18
Isaac was still en route when his friend Shlomi, the air marshal, made it to the front. He snuck onto a Tel Aviv flight against the orders of the officer in charge of security at Heathrow. Hundreds of Israelis were camped out on the airport carpets, trying to get home, there were threats of terrorism, and airline security personnel like Shlomi had been ordered to stay put and let the war take care of itself. Shlomi was enjoying London. Before he got the air marshal job he’d never been out of Israel, with the exception of the raids into Jordan, and had never flown on anything that wasn’t an army helicopter. But now he’d been to New York and had seen Pink Floyd in concert. He could have exempted himself and stayed away. But he knew without being told that the men from Almond Reconnaissance, and Patzi himself, were going to reassemble, and he had to be there.
When he landed in Israel he took a bus to the big base at Julis, where reservists were signing up. He was still wearing the suit jacket he had to wear as an air marshal, an item of clothing that no one in their right mind wore in Israel, and he looked like an eccentric among the hundreds of men on the grass in jeans and sandals. Everyone was chatting and smoking, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. There was talk about the army forming a new tank battalion within a few days, no one knew exactly. Shlomi understood that this base was for people who weren’t in a hurry to fight. Even though he’d already signed the papers making him a soldier, he jumped over a fence, which meant he was officially AWOL, and hitchhiked to his apartment near Tel Aviv. He kneeled by his bed to retrieve the rifle, uniform, boots, and helmet that he kept underneath, but there was nothing there. One of his roommates thought Shlomi wouldn’t be coming back and had taken his gear.
The night was darker than usual because of the blackout. He started hitchhiking south, hoping to make it to Sinai somehow. He was standing by the side of the road near Ashkelon when he flagged down a bus that turned out to be carrying the famous entertainment troupe of the Fighting Pioneer Youth, heading south to play for the troops. They stopped briefly at a base where Shlomi looked for a tank battalion whose commander he knew, but the emergency warehouses were empty and the tanks gone. The only person there was a young clerk.
“Where’s the battalion?” asked Shlomi.
“There’s no battalion,” she said. “They were among the first to reach the canal and there’s nothing left.”
Shlomi saw an Uzi lying around with one ammunition clip. He took it and continued southward into Sinai with the musicians. Their destination was the rear base at Baluza, which he knew as a place located a safe distance from the Egyptians, the kind of base you dream about when you’re in the field—one with showers, chocolate bars, girls. But when they drove into the base, the speaker system was screaming for everyone to run to the fences and fire outward. The Egyptians were that close. It was the fourth day of the war. He’d assumed he was going to fight the Egyptians on the canal. If they’d penetrated this far, things were much worse than anyone was saying.
After a night manning positions along the fence, he caught a jeep to an encampment deeper in Sinai. Someone said Ariel Sharon was there, and Shlomi knew that if the beefy general was around, so was Patzi. If you wanted action and a commander who cared about his subordinates more than his superiors, you stayed close to Sharon. By this time, Shlomi had been travelling from London for two days straight. He walked among the prefab buildings at this new desert base and saw three soldiers kneeling by a fire, brewing coffee in a fruit can. Two were former Almond officers like Shlomi, and the third was Patzi himself, grinning under his blond curls as Shlomi approached. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Shlomi said. “It was as if someone had opened the gates of paradise and here were the angels and seventy virgins.” Now he was in the catastrophe, where he belonged.
None of them had been given orders or even assigned to reserve units—they had just showed up—so they declared themselves to be their own unit. They already had one jeep, and Shlomi wandered off into the base and stole a second. That’s how “Force Patzi” was created, and became known to those who know, although officially no such unit ever existed.
On the morning of October 14, at about three a.m., a few Egyptian helicopters crossed the battle lines in Sinai and dropped a detachment of commandos near a point known on the Israeli maps by a Canadian name, Yukon. That was where the army had concentrated the big roller bridges that would be needed for the counterattack across the Suez Canal, if that became possible. It wasn’t yet, because the Israelis were still reeling, and the Egyptians were about to send tank columns even further into Sinai. Israeli spotters saw the helicopters land and guessed that there were about one hundred Egyptian commandos in the desert near Yukon.
A few other Almond Reconnaissance officers had trickled in, finding their way to Patzi at this end of Sinai. One was Eitan, who’d rushed down from the engineering department at Ben-Gurion University, and another was Katz, who was unique for being an observant Jew and not an atheist kibbutznik. The improvised force picked up an armoured personnel carrier that had lost its unit, driven by a guy named Saul from Beersheba. Before dawn, Patzi’s jeep led this crew out into the desert to find the commandos, Patzi on the machine gun, Shlomi at the wheel. Other officers might have found reasons to delay, call for reinforcements, or radio the air force and wait. The dozen men with Patzi would be outnumbered by a factor of ten.
They picked up a few tanks from a reserve brigade, the 600th, improving their odds. Shlomi remembers striking off the road into the desert following tracks, coming to a rise, then finding his jeep amid a mass of prostrate men dug into foxholes and concealed under the scrub.
It was as intimate as an ancient battle—you could touch the enemy and he could touch you. The Egyptians opened fire as Shlomi drove in. When the armoured personnel carrier driven by Saul from Beersheba came over the rise it was hit by a rocket that went right through Saul in the driver’s compartment and then through Eitan, the engineering student, who was in the back. The vehicle just stood there discharging black smoke, but Shlomi only noticed that afterward, and barely registered the presence of the tanks. In his memory, he and Patzi are alone in their jeep. He swerves furiously, then reverses back down the dune and comes back up at another point along the rise, and Patzi starts shooting again. In and out, then back, firing at the figures next to the jeep. When the Egyptians shot at the Israelis in their midst, they hit each other. “We turned around and around and we killed and killed”—that’s how Patzi described it to me when we spoke about this in his kitchen. “They died in their positions.”
There’s a 1,200-page regimental history of the 600th Brigade—a granular account of one unit’s nightmare in Sinai compiled by one of the junior officers, later a university professor, Menachem Ben Shalom. The account includes testimonies from the tank crews who were there that morning, including the author himself. One of the tanks was quickly hit by a rocket, blinding the commander in the turret. The others charged into the mass of infantry. “We spotted the commandos,” one crewman recalled, then changed to present tense, as if this were still happening, “and I attack with the machine gun and the treads, I’m crushing people and losing all semblance of humanity.” A loader named Andrei remembered seeing “a man facing me with an RPG, and the order was given to run him over, and I remember the awful picture of the Egyptian soldier understanding that we were going to run him over, and I see the horror on his face as we run him over.”
“One brave soldier of theirs suddenly stood up ten metres in front of the tank holding an RPG aimed right at us, right at my periscopes,” remembered Ofer, a driver in a tank commanded by an officer named Yehuda Geller. The officer was exposed in the turret, speaking to Ofer over the intercom. “In those seconds I whispered to myself ‘Hear, O Israel,’ ” he said, reciting the words of the prayer Jews say in the moments before death, “and waited for the worst. At that moment Yehuda Geller shot a few bursts at the soldier from the turret with his Uzi. My trance was broken by Yehuda’s shout, ‘Break left, crush him.’ I turned left and ran over the brave soldier.”
No one remembers exactly how long the battle lasted. The Egyptians fought almost until the last man. “No one surrendered,” Patzi said. But the word almost is necessary because a few of the tank crewmen say there were enemy soldiers lying on the ground, maybe dead and maybe not, and Patzi shot them to make sure. There’s a blurry time at the end of a battle when no one’s certain it’s over, and the blurriness can get you killed: maybe while one enemy soldier surrenders and you lower your guard, his friend shoots you in the back. That had almost happened in a smaller battle a few days before. Patzi had seen an Egyptian officer surrender then change his mind and raise his rifle. Patzi shot him first, and it confirmed what they believed in Almond Reconnaissance, which is that the battle is over only when you’re sure that all the enemy soldiers are dead.
As the Israelis overcame the commandos, a few of the tank crewmen saw two or three enemy officers trying to surrender when Patzi killed them, too. This isn’t how Patzi or his men remember it. Tank crews are trained to follow orders, to be part of the machine, and to do their killing at long range. They weren’t used to close quarters and they hadn’t seen someone like Patzi before. They thought he was berserk. The men who were in the battle describe Patzi with language that sounds less like Sinai than Troy. They were all soldiers, trying to do what they were forced to do, but he was born for it, something you don’t see very often. He was the kind of person who wins wars for you and allows you not to know what that means.
When the shooting stopped and the desert fell silent, everyone could hear an eerie wailing over the scene, like a ram’s horn. Only then did Shlomi look over and see the armoured personnel carrier smoking atop the rise. Saul from Beersheba was slumped over the horn. That was the terrible sound. Eitan’s body was in the back and Katz, the religious officer, had lost most of his blood by the time a helicopter landed. Shlomi wrestled Saul’s body out of the driver’s seat, and the horn stopped.
