On my way home I stopped by a hummus place just down the hill from Ofra that I used to frequent during my days in the Shabak. Though run by Palestinians, it’s a favorite lunch spot for settlers, in their knit skullcaps and with their loaded pistols packed in holsters. As I bit into a falafel ball, perfectly crisp on the outside, with a creamy interior just the way I like it, I reflected on how much Pinchas and I have in common. The fact that I was born on a socialist kibbutz while Pinchas was raised religious is paradoxically immaterial; we were both raised to settle and defend land that we believed to be historically and rightfully ours.
Pinchas and I were also both wounded defending our ideals. In his case, months in the hospital set him on an odyssey to discover himself within the religious kibbutz movement. For me, the losses at Green Island coupled with the national trauma of the Yom Kippur War got me serving in Flotilla 13 for nearly twenty years and participating in countless commando missions against Yasser Arafat and his PLO terrorists. If I hadn’t been fighting, I probably would have joined my friends in establishing new settlements.
I remember only snatches of conversation after being evacuated from Green Island in the Zodiac. Eyelids scrolling open, I saw the faces of nurses at Assaf Harofeh outside Tel Aviv staring down at me. “Ami, can you hear me?” one asked. She snapped her fingers, and I blinked.
I felt like Rip Van Winkle rousing from a quarter-century sleep. IVs hung on hooks, tubes fed into my veins, and over the wound was a bandage as bulky as a neck brace. Amazingly, I could talk, though doing so meant fighting through pain ricocheting from my neck to my eye sockets all the way to the base of my skull and down to my leg.
“Where are the others?” I asked, meaning Haim and my other mates from Flotilla 13. The nurse changed the subject. “Why are your feet all cut up?”
“Fought barefoot,” I managed to spit out. Talking made it feel as if I had razor blades in my throat.
The wounds and lacerations were insignificant compared with learning that of the twenty frogmen who swam with me to the island, most were wounded, and three had been killed.12 I had personally recruited and trained Haim and Dani, two of the dead. An inch in one direction or the other and the shrapnel would have killed me, too.
That afternoon Uncle Jonah, proud owner of the kibbutz’s only private car, a Ford, drove my parents and Hava to the hospital. Judging by the way the four of them gawked at me after entering the room, I must have looked as if I’d been put through a meat grinder.
Though Imma’s face betrayed her horror, Abba was stoic as ever. He grabbed my arm, entangled in the IV line, and, choking up, whispered, “Proud of you.” Uncle Jonah gazed down at me with a glow of approval.
Imma’s sobs swelled, her tears dripping on my bandages, while Hava just shook her head. What must my aunt, who survived Auschwitz, have thought about young men doing everything they could to kill one another?
When my family left, a bevy of nurses rushed in and crowded onto the bed; the hospital’s only television set happened to be in my room. When I asked what they were doing, the head nurse looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Why, we’re walking on the moon.”
As we watched Neil Armstrong take his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” I braced myself with one hand against the rail of the bed, every movement of the mattress causing more pain. What would be called one of the greatest events in human history barely registered with me because my friends were dead.
Over the radio a couple of days later, I heard General Moshe Dayan speaking at their funeral. “On the fallen soldiers’ shoulders rests the price of victory,” began his commemoration. In a riff on Theodor Herzl’s motto, “If you will it, it is no fairy tale,” he comforted the Israeli people. “Dreams have become the realities of independence, homeland, Jerusalem, and of settlements in the mountains and in the deserts, of planting trees and flowers; but also the reality of blood and sacrifice.” I agreed with every word. The death of my friends merely strengthened my resolve to show the Arabs they couldn’t drive us out of our homeland.
My next stop was Kay House, a military rehab center. One morning in early August 1969, my commander, Ze’ev Almog, came to check on my progress and to fill me in on what was happening with Flotilla 13. Ze’ev was a handsome man with blue eyes and a quiet voice. Not only did he stand out for his abilities as a commander, but he also came from a different background than most of us kibbutzniks. He grew up in a religious family, went to a religious school, and joined the army through Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth organization.
A dim orange light filtered through the curtains, and the room had not yet become a steam bath from the sun’s midday rays. I hadn’t slept much that night, waking up several times because I was so anxious to get back on my feet and train with my comrades at our base in Atlit.
Ze’ev requested that the nurses step outside and closed the door behind him. In his clipped military cadence, he leaned in and told me, “We have a problem. A big problem.”
Egypt’s strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, it seemed, had reacted to Green Island by doubling down on his War of Attrition strategy. In Cairo he declared our raid a “criminal aggression” and presented the fins and oxygen tanks we’d left behind at Green Island to the international press. He then turned to the Soviets for weaponry, including modernized antiaircraft systems and MiG-23s. Through speeches delivered in his melodious Arabic, the mustachioed pharaoh, called “Al Rais” or “the Boss” by subordinates, had roused the Egyptian masses and the Arab world to the mission of ridding the region of the Zionist scourge. The Arab world, led by Egypt, refused to accept the existence of Israel, and vowed its destruction.13
Ze’ev, his eyes fixed on me, explained that General Dayan had decided to respond by hitting Nasser even harder. Bar-Lev and Yeshayahu Gavish, the commander of the Southern Command, had begun drawing up Operation Drizzle, an elaborate ruse that called for our troops to masquerade as Egyptians in six Soviet-made battle tanks and amphibious armored personnel carriers, all captured from Arab forces during the Six-Day War. In a mini-D-Day, the first such operation in the short history of the State of Israel, our forces would cross the Gulf of Suez and wreak havoc on Egyptian military installations. Because of Green Island, the Egyptians had stationed two Chinese-built P-183 torpedo boats on high alert facing Ras Sudar on the west coast of the Sinai Peninsula, across the Gulf of Suez from Egypt’s mainland. For the IDF to move tanks and troops to the other side of the gulf on landing craft, our unit of sea commandos would need to sink the P-183s, taking them out of play and creating a distraction north of the disembarkation point. Our mission would be audacious in the extreme. Covert intelligence determined that the vessels were armed with heavy machine guns, seventeen-inch torpedoes, the latest detection electronics, and plenty of charges for uninvited underwater intruders. To plant explosives on the armored hull of a P-183 required a team of combat divers using midget submarines to get close enough to dive, carrying the mines, to the target. But with much of our commando group dead or, like me, hobbling around in hospitals or rehab centers, who was going to carry out such a mission?
“This should be a cakewalk for you guys,” Bar-Lev had assured Ze’ev, even though we had never undertaken such a complex and difficult operation. Just remember one thing, he added to make sure Ze’ev understood the gravity of the situation. Operation Drizzle was scheduled for September 9. By then our team had better sink the ships; otherwise there would be no Drizzle. Containing and deterring Nasser hinged on the success of Flotilla 13. We were the “tip of the IDF’s spear.”
The mission, as Ze’ev explained it, would require two SUVs (submersible underwater vehicles) each with four men: two to navigate and two divers to attach limpet mines (named after a sea snail that clings to rocks or other hard surfaces) to the hulls of the P-183s. Rafi Milo, the commander of the midget-sub unit, would lead the effort.14
“Who else will be on the team?” My heartbeat quickened. For nearly a month I had been cooped up in a hospital and a rehab center with a black-and-white TV and rounds of poker dice as my only diversions. I had to get back into a wet suit.
Ze’ev listed five names.
“Count me in,” I said.
Ze’ev had a blank look on his face, as if he didn’t understand.
“I’m joining the operation.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind, Ami.” His response was understandable — I still had bandages around my neck, and turning my head felt like I was getting my throat slit.
“You can’t pull this off without me.” He had just six of the eight men he needed, and only two sabotage experts qualified to dive from subs.
The wrinkles around his eyes narrowed as he focused intently on me. “You can hardly walk,” he said.
To prove him wrong I leaped to my feet, swallowing hard to conceal the pain. “Anyway,” I added, “the operation doesn’t require me to run a marathon, does it?”
A day later I was released from convalescence and returned to Atlit.
Though my comrades and I succeeded in sinking both ships — it’s anyone’s guess how many enemy sailors died that evening — we lost three of our own men when the SUV that was not transporting me unexpectedly blew up on the way back to base. Rafi, the commander of the commando training course, had returned to the service just a few days earlier to direct the operation that included Shlomo and Oded, friends and fellow fighters. I was present at the military funeral to hear Moshe Dayan give a eulogy fit for Pericles. “Soldiers,” he said in front of mourning parents and friends, “build houses and sometimes they don’t return to them.”