE! Armorers and mechanics swarm over his plane as he climbs out. At the coffee urn in the hangar he finds Itzik Brenner, number three in the four-plane unit, a dark big lieutenant with a huge nose and a black beard.
“I thought I’d make it through the fast,” says Itzik with a guilty grin over his coffee cup. Though from a religious kibbutz, Itzik is no longer very observant. “But I want to be sharp for the Syrians. I owe them.”
Dov knows what that means. Itzik grew up within artillery range of the Golan Heights. When he was four a direct hit collapsed the kibbutz shelter, killing two kindergarten friends and breaking his arm, which is still crooked. But the kibbutz has hung on, though since the Six-Day War the young people have been drifting away to the cities.
Amid the racket of the reloading and the roar of patrol planes landing and taking off, the pilots are briefed on the field by the squadron leader. General Luria is there, noting the strain on his son’s pale young face as he listens to late fragmentary intelligence. But such were the briefings in the turnarounds of the Six-Day War, too. This has been something like Dov’s bar mitzvah as an Israeli pilot, the father wryly thinks. Passing the course, getting the wings, earning praise for high performance in training — all very well! Now the enemy waits in the north. As he watches the quartet take off, and Dov’s plane leap into the air and dwindle away, he mutters a prayer.
Flying up the Jordan Valley in cloudless sunlight over familiar terrain, Dov feels his mood clearing. This was something he has also trained for, after all, close air support, and he feels ready. Those poor tank guys on the Golan are catching the heat, so the mission is a necessary one. Ahead and to the right of him roar three aircraft, Major Eli Goldstein in the lead. Dov’s fit of nerves is gone, his head is cool, and his heart soars to be flying to a real fight in the world’s best fighter-bomber, with these familiar dials, the familiar cockpit smell of fuel and electronic ozone, the familiar reassuring engine roar … but damn, the weather reports are not wrong. Ahead over the Golan Heights clouds are piled, dark and multilayered from the horizon to the zenith.
19
Fathers and Sons
About the time Dov is taking off, Arik Sharon is returning to his division. He finds Kishote at the optical gear depot, in a dusty field overgrown with rank-smelling weeds and crowded with a vast jumble of private cars, delivery trucks, ice cream wagons, moving vans, taxicabs, even one cement-mixer, the motley vehicles by which the ten thousand reservists of the division are solving the Yom Kippur dearth of busses. Kishote is quelling an angry dispute between the quartermasters and a besieging mob of tank commanders. The hubbub dies when Arik appears in his blue leather jacket, gray-blond hair windblown, the most recognizable man in Israel after Moshe Dayan. “What’s all this?” he demands.
The supply of binoculars and periscopes is short, Kishote explains, since many were drawn for peacetime war games and never returned. Now the quartermasters are requiring forms filled out for each instrument. Sharon shouts to the quartermasters, “The forms are waived! First come, first served!” Cheers from the sergeants commanding the tanks, ranging from youths who have barely finished their draft service to middle-aged reservists. Sharon again. “If the supply runs out, there will be more do
wn at Tasa, don’t worry! First come, first served, I say, and make ready to move, all of you. Nitzan, call an orders group for section heads and brigade commanders.”
Around a long narrow conference table, some fifteen senior officers gather to hear the few reliable facts that Sharon has learned from the confused first reports at Gorodish’s HQ. Without question, he says, the Egyptians have achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. This is not the time to ask why and how. One day soon the people will call the government to account, no fear! (There speaks the politician still, thinks Kishote.) Now there is a war to win.
The bitter truth is that Egyptian forces are crossing the Canal on motorized rafts in at least five major thrusts, bypassing the Bar-Lev maozim, which they stunned and silenced with an hour-long rain of murderous artillery fire. Already they have gained several shallow lodgments — he raps a pointer at the locations on a large Sinai wall map — and are now blasting breaches in the ramparts with water pumps of fantastic power, and starting to lay pontoon bridges. General Mandler’s three regular brigades, with less than two hundred tanks, face an Egyptian onslaught of seven divisions and at least a thousand tanks! The position accordingly is very dangerous.
Having poured on the gloom, Sharon turns brisk and optimistic. The Arab is a good soldier and a brave enemy, so long as he fights on a set plan. So far Egypt appears to be doing things by the Soviet book, planned and drilled to the last detail. The way to reverse this initial success is to break up the enemy timetable. The two reserve Sinai divisions — this one, and one under General Adan coming from the north — have to race down the peninsula and counterattack to contain the invaders’ bridgehead, then cross the Canal and cut them off from the rear. With this the entire Egyptian front in Sinai can falter and collapse in three days. But meantime it will be very hard going all the way.
“The bottleneck right now is tank transporters.” Sharon slaps his pointer on a wall photograph of a monstrous low-bed trailer truck carrying a sixty-ton Centurion. “General Adan has requested priority on these. I didn’t argue. He has farther to go. I don’t know how long it’ll take to round some up for us, and so, gentlemen, I mean to run south all night on our treads.” Troubled glances around the table. Sharon turns to Kishote, sitting near him at the map. “What about it, Nitzan?”