The last time I saw my childhood buddy Srulik alive was just after the Six-Day War, in an open field near Ramallah in the newly conquered Judea and Samaria. While our air force, armored divisions, infantry, and commandos blitzkrieged our enemies on every front, Srulik and his company mostly fought in the Sinai. At one point he arrived to fight in the Ramallah and Jerusalem area. After the war ended, his company marched triumphantly through the stunned Palestinian city of East Jerusalem.
Two years later, in 1969, he left the military to spend time with his wife and newborn child, only to return a few weeks later when General Dayan, needing his best fighters during the War of Attrition, personally requested that he rejoin as an officer in the tank division.
In May 1970, two months before the cease-fire that would end the War of Attrition, I was in the Sinai, having just returned from an intelligence operation inside Egyptian territory, when news came of Srulik’s death by Egyptian fire. Though we’d seen so little of each other since our teenage years, I felt as if I’d just lost a brother. I got permission to leave my post and attend the military funeral, replete with orations. As usual, I kept my tears to myself. It used to infuriate me to see uniformed soldiers weeping at military funerals. Soldiers in uniform were there to comfort parents, wives, and children, not to feel sorry for themselves. They would have plenty of time to cry later, in private.
At the sheloshim, the gathering to mark the end of thirty days’ mourning, held at our kibbutz, an elementary school teacher, noticing my uniform, pulled me to one side and, in a hushed tone, asked if we could talk. Children in her elementary school class, the teacher said, had been sending letters and care packages to soldiers on the Egyptian front. One boy extolled Srulik in the typically patriotic fashion: “You are protecting me — you are protecting us all against the enemies…You must kill all the Arabs.”
Unlike most soldiers, myself included, who never bothered responding to letters and gifts, Srulik sent a reply that arrived a couple of weeks later. The teacher pulled the letter from her pocket and handed it to me. It was postmarked the day after my friend’s death. Attached to the letter was a note from the IDF explaining that the writer, Captain Guttman, died the same day he composed the message. She told me she burst into tears in front of her classroom when she read to them what he had written.
I unfolded the letter slowly and began reading. He thanked the child for his note and the gifts but then swerved into unexpected territory. “Let me tell you one very important thing,” he wrote in his elegant penmanship. “You shouldn’t believe that all Arabs are bad. They, too, have families. They are just like us. We don’t want to kill them, we want peace.”
I read the letter over and over, repressing the urge to cry. I readily admit today that, at the time, I couldn’t fathom how Srulik could have written those words. The Arabs wanted to wipe us out, and it was only our preparedness, guts, speed, and intelligence that kept them from pushing us into the sea. Did the fact that he was a father change his attitude toward our enemies and allow him to see them as human beings?
A year later I met Biba, my wife, who with her dark features and stubborn will is as intoxicating to me today as she was the day I met her at the University of Haifa. I had considered joining my pals in building new kibbutzim on the 1967 war booty. However, I knew that Israel needed an effective seaborne commando force if we were to continue fighting enemies seeking our destruction, so I opted to stay in the military. Besides, it was my secret ambition to command Flotilla 13, something I kept to myself, having been raised by socialists who believed that talk was idle. Strong people act.
To pursue such a future, though, I needed to get myself an education. In those days kibbutzniks refused to take the matriculation exam required for university admission because such qualifying tests smacked of the elitism of the class-based society from which the kibbutz movement sought to liberate mankind. We learned to master necessary skills, not to be tested. The University of Haifa, however, offered a program designed to allow kibbutzniks who’d finished twelve years of schooling to slip through the back door, and I enrolled.
Then one day there she was, with her dark-brown take-in-everything eyes, sitting next to me in Intermediate English on the first day of class. The first time we sat together for lunch in the cafeteria, my heart pitter-pattering like an infatuated schoolboy’s, I discovered that we came from parallel worlds. Biba grew up on Kibbutz Merhavia, founded in 1929 by Eastern European intellectuals, academics, and writers who believed that culture and ideas were just as important as fruit trees and guns. In those days she worked in her kibbutz’s cowshed and loved animals. While from an early age she wanted to study social work, working in the cowshed opened her to the idea of pursuing veterinary studies. In the end, she chose to become a social worker and raise a family on the kibbutz.
Despite our similar backgrounds, winning her over was harder than most military operations. She had served as an officer in the Sinai and swore she’d never go out with a military man.
After a few dates, she put her skepticism to one side, and we rented a cramped apartment a couple of miles from the harbor in Haifa. Upon finishing the program at Haifa, I decided to continue my service in the navy and went to an eighteen-month naval officer’s course. Once I had that behind me, Biba and I had an impromptu wedding at Kibbutz Merhavia. The party ended at dawn, when my comrades, most of them drunk, were chased off the grass where the wedding took place. Biba and I spent the night in a hut.
The following day, once we finished cleaning up and removing the wreckage left behind by my friends, I went to Haifa to take a test for commanding a fast gunboat. For less than a month I commanded a Dabur, a 60-foot gunboat, in Haifa, followed by an eighteen-hour “honeymoon” on the beach before I went down to Sharm-el-Sheikh on the Red Sea to take over command of a gunboat squadron, a big step up from a commando knife and AK-47. With hundreds of miles between Merhavia in northern Israel and the Sinai, my only contact with Biba was through the occasional phone call and letters. I wrote so infrequently I might as well have been on an Apollo mission.
Compared to my service during the War of Attrition, my second stint in the northern Sinai was a beach holiday. Instead of fighting, I spent long evenings at the commander’s bridge staring at the sea and the monotonous landscape: dust devils and tumbleweeds traversing endless sand, jagged red desert mountains, black Bedouin tents dotting eroded desert hills, skeletal goats nibbling on thornbushes. My men and I smoked cartons of cigarettes and drank cases of Maccabee beer. I also discovered the sea again, its beauty and its cruelty. In the Red Sea at high tide or during storms, you can’t see the coral islands that can both dazzle you and sink your ship.
I escaped the boredom for a few days when I traveled to Jerusalem on Israeli Independence Day in the spring of 1972. A photo from that day shows me in a freshly laundered white uniform, collar unbuttoned Israeli-style, standing at attention in the presidential mansion on Jabotinsky Street in Jerusalem. In the background you can see a stained-glass window of the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven. My pants are starched, the creases razor-sharp, with a perfect one-inch cuff falling like a curtain over navy boots.
I am facing President Zalman Shazar, Prime Minister Golda Meir, and the eye-patched Minister of Defense Dayan as they pin the yellow-ribboned Medal of Valor on my chest for my actions at Green Island. My parents are sitting in the first row — Abba beaming, Imma expressionless. The medal is Israel’s highest decoration given to those who display the “ultimate heroism against enemy fire.” I was its first recipient since the Six-Day War.
That summer, alongside the Suez Canal in the far western Sinai, I saw a performance of the antiwar play Malkat Ambatya, Queen of the Bathtub, by Hanoch Levin, Israel’s Bertolt Brecht, the most thrilling diversion my men and I had from our tedium. In Israel right-wingers had disrupted performances of the play by tossing stink bombs; some called for Levin to be locked up in an asylum, Soviet-style. In the Sinai we hooted at the spectacle. In one scene, citing “state security,” the Israelis try to give the Ten Commandments back to God. In another, Golda Meir, the eponymous Queen of the Bathtub, clutches her foreign minister Abba Eban’s crotch to prevent him from offering a peace proposal. Meir’s defense minister Dayan had famously quipped, “Better Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh.” The Sinai was ours, and it appeared in that moment that we would never let it go.
In a heated discussion with the crew on the ship, I defended Hanoch Levin and other leftist writers. It was only because of us, I said to the men on the boat, that writers could ridicule us and political leadership. That was what democracy was all about.
By the late summer of 1973, I had had enough of the monotony in the Sinai, especially while my former colleagues from Flotilla 13 were turning their dinghies and guns toward Arafat and his gang hiding out in Lebanese refugee camps. At twenty-eight I was too young and ambitious, too hungry and thrill-seeking, to be sailing for long days and nights scaring off drug smugglers, infiltrators, and Egyptian intelligence squads crossing the Gulf of Suez to collect intelligence for a war that we didn’t yet know was about to erupt and change our lives forever. I decided to attend another command and staff course in Tel Aviv, where Biba and I could live together as I qualified to take command of a missile ship and hunt down PLO terrorists.
Three weeks following my move to Tel Aviv, on the Thursday before Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, intelligence reports detected Egyptian troop movements. But that evening in a speech, the head of the Military Intelligence Research Department, Brigadier General Shalev (no relation to Meir) — the man responsible for assessing military intelligence — determined there was no danger of renewed fighting. We could fast and repent our sins in peace.
As usual, the entire country shut down on Yom Kippur. Around noon the phone rang. Languidly, I picked up the receiver.
“Ami here.”
“Sir, you have orders to return to Sharm-el-Sheikh.”
“What’s this all about?” I thought it might be a prank.
“Sir.” There was a long pause. “War is about to break out.”
War? Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, the bookish fellow with a black prayer dot on his forehead, was attacking us? I was stunned into silence.
“A car will pick you up in thirty minutes.” Click. I stood still, holding the receiver in front of me like it was going to explode. “Finally,” I exclaimed, “a real war!” Green Island, in my opinion, was a fine operation but not a full-fledged war. The 1967 war was, of course, the real thing, but the only action we commandos of Flotilla 13 saw ended in fiasco. Now I had the chance to fight in honest-to-goodness warfare, the kind legends are made of.
I raced around the apartment, stuffed clothes in a duffel bag, kissed a dumbfounded Biba good-bye, and dashed to the curb to meet the driver, who picked up another officer at a kibbutz near the city of Afula after collecting me. By the time we arrived in Tel Aviv, war was already under way. Military radio reported air battles between our forces, with Egyptian MiG-21s attacking our airport in Sharm-el-Sheikh. In fact, the scale of the air war was such that our entire fleet was needed to engage the Egyptians, and we would have to drive to Sinai. My first command in the war was of three buses filled with unruly reservists rumbling overland to Sharm. Driving through the night, I couldn’t sleep, afraid it would be 1967 all over again, with the Soviets and Americans imposing a quick cease-fire. If this goddamned jalopy of a bus doesn’t speed up, I’ll miss my war! This time the Egyptians had been the aggressors, catching us off guard with a sneak attack, and I was determined to make them pay dearly.
At 7:00 AM we reached our base to find smoke spiraling up from what used to be our hangars and barracks. My men, hitherto cocky on the bus, were frozen with fear. The supposedly impenetrable Bar-Lev Line — a chain of fortifications made of concrete, stone, and sand built along the east bank of the Suez Canal following the Six-Day War and named after the cigar-smoking deputy chief of staff who had overseen its construction — had been breached, and Egyptian forces were pouring into the Sinai. It proved about as effective as the Maginot Line, built by the French after World War I to deter a German invasion. The danger of being surrounded and wiped out was palpable.
Losing the Sinai wasn’t our only fear that day in 1973. With the Syrians attacking the north, the very survival of Israel seemed at risk. Orders from the Ministry of Defense were confusing and contradictory — only after the war would we find out just how panicked Dayan had become. For the first few days I had no real idea of the magnitude of the catastrophe. All I knew was that the IDF had been defeated along the canal.
For the duration of the fighting, chaos at the Ministry of Defense forced me to operate outside the usual chain of command. At my request, Zev Almog, the commander in the area, put me in charge of preventing Egyptian commandos from attacking Israeli bases along 180 miles of the Sinai coast.
With a mini-armada of five ships, and an additional ship soon to arrive from the north, my handpicked crew, most of them graduates of marine school, and I swung into action. During the first week of the war, our main task was to destroy the Egyptian gunboat De Castro, because it controlled the northern Gulf of Suez and threatened Israeli ships stationed in Ras Sudar. The ship was a lot larger and faster than ours, and with far more firepower: two multibarreled 23mm cannons, one in the bow and one in the stern, as well as light machine guns on the sides of the bridge. Ignoring orders, I went on the attack with two “Dabur” boats; it was the simplest and most basic form of face-to-face combat, a shootout. The way we maneuvered our ship brought the enemy ship around to be a perfect target. We shot first, striking the artillery positions, and after this direct hit we let loose with enough volleys of fire to sink the De Castro.
During the next three weeks of fighting, we returned to the marine base at Sharm in the Gulf of Suez only twice, mainly to rearm. Meanwhile, we sank dozens of Egyptian vessels, most of them trying to transfer weapons and fighters to the Israeli side of the gulf.
My men, who fought valiantly and courageously in these face-to-face battles, were not motivated by abstract notions of Zionist patriotism and of love for the Land of Israel. Nor did they have faith in our military leaders. No, they fought with such ferocity because, after years of training, they believed in themselves, their comrades, and the commanders of the ships who led them in battle.
Nineteen days after hostilities began, American president Nixon and Soviet dictator Brezhnev, in one of their détente deals, forced the Israelis and Egyptians into agreeing on a cease-fire. One of my men had died during the fighting, and many were wounded. The toll was both physical and psychological. I dropped twenty-five pounds during the engagement. Others would face PTSD, the first time I’d see how trauma can trip up the mind.
At the end of the war I was given command of naval operations at the base of Ras Sudar in the northern Suez. In the new position I was responsible for landing craft, naval ships, and hundreds of men. One day, as I was coming to grips with the new responsibilities, I received a welcome surprise.
“Ami, you’ve got a visitor!” one of my men said. “She says she’s your wife.”
I rushed to the port, where Biba was stepping off a Hercules airplane.
It was dizzying to see her, but my rapture was tinged with anxiety. Since our wedding night, she had put up with infrequent visits, bad pay, and a Spartan life. I hadn’t written to Biba once during the war. I guess I was afraid that if I wrote, the evil eye would doom me just as it had Srulik.
When I asked Biba why she was there, she told it to me straight: “You might die in this war, and if I can’t do a thing about that, there’s something I can do.”
“Which is?”
“Have your child.”
I followed the good example of my unruly crew and broke protocol to let her stay.
Three months later, in early 1974, I returned to Biba and to the Flotilla 13. If the successes of our Arab enemies during the Yom Kippur War spurred Pinchas and his religious friends to launch their aggressively expansionist settlement movement, they had the opposite effect on the old guard of kibbutzniks and socialists. The message we took from the catastrophe was that there were limits to Israel’s power and that hubris can lead to catastrophic and humiliating results.
Years later, when young people about to be drafted asked me about the Yom Kippur War, I didn’t mention details of the war itself. Rather, I told them how during that conflict I lost the naive faith I’d had since boyhood in the State of Israel as embodied in the prime minister, who, throughout my childhood from the time I was ten, had been David Ben-Gurion. When I was a boy, Abba told me how the “Old Man,” as he called Ben-Gurion, lived in a big white building in Jerusalem, where he sat behind the door of a room at the end of a long hallway on the second floor, carefully pondering decisions that he knew would affect each and every one of us. Now I wasn’t sure there was anyone in charge.
In the months following the war I experienced death as never before. Thousands were dead and wounded, and the country was filled with bereaved wives, children, and parents, including many of my friends. I realized, too, that if I died there was one person whose entire world would be destroyed — Biba.
What made this confrontation with death so bitter was the hubris of our leadership. Golda, Dayan, Shalev, Bar-Lev, and a host of others had treated war as a kind of parlor game. Golda and Dayan had never even raised the option of negotiations with the Egyptians to the cabinet. Dayan had outright rejected any diplomatic solutions that involved handing back territory: “I shall reject concessions of any kind and if the Arabs ask for war, they shall have it.”
Later, when I read Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly about the Vietnam War, I asked myself why I, too, had been marching in a parade that led to disaster.