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The nocturnal activity of the air force at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, end of summer 1973: A flash of white thigh in dark water. Hair plastered down a smooth back. Ripples glimmering around rocks. Bras and fatigues crumpled on the sand.
Desert mountains surged from the interior to hover like frozen breakers over the shore, the Red Sea stretched south toward Yemen, and two armies faced each other along the Suez Canal, but you couldn’t see any of it in the dark. The scene was just a half dozen soldiers in a cove. Because in this memory they’re naked, they don’t even look like soldiers, just teenagers. Their doomed radar station is out of sight.
In the memories of the people who served there, Sharm el-Sheikh was sprinkled with stardust. They all recall the time before the war with the same faraway look and half smile. Ruti, Pnina, and Orly are all grandmothers now, but in the photographs they’re nineteen and smiling. Everything’s about to happen.
The photos show beaches and blistering sunlight in seventies Kodachrome, and kids in civilian bell-bottoms. Sometimes they’re in khaki pants or regulation miniskirts in a nod to the military that sent them here, but the military seemed to be beside the point. There was one hut between the airstrip and the water where the guys were known for the grouper they caught in the gulf and would grill for you if you showed up, especially if you were a girl; their official designation was “Reception,” but no one knew what they were receiving. In the photos they’re all playing guitars or mugging in aviator shades, or standing at one spot by the airfield where the desert wind in the evening was better than any blow dryer. It seems like a combination of the original Charlie’s Angels and M*A*S*H, shot in the landscape of the Book of Exodus.
The mood wasn’t just the confidence left over from the victory six years earlier, when Sharm el-Sheikh and the rest of Sinai came under Israeli control, but also the youth, optimism, and togetherness of the sixties. In America it was already the autumn of Watergate. It had been four years since the bloodshed at the Stones’ Altamont Speedway show symbolically ended the Age of Aquarius. The Summer of Love was a memory. But in those days everything reached Israel late, and here the sixties lasted into 1973, until October 6.
Ruti ran the telephone switchboard at the airfield. In her photos she’s surrounded by friends and admirers, posing in her uniform and Star of David necklace, stretched on a rock in a bikini. In some of her pictures there’s a soldier named Doron. He was moody and had an unmilitary mop of black hair that threw shade over his eyes. He wrote dark teenage poetry about a girl he longed for but whose name he didn’t specify. Doron grew up poor in Haifa after his parents escaped the country called “the Holocaust.” (Where are your parents from? From the Holocaust.) These kids didn’t have much to do with that. They were the first generation of native “Israelis”—not tortured, not a minority, not religious, not exactly Jews, but creatures sprung from sunlight and salt water.
Doron was handsome and Ruti wanted to know him better, but at first he spoke sharply to her and kept his distance. He wouldn’t party like the others. Instead he’d sit on a ladder near the runway to watch the propeller planes that ferried soldiers from Israel across the desert to this distant outpost, their passengers emerging from air-conditioning into the heat pulsing from the asphalt. Once, when he thought Ruti was too slow to patch him through her switchboard, he lost his temper and shouted at her. But a few months in paradise softened him, and they became friends. In the following photograph she’s holding the guitar and he’s next to her, shirtless.
Pnina and Orly monitored screens at the radar station that sat above the airfield, on a mountain that rose like a long blade from the desert floor. The radars looked into Egyptian airspace, and on the screens enemy planes appeared as yellow dots. Pnina was the senior girl at the station, and Orly was a bit younger, with the soul of an artist. (The radar monitors were men and women ranging from their late teens to early twenties, but even decades later they refer to themselves at the time as “girls” and “boys,” and because this isn’t far from the truth I’ll preserve their language here.) The Egyptians had been defeated so thoroughly six years earlier, the humiliation of their air force so complete, that the yellow dots kept a safe distance from Israeli airspace. None of the radar monitors had ever seen a real enemy plane.
Under the screens were Perspex tables where they could write out coordinates with erasable markers. Orly was sometimes so bored that she used the Perspex to copy lines of Hebrew poetry from memory. She especially liked the work of Rachel, a poet of the pioneer generation of the 1920s who’d lived on the shore of Lake Kinneret, her awareness sharpened by terminal tuberculosis. “I’ll line my basket with Kinneret memories,” she wrote in her poem “Gift”: “The pink of the morning sky among the garden trees / The afternoon gold in a peaceful clearing / The evening jasmine on the Golan hills.” Rachel was sad but never cynical. She didn’t have a husband or children, and she was young and dying, but she had the beauty of the land and of the act of living in it. Orly can still recite these lines by heart decades later. Between shifts, the monitors would smoke in the sandbag emplacements overlooking the Red Sea. They had a phonograph and a few records—some Hebrew albums, one in Spanish, and one Leonard Cohen.
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One of the laws given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai, according to Jewish tradition, mandates a day of atonement and fasting every year on the tenth day of the seventh month, a “Sabbath of Sabbaths.” The mountain commonly identified as the site of this revelation is about fifty miles from the cove where the soldiers went skinny-dipping. In 1973, the eve of Yom Kippur fell on October 5.
In a prefab hut at the airfield was a small synagogue with some tattered prayer books and army-issue skullcaps. Ruti went to services that evening. Like many Jews who think little of religious observance most of the year, she took this day seriously. Yom Kippur begins at sundown and ends the following night, when the gate of heaven closes with a final prayer called “the Locking.” You can’t eat or drink anything in between. But when Ruti finished the first evening prayer and returned to the room she shared with a few other girls, still in a contemplative mood, she wrote in her diary that boys from the airfield’s maintenance crew were resolutely ignoring their religion: “The bastards were having a nice big meal.”
The next day’s observance keeps you in synagogue almost from morning to night. The service, many hundreds of Hebrew pages, is like a slow drive through rolling liturgical countryside. It meanders for miles, crawling through land so featureless it can put you to sleep, hooking back on itself so that you wonder if you didn’t pass that same red barn an hour ago. But there are several peaks that offer a flash of understanding and a view of something great and old. Three of these moments have become permanently linked in my own mind to Leonard Cohen, and to this story, and so are worth mentioning here.
One moment is a prayer called Unetaneh Tokef, which is about one thousand years old, though no one knows for sure. The prayer describes God’s judgment and the insignificance of human beings who are “like a broken shard, like dry grass, a withered flower, like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that blows away and dust that scatters, like a dream that flits away.” The name of the prayer, translated as “Let us relate the power,” comes from its opening phrase, “Let us relate the power of this day’s holiness.” On Yom Kippur, the prayer tells us, it is sealed:
How many will pass on and how many be created,
Who will live and who will die,
Who will reach the end of their days and who will not,
Who by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst…
The lines aren’t sophisticated, they’re crude, but in the same way that life is crude. The symbolism is violent and memorable.
Another moment, a remnant of the service in the Jerusalem Temple that was destroyed by Rome in the year 70 CE, comes when men who are descended from the priestly class, the Cohanim, get up to bless the congregation. They stand in a line at the front of the synagogue, part their fingers in the middle in a mystic sign, and cloak themselves in prayer shawls so you can’t see their faces, maybe so you don’t know that the “priests” are just Mr. Cohen your gym teacher, or your friend’s dad. For a moment, the tradition transforms them into something noble. They recite a blessing that consists of fifteen Hebrew words: “May God bless you and guard you. May God shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift up His face to you and grant you peace.” It’s a very old blessing. The same text was dug up near my neighbourhood in Jerusalem on a silver amulet that someone engraved 2,600 years ago.
The third and final moment comes in the afternoon, when the energies of the congregation are flagging and everyone’s lips are dry. This is the reading of the Book of Jonah, the greatest story ever told in forty-eight sentences. In this story, God tries to speak to a man named Jonah, who runs away. Jonah is the only prophet in the Bible who does that. It’s the opposite of the way Abraham, in the Book of Genesis, responds to a similar call. Abraham says, “Here I am.” In Hebrew that’s just one word: hineini. God tells Abraham to build an altar to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and Abraham does. Hineini. Other prophets plead unsuitability at first, like Moses, who tells God that he stutters, and Jeremiah, who protests that he’s too young. But Jonah is the only one who tries to escape.
Instead of going east to warn the sinful metropolis of Nineveh to repent, as God wants, Jonah catches a boat sailing from Jaffa west to Tarshish, whose precise location isn’t known but doesn’t really matter—it’s just somewhere far away in the Mediterranean, in the direction opposite of the one intended for him. The rest of the story is about Jonah learning that escape is impossible. A storm nearly sinks his ship and he’s thrown overboard, then swallowed by a fish and spit out on shore, until we finally find him alone in the unforgiving sun of the desert outside Nineveh. A miraculous plant that sprang up instantly and gave him shade has withered and died with equal speed, and now there’s no shade, no port, no boat. It’s just Jonah and the overwhelming presence of God, who decides who’ll live and die, who by water and who by thirst. That’s where the story leaves Jonah, and us, as the Day of Atonement nears its end. The tradition shuts off our usual escape routes—food, work, sex, screens—and tries to move us from Jonah’s mindset at the beginning of the story to his understanding at the end. It’s an understanding that’s hard for most of us to grasp, but not for people who are very old, or very ill, or in a war.
On the morning of Yom Kippur, Ruti didn’t make it to the airfield’s synagogue. According to her diary entry for October 6, she slept late in the bed of the dark, broad-chested technician who was her boyfriend at the time. So she didn’t hear Unetaneh Tokef, or the priestly blessing.
At 1:51 p.m. one of the radios crackled at Babylon; under a hill elsewhere in Sinai; in a bunker full of speakers, unwashed tea glasses, and tense Israelis in green fatigues. An intelligence lieutenant named David heard an Egyptian pilot speaking in clipped Arabic, reporting an attack run. David shouted, “They’re coming.” Someone pressed an emergency button. All the Egyptian frequencies at Babylon came alive. Allahu akbar, they were shouting: God is great.
Artillery shells carpeted the Israeli side of the Suez Canal and thousands of Egyptian soldiers swarmed across the waterway. At the same moment, far away in the north of Israel, Syrian soldiers and tanks surged through minefields into the Golan Heights. An Egyptian bomber over the Mediterranean fired a guided missile at Tel Aviv.
Ruti heard the siren go off at the airfield, a sound that all Israelis know: a moan that starts low, clenches your stomach, then climbs in tone for two or three seconds, giving you time to realize that something bad is happening, and to wonder what it’s going to mean for you. The same siren was sounding across Israel and everyone who was here that day remembers it, the way the worshippers fell silent in the synagogues and strangers looked at each other on the street.
Two Phantoms stood on the runway near Ruti’s hut, new American jets with blue Stars of David painted on their wings. The air crews at Sharm el-Sheikh were theoretically on alert, but like everyone else in the air force, they associated the base with girls, guitars, and barbecues. It was supposed to be a place to unwind. The pilots and navigators had spent the previous night using what they called “the most important weapon in the sector,” the base’s 16-millimetre movie projector. In one of those details that would stretch the author’s credibility in a work of fiction, they watched Tora! Tora! Tora!, a Hollywood epic about the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.
Ruti was standing outside when the engines screamed toward her overhead. The two Phantoms took off and disappeared into the sky. New planes appeared, and she remembered Doron the black-haired poet and a few other boys shouting that these ones weren’t ours, which didn’t make sense to her even when an Egyptian bomb cratered the asphalt a hundred yards away. She kicked off her sandals and ran barefoot for shelter. A story from the victory of 1967 crossed her mind, one about Egyptian soldiers in such a hurry to run away that they left their boots behind.
She remembers that Doron was there, and it was the last time she saw him. There was a dogfight over the base when the two Phantoms returned. Then there were a few hours of quiet in this corner of Sinai as the day’s disaster played out elsewhere. In the midst of it all, no one heard the Book of Jonah or the “Locking” prayer that concludes the Day of Atonement at sundown. That year it was as if the day never ended, as if it lasted for the next three weeks, or longer.
Up at the radar station the girls sat on the floor of one of the huts, filling ammunition clips. The windows were blacked out with Bristol board. Everyone knew the radar stations would be among the first targets in any war, and there were rumours that Egyptian helicopters had already dropped commandos in the desert nearby. They could arrive at any minute. The boys had been issued helmets and rifles, even though they weren’t combat soldiers and weren’t much more war-ready than the girls. They were posted around the rim of the hilltop in the sandbagged emplacements that they’d used until now for cigarette breaks. After dark, Pnina, the senior girl, went around and gave out slices of a cheesecake she’d brought from home. The last slices went to three of her friends sharing an emplacement, one of them black-haired Doron.
Orly had just finished a shift on the screens, with no time or inclination to copy any poetry on the Perspex, and was outside when she saw the sun flying toward her—that was her first thought, that the sun was shooting out of the night sky over the Red Sea. There was a flash when the missile hit, and the hill shook. She ran in the light of burning huts until she saw some of the others huddled under a camouflage net. Someone said to cover her head with her hands. A second missile hit the station. There was no air raid bunker to hide in, no shelter at all. The power went out. Suddenly they weren’t electric youth with blow-dried hair overlooking the world from their clifftop, and they weren’t soldiers of any invincible army. They were alone and helpless on this broken hill. Someone took a fire extinguisher and tried to put out the generators. Someone else said the two boys who’d been in the radio hut were dead, and it didn’t seem possible, but one of the girls started screaming because her boyfriend was in there. The three boys who’d shared a guard post, the ones who’d eaten the last slice of cheesecake, couldn’t be found. One of the girls started digging in the hard soil with her hands, as if she could tunnel her way to somewhere safe.
People down at the airfield saw the explosion. All the radios were dead. The hill just went black and stopped answering. The reports said the radar station and its soldiers had been captured by Egyptian commandos, and these reports were followed quickly by rumours that all of the surviving girls had been raped. It wasn’t clear how anyone knew, but that’s how rumours work in the army—they make explicit your worst fears.
In the middle of that night, the first of the war, twelve soldiers in three tanks were sent to recapture the radar station. The tanks happened to be of Soviet manufacture, a detail that turned out to matter; they’d been captured in the last war and painted with Israeli insignia. The tanks rumbled up the switchback road, the crews heading into battle for the first time. When the lead tank drew close to the gate, the gunner saw two soldiers. He opened fire and watched them fall.
Orly and Pnina, clustered with the others inside the damaged station, heard the enemy come roaring and clanking up the hill. The round turrets of Soviet tanks came into view and opened fire. The two Israelis guarding the gate dropped and lay still.
The tanks moved into the station and fired into the dining hut. One of the boys, Danny, was hit by shrapnel, and another, Judah, was gripping an old machine gun on a tripod, not that any of the radar technicians really knew what to do with a machine gun, and not that it was going to help against tanks. Pnina was in a trench a few yards away from the tanks, close enough to see the enemy commander with his head out of the hatch, close enough to hear him speak into his radio: “Aleph 1 to Aleph 2, over.” The Egyptian was speaking Hebrew.
The station commander was already running toward the tanks waving a white shirt. Pnina got up too. She remembers the bewildered tank commander, who was not an Egyptian but an Israeli kid her age from a kibbutz in the north, staring at her from underneath his wide-eared helmet. He said, “There are girls here?” They all stood there looking at each other.
Ruti, at her telephone switchboard down at the airfield, knew something terrible had happened at the radar station—an attack and then a mistake. The Egyptians had rocketed the station but no enemy soldiers set foot there. The only ground combat that night was between Israelis. The soldiers didn’t talk about it and wouldn’t for thirty years. In those first days of the war there was enough bad news from elsewhere to preoccupy them. The silver tail of a MiG-17 lay in the desert near Ruti’s barracks, where it had fallen in the dogfight in the first minutes of the war. The body of the Egyptian pilot also lay there until someone took it away. Doron’s mother and sister kept calling the switchboard to ask where he was, and Ruti said he wasn’t around right now, but she’d pass on the message. That’s what they had told her to say.