8
There were so many planes in the sky that they reminded one pilot of the huge Allied raids of World War II. The first wave was Skyhawks that flew over the dry hills of northern Israel, then over the blue oval of the Sea of Galilee and into the death zone above the Golan Heights.
From the ground it was tiny metal triangles passing overhead, a flitting shadow on your tank. Up in a Skyhawk you saw the dials, buttons, and lights, the cross of the sight, the oxygen tube. The plane had an ugly, efficient American cockpit, not like the French machines the air force used to fly, where you were raised high above the fuselage and saw the wings spread elegantly behind you. The pilots still liked to use French for airplane parts, like the fuel tanks they called bidonnes. There’s a theory—one I heard from Ofer Gavish, a Phantom navigator in 1973 who later became a human repository for Israeli musical history—that the country’s songs come from the same source as its weapons. So at the birth of the state, when the arms were mostly Czech and the inspiration communist, the tunes came from Russia. When the air force began flying Mirages and Mystères, the Israeli singers and artists who mattered were all visiting Paris and bringing back Piaf and Moustaki and translated chansons. Then came the late sixties, when the French chose the Arabs over the Jews, and the weapons started coming from America with rock ’n’ roll.
Far beneath the pilots, the Golan escarpment was covered with the black spots of Syrian tanks moving into Israeli territory with little to stop them. The war on the ground was a different world from the one in the air, but black smoke rising from the battlefield reached the rarified height where the pilots worked, turning the whole scene dark.
Down below, the scale of what had gone wrong was clear from the first hours of the fighting. Entire units had vanished. In the air, however, the pilots’ hubris was chipped but not shattered. The superheroes in the green flight suits were supposed to win this time as they’d won six years before. But this was a new war, and the enemy had new missiles from their Russian patrons, the same ones that Tom Wolfe described when he wrote about the air war over North Vietnam a few years earlier. The SAMs were like “flying telephone poles,” he wrote, climbing toward you in clusters of six or eight, turning to follow you when you tried to get away: “The SAM’s come up, and the boys go down.”
The flight this morning, the second day of the war, was a choreographed plan known as Model 5. The idea was to destroy the Syrian missile batteries on the Golan so the Israeli jets would be free to help the infantry and tank men who were screaming for air support down on the plateau. Some of the planes were flying from the Ramat David air base in northern Israel, a seven-minute flight to the war on the Golan if your plane was bomb-heavy and slow. Ofer, the Phantom navigator who later became a music historian, was at the base but was too green to fly a real mission at first. He was twenty-one and had been out of flight school for only a few months. He was preparing maps for the pilots and hanging around the operations room, listening to the radios.
The day before, he’d been home at his kibbutz for Yom Kippur. In those days many of the kibbutz movement’s avowed atheists marked the fast day not just with a barbecue but with a pork barbecue, a way of celebrating their freedom from God and Jewish fate. That practice was about to change, one of many things that would change when the war made clear that no one was free of anything. When the call came from the squadron and Ofer rushed back to the base, one of the first things he saw was a veteran navigator, a religious Jew with a skullcap, asking the squadron’s cook for a big steak. The navigator had flown one of the first desperate missions of the war while still fasting and almost fainted in the air. The religious Jew asking for a steak on Yom Kippur was one of Ofer’s first indications of how bad things were. The navigator with the skullcap didn’t survive the week.
The planes of Model 5 were sent off the following day at eleven a.m. to turn things around on the Syrian front. Ofer was reduced to hearing it from the base. At first there was radio silence. It was hard to imagine what was going on in the air. Some of his friends from the fresh batch out of flight school were raring to go, lobbying commanders to get on the roster, but Ofer was relieved to be on the ground. He wasn’t eager to die in an airplane, or at all. If you meet him today it’s impossible to believe he was anywhere near fighter jets. He’s an elfin grandfather who leads tour groups around Israel with an acoustic guitar.
Before long, a flight of Phantoms from his squadron went in, led by a pilot named Henkin—they flew low to avoid enemy radar, pulled up into a steep climb, turned downward, and dove toward the batteries. It was all calculated to the foot, to the second, to the degree of the climb and the dive, based on aerial photographs that showed precisely where the batteries were. But the Syrians weren’t stupid, and overnight they’d moved. Henkin was a pilot with a great future ahead of him, so they said. In the seat behind him was a navigator named Levi. They were already in the dive, the engine whining and the airplane shaking, when Henkin understood that his target wasn’t there. He adjusted, but now the angle of the dive was steeper than planned—too steep, at least that’s how the other pilots understood what happened. No one really knows.
Ofer was in the operations room when the squadron commander asked his pilots to report results. Someone said, “Number 1 went in next to the targets.”
The commander said, “I understand that Number 1 went in to attack close to the targets?”
“No,” said the voice. “He went into the ground next to the targets.” The commander didn’t want to understand what he was hearing.
What the pilots seem to remember more than anything else is the transitions. You were in the crew lounge, a kind of male paradise with armchairs, whisky, a record player, and women soldiers who worshipped and pitied you. There were cooks—reservists who’d been called up from hotels and cruise ships to make you food—and professional masseurs working on the Ping-Pong tables. Then the command arrived and you ran out to the tarmac. You climbed the ladder into your cockpit, sweating into your helmet and suit. Within a few minutes it was skidding telephone poles in the air and white carpets of cannon shells, and your friends exploding or parachuting into Egyptian fields to be pitchforked by villagers and taken to be tortured. If you made it, thirty minutes after takeoff you were back on the Ping-Pong table, getting oiled up. Then it was all black humour, poker, and the country’s best bands, who started showing up at the base as soon as the war began—a hip new act called Beehive; a three-woman band called Chocolate, Mint & Gum, which included Yardena Arazi, famous as the prettiest woman in Israel. Then you strapped yourself in and went out again. One of the pilots compared it to “heating and cooling a piece of metal three times a day.”
In the photographs everyone’s grinning, of course. They’re young and unfazed, chest hair surging from unzipped flight suits, moustaches and sideburns on the older reservists, nicknames like Rhino and Wild Bull, looking less like clean-cut American air-force types than like the military wing of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The base at Ramat David was a strange little world under intense psychological pressure. The whole show was run by an officer who everyone called Zorik, the base commander, a wiry colonel who could fly any plane and whose leadership style was more personable than intimidating.
One night that first week, a Skyhawk pilot named Momo was asleep at the base. He was from Ofer’s class at flight school, so he was also too green for combat. One of the experienced pilots who’d been called back from civilian life was a guy named Diamant, who was twenty-five, studying in university, and working with his father in construction. He had a little son and daughter. Diamant was suiting up in his quarters when a Syrian missile hit nearby and killed him. Momo heard the blast and scrambled under his bed but crawled back out when he realized that the bed was unlikely to help. A few hours later Momo got his chance to fly.
Before dawn he was in the briefing room with two others, preparing for a bombing run to Port Said at the northern tip of the Suez Canal. The flight’s Number 1 was Vilan, one of the squadron’s most experienced men. Young Momo would be Number 3. He was surprised to find that Number 2 would be Col. Zorik himself, who’d barely slept since the beginning of the war but who knew his men were rattled and insisted on joining the day’s first mission to raise morale.
Momo climbed the rungs of the Skyhawk’s ladder and slipped in. The canopy closed. He followed the two older pilots in a straight line down the coast toward Egypt in the dark, hugging the ground to avoid the missiles, and at first light he was over Sinai, approaching a lagoon on the Mediterranean shore that had somehow turned pink. He flew closer. The flamingos were migrating, and thousands of them were resting on the water at dawn.
The three planes turned inland. The green pilot saw the roads in northern Sinai backed up with Israeli vehicles, some of them stuck in the sand. The pilots skimmed the lagoons toward Port Said and pulled up into the attack about two miles out, lining up in the air, first Vilan, then Col. Zorik, then Momo in the Number 3 plane, which was the worst job because the first two might catch the Egyptian gunners by surprise, but by the time he showed up they’d definitely be waiting.
Vilan’s plane rocketed into the sky and released its bombs. The gunners were still asleep. Then came Col. Zorik, and now Momo saw lines of shells rising from Port Said and thousands of bullets coming at him from infantry in the sand—he couldn’t see the men, just their tracers in the dim light. He was flying into a white cloud of shell smoke and there was nothing he could do but ignore it, concentrating on the pull-up spot, the angle and speed of his climb, the force pushing his body into the seat, the light jerk of the bomb release, and he was away. He saw the flashes of light weapons coming from the reef by a besieged Israeli outpost called Budapest. Every Egyptian foot soldier in the vicinity was shooting at him, but he doesn’t remember being afraid, just angry: “I was furious that they were trying to kill me,” he said. “Who were these sons of whores who dare try to kill me?” He dove with his machine gun, strafing them once, then flipping back and doing it again, finishing every round he had before he heard Number 1 on the radio, screaming, “Pull up! Pull up!”
Momo lifted his head and looked out to sea. He saw the plane piloted by Col. Zorik, on his morale-boosting mission, gliding toward the surface of the Mediterranean, skimming the water. It wasn’t clear what was happening, and Zorik never said a word on the radio, he just disappeared into the sea in a white circle of froth and no one ever found him. When you played music at an air base, you played for people who had images like that fresh in their minds.