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Next to the airfield at Sharm el-Sheikh was a navy anchorage for gunboats and a few landing craft, the biggest of which had once lived a different life, carrying ore down East African rivers, with a different name, Zambia Challenge. When the Israeli navy bought the ship and refurbished it to carry tanks and infantry, they gave it a new name, but nothing warlike—Bathsheba, the name of the woman David fell in love with when he saw her bathing on the roof in the story from the Book of Samuel, retold later on in Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” Three years before the war, the Bathsheba became infamous when a truck of explosives blew up on board and killed twenty-four people. A month after that, the Bathsheba was almost sunk at the port of Eilat by Egyptian frogmen with a magnetic mine, but survived to serve as the centrepiece of a hazardous mission in the Yom Kippur War.
Sharm el-Sheikh wasn’t a paradise now. The Egyptians had mined the narrows and there was combat in the Gulf of Suez. Two Israeli gunboats had raided an Egyptian anchorage on the other side of the gulf, sinking a few enemy boats and returning with a few sailors wounded and one killed. One of the lieutenants at the anchorage, Motti, remembered seeing that soldier wrapped in a blanket on a pier. He was eighteen and his name was Herzl. The helicopter wouldn’t take him because there was only room for the wounded. Herzl just lay there for a while. Motti had a sailor in his own gunboat whose brother had just been killed fighting with the infantry elsewhere in Sinai, and everyone knew but him. No one told the sailor while they were at sea, going up and down the Gulf of Suez. They pretended nothing had happened. Only when they docked a few days later did Motti pull him aside. The kid asked how long everyone had known, and Motti squirmed. He was only twenty-one and hadn’t been trained for this. That was the life of a young naval officer at Sharm in those weeks.
Another young officer, Roni, commanded one of the smaller landing craft and was preoccupied with preparations for something big, code-named “Green Light.” This was to be a surprise invasion across the Gulf of Suez: The Bathsheba and the smaller craft were to cross the waterway and land a brigade of paratroops and a battalion of armour on the Egyptian side. They were going to go in like Omaha Beach if necessary, then come up behind the Egyptian forces facing the Israelis along the Suez Canal. It was a creative and perilous idea. Most of the attacking force would be aboard the Bathsheba, a lumbering target that could be sunk with one shell. And if the Egyptians were waiting on the beaches, there was a chance no one would return.
Roni’s friend Yoram, another lieutenant, was chosen to land with the infantry as a liaison officer. This was not an enviable job and not at all what Yoram was supposed to be doing. His wedding had been scheduled for Tuesday, October 9. But the surprise attack came on October 6 and Yoki, the bride, saw her fiancé disappear into the military with all the other young men. They’d been together for three years, beginning with a date at the Comet Cinema in Haifa. Yoki doesn’t remember the movie, just his hand on her shoulder.
Yoki was called up herself and sent to a logistics base in central Israel. For the first week she heard nothing. It wasn’t like today. Most of the soldiers had no way to contact home, and they could be dead for weeks before you knew. When Yoki’s cousin was wounded on the canal and taken to a hospital the family was actually relieved to hear it, because at least it meant he was alive.
By the end of the second week of the war, Yoki had still heard nothing from Yoram. She couldn’t bear the whiplash that came with thinking they’d be married and then knowing nothing about his fate. She decided to go find him.
She got her parents to drive her to the airfield at Sde Dov, in Tel Aviv. She begged her way onto an army transport flight and was told to sit in the back of a small truck on the tarmac. The truck drove up the ramp into the Hercules, the ramp closed, and she sat on the truck’s bench in the weak cabin lights and in the roar of the engines for an hour.
Two unexpected occurrences followed aboard the Bathsheba within about a day of each other.
In one, the open deck that was supposed to carry tanks to the invasion beach became the venue for a Leonard Cohen concert. The crews don’t remember who brought him, just that he was suddenly there with a guitar. It seems likely that he came from the nearby airfield, where he’d slept in Orly’s bed. Someone took a picture of Cohen on the ship in the sunshine. He’s standing next to Roni, one of the lieutenants:
That was the first event. The second began with Yoki’s arrival at the anchorage, looking for her groom. He wasn’t there. But someone told her he was alive, as far as anyone knew, out on a patrol in the Gulf of Suez.
Then someone at the base decided that Yoki and Yoram were going to get married right now. People who aren’t in wars think they have all the time in the world, but at Sharm el-Sheikh in those weeks it was clear you just couldn’t wait. It was time for the wedding.
The cooks threw together a few sandwiches. Someone found a bottle of wine and someone else improvised a wedding canopy. By a stroke of luck or divine providence, the rabbi of the navy was also at the base just then and was pressed into service. The speaker system told all hands to assemble at the dock, aboard the landing craft Bathsheba. Everyone came.
At sea, Yoram had no idea that Yoki had somehow made it to the southern tip of Sinai or that he was about to get married, and found out only when he reached the naval anchorage. Someone rushed him to the quartermaster’s storeroom and got him some clean fatigues. In the girls’ quarters they tried to get Yoki to wear a nice civilian dress, but she stayed in her own fatigues, dark green pants and a khaki shirt. All the ships in the anchorage sounded their horns, and instead of just climbing aboard the Bathsheba from the dock, she was ferried out on a motor launch.
Yoram and Yoki were reunited on the deck where the tanks were supposed to go, where the ammunition truck had exploded, the site of the Cohen concert that happened around the same date as the wedding, though it’s not clear which came first. After all the preparations for Operation Green Light, the mission was called off, and Yoram never had to land with the troops like Omaha Beach. The concert and the marriage ended up being the two most significant events aboard the Bathsheba in that war.
After the ceremony, the rabbi told them they had to spend the night together—that was Jewish law, and there were no loopholes. But when they went back to Yoram’s room another sailor was asleep in one of the bunks. He’d come off watch exhausted and couldn’t understand why they were waking him up, so they just let him sleep. In the end, Yoram went back to sea and Yoki flew out the next morning. The next time they saw each other was three months later, but they’ve never been apart since then. They have three children and seven grandchildren.