19
There’s a photo of Patzi from a few days later, taken by Isaac when he finally made it from Tokyo with his camera. The commander is leaning against the armoured personnel carrier. If you look closely, to the right of his head, near the top of the vehicle, you can see the little hole where the rocket hit. He’s picked up a crude musical instrument left behind by Egyptian soldiers, a kind of improvised lyre, and there’s a cigarette between his fingers. If you know the Bible you can’t help but think of the beautiful killer with his secret chord.
One of Isaac’s friends had given him a Russian rifle taken from the dead commandos. He had to clean blood off it. But his most important piece of gear was the Nikon, which he had out almost all the time. It wasn’t just a way to record the events. The camera, he told me, was his shield. Years later, when his father was dying, he took pictures: “When I’m holding a camera it’s not me.” Few combat officers had cameras, and no press photographer was as close as he was to the fighting. It’s thanks to Isaac’s rolls of film that we can see what all of this looked like. Because he never bothered to register with the army when he landed from Japan, and just went to the front, he never officially served in the war, or with Force Patzi, which officially didn’t exist anyway. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that all of these things happened, or that he was there. But we have the photos.
In one shot Patzi is kneeling in the centre. Above him, with his hands on his hips, is Shlomi the air marshal. Isaac is the bearded one kneeling on the right.
Now the Israelis were finally recovering from the shock of the first week. The plan was to roll the dice with a canal crossing and a breakthrough onto the Egyptian side, which the Israeli soldiers called “Africa.” This would either end the war or end in disaster. The whole army was moving toward the canal, the roads through the desert jammed with trucks and commandeered civilian cars and buses. Isaac has a shot of that too:
In the foreground, with the cigarette, is an officer named Joshua, to whom Patzi gave the job of leading one of the first tanks to the waterline on the night of the crossing. The tank was hit by an Egyptian shell and Joshua was killed. Every so often the vehicles moving forward for the decisive battle had to pull off into the sand to make way for trucks bringing wounded back from the front. “A chaplain appeared on the roadside distributing copies of the Psalms,” according to one historian, “which were snatched up even by avowed agnostics.”
Isaac snapped a photo of Shlomi, the air marshal, cleaning a machine-gun barrel as they prepared for the push across the canal:
He has a photo of them plotting the route:
And taking a shower:
They tried to sleep:
But it wasn’t easy.
The first troops crossed the canal and reached “Africa” without being detected. When the Egyptians figured out what the Israelis had done, the soldiers from Force Patzi found themselves at a cursed rectangle on the canal banks called the Yard. This was where General Sharon’s forces were crossing, and it came under murderous shellfire. The general himself was lightly wounded in the head, and soldiers and engineers were being cut down in the Yard itself and on the fragile bridge over the canal. Isaac ferried casualties back a few miles to a clearing station—they’d load up their armoured personnel carrier with as many wounded men as could fit on the floor, race out, unload, then back to the waterline. Isaac remembers standing over five men on the floor, one of them screaming so loud that he had to ask him to stop.
In his memoir, Warrior, Sharon describes the Yard jammed with vehicles as shells fall. A tank pulls up, the turret opens, a young soldier climbs out. It’s the son of Sharon’s own signals officer, a middle-aged man sitting in the general’s armoured personnel carrier. The father and son embrace, say a few words, and then the son goes off with his battalion into battle. An hour later word arrives that the son is wounded, and his father briefly leaves to find out what happened. His son’s in critical condition with a spinal injury and can’t move his legs, the signals officer tells Sharon, and goes back to work. The commander of the paratroops who were crossing the canal also had a son in a tank, and this son, too, was wounded. “All across the battlefield other fathers were losing sons and sons fathers,” Sharon wrote. “Men who had fought in the War of Independence twenty-five years ago were still fighting.” In his antiwar song “Story of Isaac,” Cohen admonished the older generation for sacrificing the young. But here in Sinai things were more complicated.
Isaac doesn’t have pictures of the bloody scene at the Yard. In his photos the Israelis are alive and grinning:
And the dead soldiers are all Egyptians:
That wasn’t the reality, just the pictures.
Patzi led his little crew across the canal on the second day of the counterattack, and there was more killing as they pushed into Egyptian territory. It gets monotonous to describe it after a while. Isaac remembers flashes: an enemy tank swivelling its cannon toward them and his knees going weak because this was it, and then the Egyptian tank exploding, destroyed by an Israeli tank that Isaac hadn’t seen. The unit storming a cluster of Egyptian tents, killing the soldiers inside—but he doesn’t remember more than that, or doesn’t want to talk about it. Of the whole war, he said, “I took photographs, I saw things I didn’t believe I was seeing, I repress it all. My mother said that when I came back I sat for a week and didn’t move.”
What everyone remembers was that within days of the crossing they were near an Egyptian air base called Fa’id. It was late afternoon when a truck materialized like a hallucination, carrying one of the grande dames of Israeli song.
Yaffa Yarkoni was famous as a singer of ballads from the Independence War, forty-seven years old, and there she was, across the Suez Canal with the troops of the front line, before the army even really controlled the territory. Uniformed bodies were strewn in the sand not far away. She’d somehow managed to cross the canal with an accordion player, and she was going to raise morale or die trying. She was in jeans and an army shirt, an orange bandanna around her neck.
She stood on the rear ramp of Sharon’s armoured personnel carrier and started singing as the general and his soldiers contemplated this emissary from an impossible world where there were women with orange bandannas around their necks. It would be hard to believe this actually happened if Isaac hadn’t been there with his Nikon:
Sharon knew her from the ’48 war, when they’d both been young, before he was a general and she a grande dame, before Israel was even a country. He went over to kiss her:
She was still singing, as the men tell it, when there was a roar overhead. A lone Sukhoi appeared in the sky and dove.
The general shoved the singer into the vehicle and lay on top of her. The Egyptian came in firing his cannon. Patzi stood there in the open, taking absurd shots at the plane with his pistol until Shlomi pulled him down. A few of the others were blasting away with their Russian rifles and one of them, Golod, was using the big machine gun mounted on the armoured personnel carrier. You could see the red circle of the jet engine as it pulled up and away, and Golod’s tracers rising from the ground and flying right into the red circle. The plane faltered. The canopy shot off and there was a helpless human being suspended in the air by a parachute, floating down toward the people he’d just been trying to kill.
A few soldiers sped off and grabbed the pilot as soon as he landed. The enemy.
The Sukhoi crashed in the desert nearby:
The soldiers gave the pilot something to drink and handed him off to interrogators. Isaac and Shlomi and the others took his silk parachute to use as a tent.
Like many dates in this narrative, the precise timing of what happened next is blurry. Shlomi thinks it was the same night. He’d just returned to their improvised camp from a sweep through the desert to scrounge fuel cans for the jeep. He needed benzine but all he could find was diesel. The camp was a quiet group of dirty men, the jeep with its empty fuel tank, the armoured vehicle with the rocket hole and bloodstains, a few tanks. Some of the soldiers were eating combat rations near the parachute-tent.
They were somewhere west of Suez, a place Shlomi remembers as “nowhere”: “Put your finger anywhere on the map. Dunes. A white parachute.” Shlomi is not an excitable speaker. He’s seen a lot, and he’s efficient, not voluble. But here his story took on a different tone. As he approached the encampment, he heard a voice.
“It is,” he said, “as if you’re walking in the desert and God comes down to you and starts speaking. I was like Moses hearing the voice, and I walked toward it. I’ll paint the picture for you: A steel helmet on the sand. Sitting on the helmet is a figure with a guitar, singing ‘Lover Lover Lover.’ ”