Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando

by Moshe Betser

  The wait for the medevac helicopter seemed endless. The memory of the serenity I felt in those moments when death tried to seduce me kept coming back, telling me to close my eyes. But I refused to give up living. I thought of home, of Nahalal, of Nurit and Shaul. I thought of my parents, of my family, and of my oldest brother, Udi, somewhere back in Karameh in the battle. An officer in a battalion from the paratroops brigade fighting inside the village, I wondered if he was also hurt in the operation.

  * * *

  A few minutes went by and the casualty who had first slowed down Matan lay on a stretcher beside me, unconscious. A few more minutes went by and Yisrael Arazi, white as the desert limestone, lay alongside him, still breathing. But when Shoham, who fell so soundlessly in the midst of the fight beside Arazi, came in, I saw he was already dead. Then Engel came in on a stretcher. He smiled weakly at me. With my lower jaw gone, my own smile in return must have been a horrifying sight.

  When the medevac chopper finally landed nearby, I waited until they loaded all the other wounded before I climbed aboard, finding a seat in the rear. Doctors used hand signals to communicate with each other as the helicopter’s whirring blades lifted us into the air. They cut away Arazi’s uniform and filled his arms with needles for blood transfusions. But nobody knew what to do with my problem. I breathed through the hole in my throat. The blood stopped cascading, but it kept dripping from my face onto my soaked uniform.

  I caught the eye of one of the doctors and signaled a question with my hand, shifting my eyes back and forth between him and Arazi. The doctor looked down at my friend and then back up at me. He shook his head. I glared back. He went back to work on Arazi.

  We flew low, due west, through the towers of smoke from the destroyed tanks, over the green oasis of ancient Jericho, the oldest town in the world, over the bare ancient hills of Judea, until finally we were above the forested hills around Jerusalem, racing toward Hadassah Hospital.

  I looked out the window. Below us, I saw an Arab peasant working in a field, using a cow to pull a wooden plow. He did not even look up at the helicopter flying so low overhead. Unaware of us, dead and dying on board, oblivious of the battle raging only a few miles away.

  * * *

  I stayed conscious all the way into the operating room at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital. Only the anesthesia finally closed my eyes. I opened them eight hours later.

  My brother Udi stood at my bedside. Three years older than me, he is as stocky as I am tall. In my eyes, he is a strong, quiet rock of responsibility and integrity.

  With my mouth and jaw wired and bandaged, I could not speak. He passed me a pad of paper. I scrawled my first thought. “Arazi?” I wrote, holding it up to show Udi. He shook his head. Arazi was dead.

  I lay in the hospital for a month. My jaw was wired closed, so I used a straw for my liquid diet and was barely able to speak. A dozen of us from Karameh lay in our beds in the ward — paratroopers, sappers, tank drivers, engineers, and infantrymen. The VIPs came to visit with their questions prepared in advance, never really listening to what the wounded said, not really knowing what to say to the wounded, as if embarrassed by the whole situation.

  President Zalman Shazar came by the beds to ask his questions. “What’s your name?” the elderly man asked me.

  “He can’t talk!” shouted my comrades. The president kept peering at me, a crowd of hospital personnel and reporters gawking from behind.

  “I see,” said the president. “So, where are you from?”

  Another time, Yaffa Yarkoni, a singer who had entertained Israeli troops since the days of Palmach, came to visit. She sang a few songs, and then noticed me, my jaw all wired up, the bandages covering the stitches in my throat. She reached a line in a song about a loved one, and came over to me to give me a big kiss. I must have looked pretty bad, getting all that attention.

  Mostly, we talked in the ward about what had happened — the best debriefing of all, the survivors’ dialogue. We all knew what went wrong, but the politicians and generals did not want to know our versions of Karameh. The cover-up began, with combined interests at stake.

  Both military and political decision makers responsible for the operation worked to make sure that the public never knew of the debacle. Instead, in newspaper interviews and speeches, the politicians and generals made Karameh sound like a smashing success.

  Then-Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev gave interviews about how the raid fulfilled all our goals. The politicians and generals could not admit that the IDF had failed to meet its objectives. As far as they were concerned, more casualties meant greater heroism. Uzi Narkiss, the general in charge of the operation, quietly paid the price. A few months later he gave up his uniform for a cushy job with the politicians.

  The PLO said Arafat escaped on a motorcycle on the road heading east. I did not see him. But if the sayeret had reached our place on time, we might have caught him and the rest of the PLO, and changed history.

  I do know that the IDF lost nearly thirty soldiers that day, with seventy wounded. The IDF disgracefully left three bodies behind in the field, and the Jordanians paraded them along with the abandoned tanks in downtown Amman.

  For the PLO, Karameh became known as a great victory, despite the fact we killed hundreds of them and destroyed their base. Attacked by the vaunted IDF, they survived less than a year after the IDF humiliated the combined armies of the Arab world.

  Walking back to Matan alone from the firefight, waiting for the bullet that would end my life, I had thought about the great big Israel Defense Forces, the army that beat back all the Arab world less than a year before but went into battle without planning, certain that Arab irregulars were no match for them.

  I thought about how soldiers without commanders, like those three around Arazi, can panic. And I thought about my own sense of shock at being wounded, not only because of the pain, but because it meant leaving my soldiers behind, in trouble. And, of course, I thought about how I had died — and was given the chance to live.

  Victory can be measured by the balance between plan and action. If you win, you planned well. Defeat provides an opportunity to learn. Where did you make mistakes? Did you underestimate or overestimate the opposition? Were there gaps in the intelligence? Was the approach wrong? The timing off? The right means chosen? Who faltered? Who panicked?

  But no harmony existed between plan and action. We did not meet our goals. Karameh could have become a textbook case of how not to integrate an organization made up of many parts. But the IDF never asked what went wrong at Karameh. No summaries or formal conclusions were written up, no recommendations made for further inquiry.

  In a single stroke, my perceptions of the IDF and its strength, and of my own invincibility, had changed forever. At Karameh I understood my own vulnerability, as well as the IDF’s. Since then, before every battle, every operation, and every project I began, I have seen Karameh in my mind’s eye, where I learned to learn, and the first thing I learned was that if the IDF could fail so badly, peace was still a long way away.

  They reached me at the hospital about a month after the battle, sending a junior officer who had not seen the battle and did not understand anything I talked about. Nobody gave the order for a full investigation with teams to debrief everyone within two weeks, while the events remained fresh in the minds of the participants.

  Moshe Dayan came to visit with Nurit one day. I would have told him about what I saw and learned, but by then new medical problems plagued me. I was infected with jaundice from one of the blood transfusions during my operation. I could only sleep and drink water, which I immediately vomited back up through the horrible wires holding my jaw together. Worse than the wound itself, the jaundice left me in no condition to discuss much at all, let alone Karameh.

  Six months of recuperation lay ahead of me, said the doctors. But I would not lose touch with my unit. The brigade command picked my brother Udi to replace me as deputy commander of the sayeret. “Betsers go and Betsers come” b
ecame a motto in the brigade while I went home to the Jezreel Valley to recuperate in Nahalal, my birthplace, where the story of my life really begins.

  BASIC VALUES, BASIC TRAINING

  One of my earliest memories is the sweet-and-sour smell of cow dung and damp straw, mixed with the sound of steaming milk spraying into metal buckets as my grandparents milked the cows in the little barn behind their house, my birthplace.

  Russian revolutionaries and social experimenters, my grandparents rejected religion for the sake of farming, and gave up schooling to work with their hands. They believed in action, not words, an ethos that dominated the original settlement movement of the Jezreel Valley.

  But they loved ideas. Radical democrats, they planned to turn the Jewish world they knew on its head. In their revolution, Jews became farmers, workers, and artisans instead of intellectuals, merchants, or beggars. Their revolution led them to Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and to the Land of Israel, a sparsely populated corner of the decaying Ottoman empire at the very beginning of the twentieth century.

  Born in Russia, my grandfather Yisrael Betser came to the Land via Argentina. His parents started him on his revolutionary course by moving their household from Russia to northern Argentina. A nineteenth-century German-Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice Hirsch, had established a self-sufficient Jewish farming colony there.

  But living in Moisesville, as Hirsch called his Argentine settlement, did not satisfy Yisrael’s aspirations for Jewish self-determination. In 1907, after a year in Moisesville, at the age of twenty-four he traveled alone, halfway around the world, to join the Zionists in the Land of Israel.

  Two years later, he met my grandmother, Shifra Shturman, the oldest of three Russian sisters who had arrived in the country calling themselves “workers in the revolutionary movement” and seeking work alongside the men.

  Yisrael and Shifra met at Umm Juni, south of the Sea of Galilee, along the banks of the Jordan River, where the Zionist movement sent them to create a settlement. Neighbors to a few tribes of Bedouin, they eked out a living off the banks of the river. Shifra was the only woman with the six men — including Moshe Dayan’s father-in the first years at Umm Juni.

  The seven young people — all in their early twenties — created the first kibbutz, Degania. And at the end of their first year in the commune, Yisrael Betser and Shifra Shturman married, and then moved southwest to Merhavia, in the Jezreel Valley, where they helped found the second kibbutz.

  My aunt Yardena was born there, and so was my father’s oldest brother, my uncle Moshe, whom I never knew and for whom I am named. He died early in World War II, a volunteer in the British Army. According to everyone in Nahalal, my uncle Moshe stood out among all the youth of Nahalal for his wisdom, modesty, humor, and diligence. But most of all, they told me, my uncle Moshe stood for honesty.

  My grandparents moved several more times, and had five more children — Nahman, my father; my uncles Ya’akov and Zvi; and my aunts Sarah and Havah. But finally they decided against the kibbutz as a way of life, envisioning instead a settlement that combined their individualistic spirit with the science of collectivism. Thus they reached Nahalal, a hill surrounded by a malaria — ridden swamp in the Jezreel Valley.

  Their moshav, as they called their experimental farming community, would not be as communal as the kibbutz, where the fields belonged to everyone and nobody had private possessions. Instead of collectively owning the land, each family received an equal share of land and the same means to make the land produce food. They did not have to worry about marketing their produce — the moshav movement created an organization to handle marketing — and the settlement included artisans and craftspeople whose skills earned them a place in the community.

  As a scientifically planned community, Nahalal’s very architecture served as a symbol as well as a function of the society’s organization. They laid out the settlement in a circle, putting a ring of houses around the perimeter and slicing the land around the circle like a pie, with each family getting the same amount of land. Every season, the farmers met to plan what to grow in the coming year, and everyone received the same supply of seeds and equipment. Nobody would own a tractor unless everyone owned a tractor. Until then, they shared. And in 1921, the moshav elected my grandfather Yisrael Betser as its first mukhtar, the mayor of Nahalal.

  My mother, Sarah Hurvitz, whose family was already five generations in the country (she was born and raised in Tel Aviv), met my father, Nahman, in Kibbutz Haim in the Jezreel Valley, and gave birth to me in my grandparents’ house in Nahalal in 1945.

  I spent my first four years there, until the end of the War of Independence. Then, answering David Ben-Gurion’s call for experienced workers to help build the country, my father took us to Haifa, where he worked as a contractor on major construction sites.

  But he preferred the Jezreel Valley — and so did I. Moving back to the valley, just before my eighth birthday, became one of the happiest days of my life. Though we moved to Bet She’arim, it was only a ten-minute gallop on a horse across the fields to my grandparents’ home in Nahalal.

  I grew up barefoot — not because we could not afford shoes, but because we learned to love the feel of the ground beneath our feet. Like my uncles and aunts and my brothers and sisters, I inherited Yisrael Betser’s genes, which gave me height, and Shifra Shturman’s genes, which gave me strength. By sixteen I was the tallest of my friends — six — foot — three. And though I weighed only a hundred and sixty pounds, it was all muscle, and remained my constant weight throughout all my years in and out of the army.

  I swam, played basketball, rode horses, and most of all, I ran. My greatest pleasure, running, gave me a feeling of freedom. Later, when I went to the army, it would be one of the first things the officers noticed about me. I always came in first, second, or third in the long double — time marches or in the platoon punishments that taught us the discipline of soldiering.

  Raised to believe in farming the land to develop it, and soldiering to defend it, army service was more than duty for me; it was a responsibility. But in our family, indeed throughout the Jezreel Valley, war stories were nothing to relish or brag about, indeed were rarely told.

  For many years, a rifle hung on the wall of my grandparents’ dining room, which also served as their living room. It was not there as decoration or nostalgia. A few years before my birth, an Arab threw a hand grenade into a Nahalal house one night, killing a baby. It could happen again. The fedayeen continued coming across the borders to terrorize the Jews of the Land of Israel.

  By the age of ten I knew how to use a rifle, an old Lee Enfield my father kept at home. But along with my father’s practical lessons in the weapon’s handling came a much more profound one. Only if we proved our readiness for self-defense would the Arabs ever accept us in the country. Peace, not war, was the goal. To reach it, we needed to be strong.

  Though he was wounded twice as a fighter — once with Wingate, and then later in the War of Independence — I never heard a war story from my father. In the Jezreel Valley, his friends and neighbors admired his farmer’s abilities, his readiness to help anyone who needed it, and his preference for deeds over words.

  So, like most of the kids of Nahalal-and indeed the rest of the farming settlements of the Jezreel Valley — we learned of our own families’ historic heroism through hearsay and the schoolbooks of our country’s modern history.

  Growing up in Nahalal, even with all the reticence about talking about war and combat, my roots included the Haganah and the Palmach. A self-defense organization, created in the underground during the days of the British occupation of the country, the Haganah provided protection from the Arabs when the British did little to help.

  As its strike force, the Palmach became the model for all the special operations forces in the IDF. A combination of British military tactics and kibbutz and moshav values made the Palmach an extraordinary military force, in which young men and women
fought together. Using creativity and improvisation to counter the overwhelming numbers of Arab enemies, their guerrilla tactics made the most out of meager resources. Imbued with a profound camaraderie amongst its few hundred members, the Palmach’s fighters came from the farms and the labor movement, the elite of the country’s youth, recruited by friends and sworn to secrecy.

  For me, the best stories I heard from the old — timers in the village gave me clues and hints where to find forgotten arms caches, hidden in the valley during the years of the British Mandate, when it was illegal for a Jew to have a gun — even while under constant attack from Arabs.

  Following those clues, I led my friends to caves in the hills above Nahalal or to underground caches hidden beneath the floorboards of old barns. Once, I dug up an old septic tank to find an arms cache that included a Sten gun. My father had built that cache — not that he ever told me about it.

  When I turned fifteen, my brother Udi went to the army — to the famed paratroops brigade. Like me, he had sought out old arms caches and tried out the guns he found in the old quarry in the hills north of Nahalal. But suddenly, when he went into the army, he changed. Soldiering stopped being a game for him.

  Now, when he came home from the army, he went into the hills with his friends, other new soldiers. I spied on them when they told stories about the army. Combat soldiers all, they complained about tough sergeants and laughed about moments of fear that they overcame. I listened eagerly to their stories-not because I looked forward to war or combat, but because I looked forward to the challenges they described: the long marches and sleepless nights, the exhilaration of parachuting, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from shooting accurately.

  Never much interested in school — I attended an agricultural high school not far from Haifa — I preferred hiking the land to reading about it in schoolbooks. Often my girlfriend, Nurit, and I took off for a few days or even weeks to go hiking and camping, whether in the Galilee’s hills or in the Negev’s desert. For us, no greater pleasure existed than tracing the course of a wadi we visited for the first time.