Before returning to Kerem Maharal from the kibbutz, I stopped at a chain hamburger joint built on what had been the lands of Samakh. After I bit into my cheeseburger, I noticed another diner staring at me. He turned to his wife, who wore a hijab in the Druze tradition, and said something before standing up and striding toward my end of the restaurant. His dark hair, almost black, was in the style of a military buzz cut, and he walked with a soldier’s steady cadence. “Mr. Ayalon,” said the man, introducing himself as a former fellow officer, “can I have a moment of your time? I just want to say how much I wish you would return to politics. Israel needs a prime minister like you.”
I gestured at the empty seat next to mine, but he said he preferred to stand. “Thank you,” I responded, “but I’m really not cut out for politics.” I explained as best I could that I lack the necessary moral flexibility, and he laughed with appreciation for my sarcasm. We ended up taking a group photo with his wife and son.
Traffic jams gave my thoughts ample time to wander on the drive home, and memories, sharp as razor wire, tore at me. Just beyond the dry hills I was moving past, my friend Haim Sturman lay buried in the cemetery at Kibbutz Ein Harod. Haim, with his sparkling dark eyes, puckish grin, and angular, stubbly jaw, embodied the Zionist ethos I grew up with. I had missed his funeral because I was in a hospital still recovering from the same battle that killed him. The ceremony was a national event because he was from the third generation of Sturmans to die for Israel and Jewish self-determination, a legacy of heroism of a sort that probably had not existed since the kingdoms of David and Solomon.
Haim’s Ukrainian-born grandfather, also named Haim, set out with his comrades to drain the swampland between Mount Carmel and the Sea of Galilee and helped found Kibbutz Ein Harod, which Ari Shavit describes in My Promised Land as being “imprinted on every Israeli’s psyche.” He wrote that “in a sense it is our Source, our point of departure,” because the kibbutzniks were aware “that what they were about to do might require violence. Their determination was to conquer the valley — come what may.”
Haim Sr.’s peaceful idealism clashed with the reality on the ground. When Arabs began attacking Jewish communities during the great Arab revolt of the mid-1930s, he was among the earliest to join the Haganah defense organization and to champion the “Tower and Stockade” settlements, collective farms encircled by fences and protected by watchtowers that defended against raids. In 1938, while in a jeep reconnoitering land for a new kibbutz in the Beit She’an Valley, he hit a land mine and died. It had been planted by followers of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the Syrian Islamic revivalist preacher who deployed jihadist terror first against the French in Lebanon and then against Jews in Palestine. Haim Sr.’s son Moshe inherited his father’s pistol, and when Arabs killed Moshe in a battle near Beit She’an in 1948, the gun was passed on to his three-year-old son, Haim.
I was Haim’s commander and trainer in Flotilla 13, and we became close friends. The Navy SEALs have Hell Week; we had Hell Month, thirty days of physical and psychological torment designed to weed out all but the most determined. If you survived this crucible, then came three months of advanced infantry and weapons instruction, parachuting, maritime warfare, boat operations, explosives handling, and demolitions. Finally, we endured long months of diving in the open sea, by day and by night, to practice raids on ships and land-based targets.
To test our mettle, we’d wait for perfect storms, those cold fronts that howled down from the far north bringing blizzards to the Golan and driving rain to the coast. In the dead of night, we’d maneuver dinghies through ten-foot waves and plunge into the water off the coast of Atlit with sixty-pound packs on our backs. It wasn’t the cold or the weight of our packs, however, that broke the most recruits; it was the radical isolation of swimming for hours through the deep waters of the bay so dark you could barely see the compass and depth gauge to navigate your way. We felt like blindfolded men pitched into a whirlpool. They called us the silent ones because deep underwater, divers can’t hear a thing. This was survival of the fittest, and some of our modern-day Samsons lasted only half an hour.
Those who made it through faced still more training. We’d practice doing reconnaissance of enemy coastal defenses. Or we’d maneuver unwieldy, water-laden mini-subs through waves crashing against the rocky coast. We’d hit the beach after fighting currents trying to sweep us back out to sea. We’d scramble up and down cargo nets and across rope bridges, race up and down mountains, slither like vipers through minefields, and practice laying booby traps and explosive charges or scaling the sides of ships with silencers in hand.
To be frank, we were motivated neither by Zionist-socialist New Man ideology nor the post-Holocaust ethos of Never Again. It all came down to the thrill of adventure and danger, the intoxicating adrenaline of the fight — the desire to push our limits. Swimming faster, diving deeper, running farther, and shooting less out of careful deliberation than instinct and intuition constituted the formula for survival. In our line of work, if you hesitated, your target would drop you.
My sense of mission took on new dimensions after the 1967 war. Until then Israel’s main enemies, the Syrians in the Golan, the Jordanians in the West Bank, and the Egyptians in Gaza and in the Sinai, were all across land borders. After 1967 the Red Sea facing Egypt became our most important border. Egypt instigated its War of Attrition, and we naval commandos were needed for special operations.
Egyptian raids were growing in number and deadliness, sparking a mounting mood of panic in Israel. Although I had signed up for Flotilla 13 for the sake of the challenge and the thrill of danger, the buildup to the Six-Day War had made me realize for the first time that our undertakings were a continuation of the wars our parents waged against the British blockade, against armed Arab insurgents, and against the Arab states that ganged up against us following the UN Partition Plan in 1947 and our Declaration of Independence in 1948. Our enemies still rejected our right to exist, and my comrades and I believed we had no choice but to continue fighting until our strength forced them to accept Israel as a fait accompli. With our victory in the Six-Day War, we could now achieve our destiny of liberating the Land of Israel — by settling Judea, Samaria, the Golan, Gaza, and the Sinai. Flotilla 13 was now playing a key role in this elemental struggle.
On July 10, 1969, enemy commandos made their way across the Suez Canal in dinghies, and at Mezach near the breakwater at the southern entrance of the canal, they infiltrated our lines and attacked our armored corps. Set aflame, eight of our soldiers died in their tanks, nine were wounded, and one was captured alive. Flotilla 13 would deliver Israel’s response.
Just after dusk on July 19, the day before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon to take a “small step for man and a giant leap for mankind,” we commandos of Flotilla 13 gathered in Ras Sudar, a Bedouin region of labyrinthine desert canyons in the Sinai south of the Suez Canal, in those days one the most strategic stretches of water on earth. If my friends and I could slip through Egyptian defenses and eliminate the soldiers on Egypt’s Green Island, or Al Jazeera Al Khadraa, a reputedly impenetrable fortress like something out of the movie with Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn’s The Guns of Navarone, we would deliver a new plague on the House of Egypt. British military engineers had erected the fortress during World War II to protect the Suez Canal, the ultra-strategic lifeline of the British Empire. The resounding message would be that no matter how well fortified, no Egyptian position was beyond our reach. No enemy soldier, not even elite commandos hidden away in the Pyramids of Giza, could go to sleep or take a piss without the nagging fear that we could show up, guns ablaze.
The raid was to be the first such attack on this scale in the history of marine warfare. Our goal was to knock out a radar station, destroy the 37mm cannons and four 85mm antiaircraft artillery pieces, both heavy and light, and kill most of the combatants on the island. Our amphibious battle plan called for swimming and then diving toward our target through waters notorious for punishing currents before shifting over into assault mode the minute we divers poked our heads out of the water just under the walls of the enemy barracks. Not the American SEALs or the Italian Decima Flottiglia, nor their British, German, or Soviet counterparts, had ever gone, like a caterpillar emerging from its chrysalis, from diving to close-range commandos.
We trained at the Gesher police station, which had been turned into a replica of Green Island. Gesher was where my father had been stationed in 1948. According to our intelligence reports, Green Island, shaped like a dog’s leg and not much larger than a soccer field, was protected from hostile forces by three coils of razor wire surrounding eight-foot-high walls jutting up from the water. The walls featured windows like of a turreted medieval fortress through which soldiers could shoot at an invading force. More than a dozen machine-gun nests covered a wide roof atop the walls. Down below, facing the interior of the island, an enemy garrison of at least eighty soldiers and forty elite members of the al-Saiqa Thunderbolt Forces manned concrete bunkers. I realized only in researching this book that the name al-Saiqa comes from a military unit established by the pharaoh Ramesses II; everyone in these parts, it seems, is obsessed with ancient history.
After raiding us nine days earlier, the Egyptians were determined to thwart our attempts at revenge. Our group of sea commandos, together with the equally elite Sayeret Matkal, or Unit 269, the special forces team usually assigned to carry out intelligence operations inside enemy territory along with operations to rescue hostages, would motor halfway to the island in twelve rubber Zodiac dinghies. At that point, in four teams of five, the flotilla men — carrying rifles, grenades, hundreds of rounds of ammo, and walkie-talkies — would dive in and navigate underwater the rest of the way. In our black wet suits, we couldn’t be detected underwater.
We were to arrive by approximately 12:30 AM and no later than 1:30 AM. If we hadn’t reached the island by then, we were to abort the mission because we wouldn’t have time to complete it before the first light of dawn.
The only way for twenty commandos to have a prayer against such a large contingent of trained adversaries was the element of total surprise. We were to earn our motto: “As the Bat Emerges from the Darkness.” The island’s fortifications had a single vulnerability that we aimed to exploit. After landing, we would shoot our way onto the roof and clear the northern part of the fortress so that Unit 269, arriving on the island a few minutes after us, could pass through our rooftop beachhead and race to the far end of the platform, cross the concrete bridge, eliminate the Egyptians in their barracks, and continue with the sabotage mission. Once the fighting was finished and we blew up the island’s artillery positions, an extraction team would carry our wounded or dead back to the Zodiacs.
I can still hear the parting words from chief of staff General Haim Bar-Lev, second in command only to our eye-patched minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, as he wished us luck on our mission. He was seated in a folding chair, the red glow of a cigar wedged between the middle and index fingers of his left hand. “Guys,” he began, smoke corkscrewing up from his lip, “if you see that there’s fierce resistance, if people start getting wounded, just retreat.” He picked tobacco off his tongue. “This is not the time for victory at any price,” he concluded before rising abruptly and heading for the exit.
“What the hell!” I mumbled under my breath. Did he really just say “not at any price”? Did the general, who was sending us on this either-us-or-them operation, truly not realize that once we opened fire there would be no turning back? If there were still Egyptians alive when we tried to leave the island, from the roof they would easily pick us off. Did he even understand the mission he was sending us on?
When the IDF crushed the Arabs on every front and liberated Judea and Samaria and the myth-shrouded Sinai in 1967’s Six-Day War, we in the naval commandos accomplished nothing. Six from our group were captured by the Egyptians and ended up as POWs, and the rest of us simply failed to carry out our mission. This sense of failure hung over me as I called to Haim, who was to be my human ladder, enabling me to summit the roof of the fortress, and to Zalman “Zali” Rot, another friend from Kibbutz Afikim in the Jordan Valley, who was to fight alongside me. “Listen up,” I said, “forget about Lieutenant General Bar-Lev. There’s nowhere to go. It’s us or them.”
Haim flashed a wry grin as if to say, Let’s make it them.
We picked at our final meal before climbing into trucks and driving half an hour up a sand-and-shale track to Ras Masslla, the launching point. I recall staring out the back of the truck at the darkening sky, a couple of stars and some satellites traversing above. Neil Armstrong, I thought to myself, was up there somewhere.
It was silent in the truck, the only sound the rumble of the engine. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I recall Dani Levi, with his trademark graveyard humor, belting out a few ironic bars of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”: You better start swimmin’, or you’ll sink like a stone…
“Shut up, Dani!” someone snapped. Silence returned, leaving us alone with our fears.
At 8:30 PM on the dot we arrived at the launching point. We hopped into the dinghies and loaded up our ninety-pound combat belts with guns, a dozen stamped-steel magazines (each one holding thirty rounds), grenades, our diving equipment, and fins. Two hours on the rubber boats took us to within a mile of Green Island.
Unit 269 watched as we looped the straps to our heavy packs around our shoulders and slid silently, our combat diving tanks first, into the dark, warm waters of the Red Sea.
The currents were stronger than we’d anticipated, and to avoid them we descended to the unplanned depth of sixty-five feet, perilous for divers using closed-circuit rebreathers, heavy as anchors. With only a small illuminated compass and our lieutenant Dov Bar’s hand signals leading us through the pitch-black waters, we inched closer to the island, one painful stroke at a time. Nearing our target, we swam back to the surface, where we could just make out the black colossus looming a hundred yards ahead. We were dangerously behind schedule. It was clear that the chances of reaching the island by 1:30 AM, the point at which orders were to abandon the operation, were nil. I recall the way light from the half moon showed exhaustion on the others’ faces. Dov’s eyebrows arched into a menacing pyramid, nostrils pinched and determined. “I know there are some of you who think we will go back if we don’t reach the island in time. No fucking delay will keep us from fighting tonight. We have only one direction in front of us,” he said, pointing out to the ink-black waters, “kadima — forward — even if we reach the island in the morning.”
We dove back down to make our approach and arrived under the north tower, where we soundlessly stripped off our diving equipment and fins. We arrived at 1:38 AM, already an hour and eight minutes behind schedule, but the delay in reaching the island turned out to be a godsend. The high tide bought by the extra time permitted us to dive all the way to the rocks on which British military engineers had erected the high concrete walls. Around my shoulder and chest, I slung the AK-47 and a harness heavy with a dozen magazines. Though weary from the dive, I was relieved that at least the fighting against the current was behind us. I inhaled the briny air. It was showtime.
The first group, led by First Lieutenant Ilan Egozi, who had been one of the POWs in Egyptian hands after the Six-Day War, cut through the outer lines of barbed wire. One of the sentries on the roof must have heard them slice through the thicker inner coil because we noticed a red light go on in the guardroom as we filed quickly through the gap in the wire. I saw the guard leave the room and creep toward us with a flashlight. Afraid we’d be spotted, Egozi lifted his weapon and fired at the guard, to us a featureless figure in the night. The crackle of this first gunfire seemed louder than a sonic boom. Upon seeing his comrade’s body hit the ground, a second sentry lobbed a grenade in our direction. A shrapnel shard as big as a silver dollar hit Egozi, who struggled back to his feet and returned fire.
From the roof eight feet above, we heard footsteps and muffled snippets of Arabic. Within seconds volleys of enemy bullets flew into the water and ricocheted off rocks. The only thing in my mind, less a thought than an instinct, was to scale the wall and get on the roof. Any delay, even by a few seconds, and we’d be trapped between the sea and the wall, defenseless against the al-Saiqa commandos.
With Haim and Zali following me, I shot through the barbed-wire fence at the north wall while running up the concrete ramp to the eight-foot wall surrounding the fortress. I turned and motioned to Haim, who assumed his position as human ladder. It was only then that I realized I had lost a boot while racing up the concrete ramp. I peeled off the other one and climbed barefoot onto Haim’s sturdy shoulders. The extra height permitted me to crane my neck over the edge and scan the roof, which was illuminated periodically by muzzle flashes. Some of the Egyptian soldiers raced from their barracks to the machine-gun nests; others — it seemed like half the garrison — headed directly toward us, firing everything they had, from heavy machine guns to rocket-propelled grenades. The din of explosions swelled to a roar.
My head jerked to one side — suddenly I saw stars. Shrapnel had struck just below my hairline, though I hardly noticed as I rooted into my bag for a grenade. Regaining my balance, I pulled the pin and lobbed the grenade in a perfect arc. It landed inside a machine-gun nest but failed to explode. I tried a second one and it, too, was a dud. So was a smoke bomb. It was while grabbing for one more grenade that I noticed it was damp. Seawater must have rendered the goddamned grenades useless.
I shouted over the din to Zali, “Follow me!” Directly ahead of us was a guard post emplacement manned by two soldiers, their heads swinging from side to side, caught in the bedlam. If we could just capture the post, I thought to myself, we’d have a direct line of fire into the onrushing commandos. I leaped off Haim’s shoulders and crouched onto the platform, where Zali joined me.
Bootless, I sprinted with Zali toward the two Egyptians. The trigger on my AK-47 was hot to the touch. One squeeze and my first target staggered backward before doubling over and falling sideways. Zali blasted the second sentry in the chest.
We raced to the guard post and crouched next to the two dead bodies. All around us rocket-propelled grenades slammed into concrete walls, kicking up bits of rock as sharp as daggers. The captured post provided enough protection to spray more bullets at the Egyptians; those who didn’t drop scrambled for cover. This enabled more of our commandos to climb onto the wall and join the battle. In our meticulously rehearsed plan, the Unit 269 team should have been arriving any moment.
Ahead of us was a machine-gun nest. “We’ll have to take it,” I shouted into Zali’s ear just as another grenade erupted close enough for us to feel the vibrations. “Fuck!” Zali groaned, dropping his weapon and holding up his hand. One of his fingers was missing, blown clean off, and his severed thumb had fallen behind the head of a dead Egyptian.
“Can you still shoot?”
Sweat streaming down his face, he swallowed hard and nodded. “Could be worse,” he said. “Still got three.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Haim and his group, until that point waiting at the bottom of the wall, crawl onto the roof. Haim turned to clear the second machine-gun nest on the northwest corner of the roof. He must have figured that if his group could get through the concentration of raking fire, they could take out those assets on their own.
To cover their progress, I threw one of my few dry smoke grenades. Now the Egyptians manning machine-gun nests couldn’t see my friends sprint past them, nor could they see me, still barefoot racing over hot casements and spraying their nests with bullets. The rubble shredded the bottom of my feet, but adrenaline numbed the pain.
Most of us frogmen were finally on the roof fighting the Egyptians in a fierce face-to-face shootout like in a saloon in the Old West. Dov sent up another green flare, signaling to the 269 commandos to get to the island as fast as their outboard engines could carry them. Where the hell were they? If the 269 didn’t show up soon, I thought to myself, we’d run out of ammo and the enemy would regroup before we could escape.
“Let’s move,” I said to Zali, pointing with my gun to the next machine-gun nest. With Zali following me, gripping his blood-smeared weapon, we raced pell-mell at the machine-gunners, dodging and weaving. Banging in my final magazine, I blasted away with my head exposed above sandbags. We advanced to the 85mm antiaircraft position. It was then that I noticed the Unit 269 reinforcements finally filing onto the roof. With my AK-47, I motioned for them to join us.
All of a sudden it was as if a mist surrounded me. The din of battle disappeared, and an uncanny calm settled over me. Just as with the wound to my forehead and the lacerations on my feet, I felt no pain as shrapnel passed through the major artery in my neck. In cerebral shock, I swooned and tumbled unconscious to the ground.
I’m still alive, I thought a minute or two later. I blinked away the dust and opened my eyes, only to see that I was covered in the blood spilling from my neck. I heard retching, louder and, all these years later, much more memorable than the roar of cannon fire. On my back and on the verge of another blackout, I noticed Zali firing at the enemy with his three remaining fingers. I looked around, but I couldn’t figure out who was retching. Then it dawned on me: A month earlier, during a sabotage operation against a coastal Egyptian radar station in Adabiya, I’d encountered Egyptian fire while breaking through coils of barbed wire.10 From close range, I’d fired, and two men fell; the targets, nameless and faceless, were eliminated. Or so I’d believed until one of the men began retching as if choking on blood. I’d shot again, and not just once or twice; I’d emptied a magazine until the terrible groaning ceased.
I finally realized that I was the one who was dying. So is this what it’s like? I asked myself. No good-byes, no final words, my life over before the age of twenty-five.
Determined to make my final minutes count, I emptied the remainder of my magazine in the general direction of our enemies, invisible in the inky-black night. Once I saw the Egyptian canon post was in our hands, using my AK-47 as a crutch, I hoisted myself up and on shredded feet crossed the roof, volleys of bullets whizzing through hellish smoke and fire. I returned to where I had stood on Haim’s strongman shoulders. Fellow soldiers helped me down from the roof and into the Zodiac, where I reached in my bag, pulled out a dose of morphine, and shot myself up.
I guess it did the trick because I don’t remember feeling any pain and my recollections from the return are hazy.
What I recall from my half-conscious state was the way our unit’s physician, Dr. Slavin, inserted a needle into my arm for the IV while soldiers carried my friends into the Zodiac, friends who seemed to be in even worse shape than I was. One soldier landed with a thump next to me. He wasn’t moving. Had he passed out? Haim, too, was motionless, though I could feel the warmth of his body. “Wait,” I slurred to the doctor. I didn’t understand why he was patching me up when others clearly needed his help more. Slavin, nodding, turned his attention to my neck, muttering to himself. “The bastards,” he said, referring to the military brass who’d sent us, “what a goddamned waste.”