Israel Hayom..
13 September '13..
A single moment of fear. That is what I remember. Fear like I had never felt until that moment, fear that I've never felt since that day, that single moment, 40 years ago.
And the firm decision that came out of it. I remember that as well. That I wasn't going to die like that. That there was no way I would be wiped out there, with nothing remaining of me. That no way was it going to be over. That I had lived until that moment, and then I would disappear as though I had never been.
The MiGs woke us up with the shriek of engines shortly before dawn broke. There were three of them, dark and faintly visible, the green-gray of Syrian military camouflage. When I raised my head from my sleeping bag, with the slightly sour odor inside and the moisture of dew outside, on the rocky ground, I saw them from the side, flying low. For a moment we could have thought they were ours, our own troops. Our air force at its finest.
And then they turned left, and I saw the shape and angle of the wings. MiGs, no question about it. As a teenager I had been interested in aircraft; I could identify them. A MiG-17 and a MiG-19. And beneath their wings, the small, threatening silhouettes of bombs. And they were diving toward us.
Then came the fear.
It was roughly a week after the war began. Our battalion of heavy motorized mortars (the Makmat 160 mm) was camped for the night along the border fence near the Quneitra-Damascus highway, which was known as the America Road. In front of us, slightly to the right, was the landscape that later became one of the best-known photographs of the war: The charred remains of the Syrian anti-aircraft convoy that had been destroyed from the air, its black artillery barrels still aimed upward over their burnt and twisted chassis.
* * *
Over the past few days we had hurried to Camp Filon on the Golan Heights, opposite Rosh Pina, like everyone else. We had mobilized in a hurry and gotten our equipment, like everyone else. Our battalion, which had been established several months before the war, was made up of young reservists. I ended up there by accident: I got my first reserve call-up because of the war. I reported to Camp Filon, met officers from the battalion I had gotten to know during my regular army service, and joined them. All that was left for me in the armory was a single Uzi with a wood stock and just one magazine. It had no strap. I used the black shoelace of an army boot that I had brought with me. Later on, when I told a high-ranking army officer about my Uzi and the shoelace I had used as a strap, he looked at me suspiciously.
"I read about that in Haim Sabato's book, 'Adjusting Sights,'" he said. I felt that I had sinned by adopting a memory that wasn't really mine. But that was how I went to war: in a battalion that I didn't belong to, with an Uzi on a shoelace.
Our battalion went up to the Golan Heights as part of Camp Filon's reserve division via the Arik Bridge and the Yehudiya road. The battery went first, and then the rest of the battalion, including the second battery, which I joined. The first battery, which deployed near Kacha Farm, took counter-battery fire, and an officer was wounded.
There were already burned-out IDF tanks and burned-out Syrian tanks nearby. When the rest of the battalion caught up, we took part in the battle for Hushaniya, where the Syrians had concentrated a large armored force. I remember how we shuffled from one side of the damaged road to the other with destroyed tanks on every side and vehicles that had caught fire, and with thick clouds of smoke in front of us. In the dim light of the early morning the big transistor radio made of wood and plastic was playing "Five Hundred Miles" sung by either the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary or one of the bands that sang those beautiful folk songs; and it felt like we were in a movie.
But it stopped being a movie when we deployed near Quneitra and took horrific counter-battery fire and the shrapnel hit the sides of the half-track at the forward firing command post, the battery's headquarters, slashing through the tarp. It was definitely no movie when we stood on Booster Hill near Quneitra, anticipating the IDF's counterattack. On our left, in the wadi, the tanks prepared to break through to America Road, with their patrol jeep moving to and fro among them. When the tanks started advancing, the Syrians started firing. From noon until well into the night there was heavy fire, and the tanks advanced into Syria, reaching as far as Khan Arnabeh. We were ordered to descend from Booster Hill and deploy in the campground near the fence so that we could join the tanks later that day.
Then the MiGs came.
The drill says that when aircraft start coming down on you and you're on the ground without an anti-aircraft gun, you're supposed to lie on your back, point your rifle barrel upward and fire. To the pilot, even the sight of bullets being fired from light weapons is enough to deter, and who knows -- the gunfire may even hit the aircraft and shoot it down.
But at that second, when I was in my sleeping bag with that Uzi with its single magazine and shoelace next to me, the option of shooting down the plane didn't seem all that practical. I lay near a boulder typical of the area, and when the MiGs dove above me, the only thing I could do was take cover underneath it, cling to it, cling to the ground.
I was born and raised in Tel Aviv. Until then, I had lived all my life in the city, and in cities in general. But at that moment, there was nothing more important, nothing better, nothing more embracing, than that boulder and that ground. I remember every second that passed, every thought I had, as the MiGs dove. Time froze. That's it, I'm a goner, I thought to myself. Is this where I'm going to die and disappear? Here? As if I hadn't lived for 22 years, as if I would leave nothing behind me?
No, I told myself. I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to go back, and my wife and I are going to have a child, and my family and I will have continuity, because life must go on. It must.
The MiGs dropped their bombs slightly to our rear, on the ammunition trucks, semitrailers parked on the road. They exploded with an enormous sound of thunder, and large clouds of greasy smoke rose toward the sky. As the planes headed back to their base, one of them was hit by bullets fired by a member of a tank crew near Khan Arnabeh. The pilot ejected, parachuted to earth, and was taken prisoner.
One of the soldiers in our battalion was killed in that bombing: Cpl. Eliyahu Nagawkar. I didn't know him. We found out later that he had been hit by shrapnel from the MiGs' bombs or from the secondary bombardments that followed.
He was the only one of our battalion to be killed throughout the war. It seems our battalion was lucky, because later on in the war we found ourselves shooting and moving, taking anti-battery fire and keeping on -- but except for a few wounded, we came out of it intact. One time, we were advancing on America Road toward Tal Shams. I don't know how it happened, but our battalion, with its heavy, antiquated mortars that looked like shoeboxes mounted on the body of a World War II-era Sherman tank, was the one that raced ahead, toward Damascus. Then we found ourselves in the midst of a battle of armor versus armor -- our tanks on the left, theirs on the right, and armor-piercing shells with their red tails flying among the mortars, which waddled from side to side, like ducks on the narrow road.
Then, between one shell and another, we turned the mortar sideways on the narrow road, between the wooden electricity poles, and only one vehicle took a direct hit -- in its rear, where the engine was located. No one was hurt.
But it seemed we had piqued the curiosity of a Syrian forward observation officer sitting somewhere on high, maybe up on Mount Hermon. He decided to destroy our strange battalion, and from that point on barrage upon barrage of mortar shells and Katyusha rockets accompanied us wherever we went. We emerged from all of them unharmed, even from a barrage that seemed like an entire warehouse of Katyusha rockets was being lobbed at us, and dozens of Katyushas exploded one after another, not too far away from us, just to our left flank.
A day or two previously, the command post of one of the batteries in our battalion took a direct hit when we were inside the Syrian village of Jeba, beneath Tel al-Sha'ar. A few minutes before, we had still been shooting at the Iraqi and Jordanian tanks that had surprised the IDF from the south. The forward observation officer, who was with a group of high-ranking officers on the summit of the hill, guided our aim, and I was very proud when he radioed back enthusiastically that our shells had hit their targets and he had seen enemy tanks flying through the air, flipping over. Still, 160 millimeters is 160 millimeters, and our shells were heavy and deadly.
Then, Syrian shells started falling on the top of the hill and raising yellow-black clouds. The group of commanders dispersed and precise counter-battery fire started falling around our guns in the village below. We went down into the bunker, which was adjacent to a Syrian dwelling. As the shells fell above, one of the officers held that same large transistor radio. This time, the Beethoven violin concerto was playing. More than a week after the war had started, and under counter-battery fire, we started making bets on how much longer it would go on. I don't know how or why, but I made a bet with that officer that the war would last 17 days, and then there would certainly be an extension, and it would be over within 23 days. We agreed that whoever lost the bet would give the winner a record of the Beethoven violin concerto.
We kept fighting, with a great deal of death all around us. Their corpses, and our corpses. Day after day of fire at them, and fire at us. Some moments I remember fully; some of my memories have already faded. I remember vaguely that we met troops from another battalion that was similar to ours but had outdated Priest artillery -- a 105 mm gun mounted on a chassis even older than our Sherman. That battalion took fire again and again and suffered a heavy toll of dead and wounded. And we swung our mortars between the falling shells, from position to position, shooting and moving, as far as the village of Khadr, near a yellow hill, from which we fired all night long as we supported the capture of Mount Hermon. Then we moved within the area known as the Syrian enclave, arriving in Mazraat Beit Jan, with its gorgeous view and poplar trees all along the wadi, and one of the batteries ascended to an intersection known as "Zefet-Beton" (tar-concrete).
Then came the winter and the snow, and the Syrian war of attrition. When we took counter-battery fire, it didn't frighten me anymore. If I had managed to survive the MiGs, I'd survive any other test.
* * *
During my first 12-hour furlough from the reserves, with 17-day stubble on my face and my uniform stained with soot and oil, I told my wife about the morning of the MiG attack and how we had to, absolutely had to, make sure we had continuity. Existence. Life.
We served in the reserves for four months straight. Then there was a six-week break, and another two months. The officer I had the bet with -- Ariel Rubinstein, now a professor and an Israel Prize laureate in economics -- brought the record of the Beethoven violin concerto to my home. I've kept it to this day.
I figure that everyone who came out of that war had his own MiG moment.
In the winter of 1974, we had our firstborn son. He is one of the children of that winter of 1973.
Amos Regev was among the founders of Israel Hayom and has served as its editor in chief since its first day of publication.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=11957
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