by Moshe Betser
“Doesn’t matter,” said the adjutant, studying the papers in front of him.
“Okay,” I said, knowing exactly what I wanted. I used my most formal tone. “I hereby resign from officers’ school.” That made him raise his head, astonished. Nobody resigns from officers’ training. I went on. “I hereby request a transfer back to my unit, where I’ll continue my service as a sergeant, as a soldier, not an officer.” His mouth dropped open. And to drive the point home, I added, “In fact, I can leave right now.”
He gasped, looking for words. Finally he said, “Impossible.”
“What do you mean impossible?” I demanded angrily. “What you’re doing right now is deception. If someone had told me before this course that I’d have to sign up for another two years …”
“Eighteen months,” he corrected me.
“You don’t get it, do you?” I shot back. “I’m not talking about how much time is involved. I’m talking about the principle of the issue. The deception. If they told me it meant another year, maybe I would have signed up. But they didn’t. Now you tell me? In the middle of the course? Forget it. I’m quitting the course and going back to Tel Nof. On principle,” I snapped at him.
“Look, this is an order from the brigade commander,” he tried, in that defensive desk-jockey manner that always refuses to fight for itself. “And I’ll tell him that his order did not go down well here,” he added, trying to threaten me.
“You tell him exactly what I told you,” I shot back, then stood up and walked out to join my buddies on the lawn.
I told them what I had said, and then each of them went back in and told the adjutant that none of us would sign up for the extra time. It became a matter of principle.
The next day Giora Haika, our company commander, showed up and summoned all five of us for a meeting.
“Are you guys out of your minds?” he began.
I put up my hand. “First of all, they brought us up in the sayeret to believe that as fighters, we don’t talk to adjutants. Why didn’t you or one of our platoon commanders come and talk to us?”
That threw Giora. “I didn’t know about it,” he admitted ruefully. “It surprised me as much as it surprised you.”
He stayed loyal to both sides-us and Raful. He did not say what he thought about the order-good or bad-or even comment on the way it came to us, via an adjutant rather than an officer. But he promised to look into it. Three days later he came back with bad news. “It’s more complicated than I thought,” he said. “You all know Raful. He’s stubborn. And he’s brigade commander. You guys think about it, and let me know what you decide.”
We discussed it that night, but I had already decided not to let my principles affect their lives. Some planned army careers. If they followed my lead, it could ruin their chances. Too stubborn to admit that he made a mistake, there was no point trying to fight Raful. I suggested that the best thing would be for each of us to decide what we wanted. But Betsers are also stubborn-especially about matters of principle. I made my own plans.
In those years, the next best unit in the IDF after the paratroops sayeret was Shaked, the Southern Command’s elite reconnaissance force.
Based in the Negev, Shaked saw a lot of action, dealing with border infiltration from both Egypt and Jordan. Almost daily, it faced terrorists from Gaza, Egyptian Army intelligence officers on reconnaissance missions, Jordanian and Palestinian infiltrators from the Jordan Rift, and Bedouin smugglers on ancient routes from Africa to the Persian Gulf through the Sinai and Negev into Jordan and, from there, to Saudi Arabia.
Shaked’s legendary commanding officer, Amos Yarkoni, the Bedouin-born former Abed al-Majid, came from the Jezreel Valley. He knew my family. As a child he herded his family’s sheep, grazing them in the rich fields that my grandparents and their friends made from the swamps of the valley. My father and Moshe Dayan patrolled the fields on horseback, chasing off the Bedouin ruining the moshav crops with their sheep. The fights with sticks and stones over the fields of Nahalal and the Bedouin grazing lands eventually turned into a strong friendship between my father and Yarkoni.
The War of Independence interrupted that friendship, when pan-Arab rhetoric united all the Arabs against us. But the Bedouin — like the Druze and the Circassians, two other ancient, stateless peoples of the Middle East — have an ancient tradition that serves them well for their survival. Stateless, they know to side with the stronger side in a dispute, and in the country where they live, they are loyal to the state.
In 1948, at the outbreak of the War of Independence, when the Arab world declared war on the newborn Jewish state, the Bedouin, Druze, and Circassians sided with the attempted Arab invasion. Abed al-Majid became a leader of one of the irregular Arab militias that raided Jewish settlements in the area.
But as soon as the IDF began to win in 1948 and it became clear that Israel would survive, many of the Bedouin living inside the borders of the state began to have second thoughts about their loyalties. Moshe Dayan met with Abed al-Majid, his boyhood friend, and talked him into siding with Israel, indeed into joining the IDF. Since then, the Bedouin, the Druze, and the Circassians — ethnic minorities in Israel-are drafted into Israel’s security forces. And for the same reason, the Druze of Syria join the Syrian Army.
As soon as my friends from Nahalal in Shaked told Amos that Nahman Betser’s son wanted to join his unit, Amos pulled all the necessary strings to get me into his unit as soon as I finished the officers’ course. Amos wanted me to train a new Shaked platoon. I wanted to see Shaked action in the Negev, catching armed Pales tinians who slipped across the borders of Egypt and Jordan, from Gaza and the West Bank.
The weeks went by in the officers’ course. I loved being in the paratroops and did not want to lose the chance to do my reserves in the brigade’s sayeret. I kept up an unlikely hope to see Raful show up one day to explain the order to us. When he didn’t, I decided to go see him myself.
A few weeks before the end of the officers’ course, while on weekend leave at home, I went to see him at Tel Adashim, the moshav where he lived a few kilometers up the Jezreel Valley from Nahalal. He knew my family, and welcomed me warmly as both a neighbor and one of his soldiers.
Raful took a lot of pride in his paratroopers. To this day, he always picks up hitchhiking soldiers. But when he sees a hitchhiking paratrooper, he drops off the soldier already in his car, in order to take the paratrooper. If the surprised soldier complains, Raful says simply, “Next time, be a paratrooper.”
We sat in the small carpentry shop in his yard. I went right to the point. “I volunteered for the paratroops sayeret,” I began, “because it is the best commando unit in the army. You’re our brigade commander. But because of an arbitrary order that you gave, I’m leaving the paratroops to go to Shaked.”
I thought I gave him the opportunity to explain his decision-or reverse it. Instead, he tried to convince me to sign up for another two years in the brigade.
“Raful, it is more than a question of time,” I interrupted. “We felt deceived. By the brigade. We were told we’d finish the course and have another six months, and then, in the middle, you told us to do another eighteen months. It was my idea that we all refuse to return to the brigade. The others can decide what they want to do. But there’s no way I’m going to break my word-and I believe the brigade broke its word to us.”
Raful admired principles, and loyalty to fellow soldiers. But he did not rescind the order. And as I left, he vowed to get me transferred back to the paratroops.
Raful was stubborn. Amos Yarkoni was no less stubborn. He lost a hand in one battle, and part of a leg in another. But the most loving of his soldiers of any commander I have known, he never lost his head. He beat back Raful’s efforts to bring me back to the paratroops brigade. “I saw Raful,” Amos said many times over the coming years, coming back to headquarters from Southern Command or the general staff’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, “and he’s still asking for you.”
Their di
spute over me went all the way to Shaike Gavish, the general in charge of the Southern Command. Shaked was the apple of Shaike’s eye, and he stuck by Amos when Raful complained that he wanted Betser back. But for Amos it became a matter of honor to keep me, and I think it gave him as much pleasure to rebuff Raful’s demand for my return to the paratroops as it did to train and lead the sons of the Jezreel Valley’s pioneers.
“You are the children of the roots of the valley,” he said at every graduation ceremony of soldiers finishing their basic training in his regiment, “sons of the farmers.” He told the new soldiers, “You make me proud.”
Already past forty when I reached Shaked, Amos was in his last year as its commander, a wise, experienced veteran who taught me secrets of the desert. He spoke a fluent Hebrew, with an Arabic accent, and wore a carefully trimmed black mustache and a black fist at the end of his wrist where he had lost his hand. He came up with his own methods for handling weapons, as fast as anyone with two hands, clutching the weapon in his armpit while using his good hand to reload, then using his forearm to stabilize the gun barrel.
Most of our work involved chasing the infiltrators who came over the Gazan border. They usually crossed at night, cutting through the fence the IDF had installed around Gaza. Our morning patrols picked up the tracks and we gave chase. Sometimes the tracks went back into Gaza. Often they ended in captures. Sometimes they ended with a firefight. Our prey included Egyptian spies, Palestinian terrorists, and smugglers and thieves.
Amos taught us to read all their tracks, as well as the codes of the deserts, fields, and groves of the south. He taught me to look at a withered leaf and know how long ago someone had stepped on it. He taught me the difference between a runner’s footstep and an ambusher’s crouch marks, between the prints left behind by an Egyptian soldier’s boots and a Palestinian terrorist’s shoes.
For Bedouin, tracks in the desert are like street signs for someone who grew up in the city. A stranger in the desert can mean a thief or a smuggler, an enemy scout or an ambush. Just as city people watch traffic lights, so Bedouin watch for footprints in the land.
Amos taught it all. “The night has everything,” he taught. “Quiet and sound. People moving, cars, a tractor across a field. Anything that has the element of animals in it-always listen, and learn. Turtles, frogs, anything that makes noise-listen. A turtle’s path or a frog’s bellow means water, and water means people.”
All new for the city boys, Amos’s lessons made the landscape come alive for the country boys in ways I had only dreamt about. Within a few weeks I read my soldiers’ footprints, knowing how tired they became on a long march from the tracks, recognizing a limp in a footstep left in the sand. I’ve known many Bedouin scouts over the years, but Amos stood head and shoulders above them all in his understanding of the land, in his leadership, in his integrity as a family man, and in his loyalty to Shaked.
He did not give orders. He taught by using example, not theory. Tracking, he taught us, is all about putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. One night we chased a terrorist crew that came over from Gaza, tracking four men to a supply shed in a kibbutz orange grove near the border. But on their way out of the grove, a fifth set of tracks joined the party. It confused us all. Where did the fifth man come from? Who was he?
Amos showed up and crouched beside the tracks, studying them for a few moments before suddenly getting up and walking off into the grove. He came back a minute later, astonishing us by holding out an Egyptian commando’s knife.
“Simple,” he said. “One of the four dropped something or forgot something,” Amos explained. “He backtracked, and rejoined the trail where he had already walked. I went back, to search for what he lost,” he said, indeed making it sound simple.
The kings of the Negev, from Beer Sheva to Eilat, we chased down Gazan thieves who stole farm supplies; we went after Egyptian intelligence crews who needed to steal something from an Israeli settlement to prove they had made it over the border; and we trapped Palestinian fedayeen coming into Israel to wreak their havoc. We even caught a few Israelis-Arabs, Druze, and even a few Jewstrying to escape personal problems by slipping out of the country. We set up our ambushes to capture people coming over from Gaza, but we always kept someone on guard at the rear in case an Israeli appeared out of nowhere.
Despite the importance of the daily routines of border security, the function of any army is to prepare for war. From the start, Amos gave me a platoon to train, as well as my duties as a participant in chases after terrorists.
Every soldier, every officer, no matter how young, knew that notwithstanding cease-fire agreements with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, war could break out. In January 1967, it might be a year away or five years away. The Arab states made no secret of their intentions to continue fighting our presence in the Land. The first priority of any army unit is to be ready for war.
Amos gave me fifty good soldiers and I winnowed them down to thirty excellent fighters, keeping only those who kept up. The key to any sayeret success is fieldcraft — especially navigation. In war, a reconnaissance force moves ahead of advancing armor to scout out the enemy’s positions and either overcome them or send back the intelligence needed for the armor to come in and do the job.
I wanted my soldiers to know how to move quickly but thoughtfully. I wanted them aware of their own tracks as well as the tracks of others. They needed to know how to survive on their own, whether finding sustenance in the desert or using the natural routes of the landscape: crannies that provided hiding, cover, and camouflaged shelter, points from which to ambush an enemy or from where an enemy might be watching.
Once they knew the basics, I divided them into squads of two or three, sending them on long-distance navigation routes that took up to a week to complete. I went alone, crisscrossing between the various squads scattered out across the Negev, meeting up with them on the move or when they reached a resting point. I always made sure to surprise them — shooting a round or two in their vicinity, to check their reaction. I remembered the fake drills of my own training and how they disappointed me. I wanted them to understand real-life situations, the reality of soldiering, and how the key to survival is staying alert at all times. Unconventional but effective, my methods kept them alert at all times. Whether training in the heart of the Negev or at the front line of combat, they were soldiers twenty-four hours a day, and must know how to stay alert. When I came across teams that did not have their weapons handy or I caught them all napping, my ambushes of a few shots over their heads made sure they would never drop their guard again.
That platoon stayed together as a reserve unit for almost twenty years. To this day I hear from soldiers who went through that harsh-but loving-training. The refrain is always the same. “Muki, your training kept us alive through all the wars.” And they saw plenty-from the Six-Day War in 1967 to the Lebanon War of 1982, they stayed together as a reserve outfit through all the wars.
In February of 1967, Nurit and I finally married, inheriting the Dayan homestead. We moved to the little three-room house with its two tall palms that Moshe’s father planted in the garden when they founded Nahalal. As an officer, I could get home from the south almost every weekend-and sometimes in the middle of the week — except when the unit went operational for a specific mission.
In April, I had a month’s leave coming to me before I finished my compulsory service. Then I would be assigned a reserve unit, where I’d serve a month per year until I was no longer fit.
I wanted to go back into the paratroops for my reserve duty. I belonged there, more than any other unit.
But Amos wanted me in Shaked. Nobody-not even Amos — knew the old Bedouin’s exact age, but that year he decided the time had come to retire from field command. His deputy, Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer, a burly colonel with thin lips that widened into an infectious grin whenever he smiled, came into the force to replace Amos as Shaked’s commander. Fuad would go on to become a general and then a politici
an. Meanwhile, Amos wanted me to stay on, to help Fuad take over.
He made me an extraordinary offer one night sitting over glasses of black tea in his spartan office. “You’re going to be a general one day,” he said to me in his matter-of-fact tone. “Stay with us in the Southern Command and I’ll give you a company,” he promised. It would make me one of the youngest company commanders in the IDF. But it meant signing up for another two years. And my plans did not include a full-time professional career in the army.
I shook my head. “I belong in the paratroops,” I told him. “You know that. No matter how much I’ve enjoyed my time with Shaked, the paratroops is my first choice. You know why I came to Shaked because of my argument with Raful. But I’ve fulfilled my duty, and kept to my principles.”
“Think about it,” he asked. “Promise you’ll think about it.”
“I will,” I promised. “But you know me. I’m not going to change my mind.”
At the end of April 1967, my platoon finished its basic training. On the last night of a long field exercise, around a campfire in the Negev under the stars, some of the soldiers pulled out a bottle of wine to pass around to celebrate their graduation from trainees to fighters. I don’t drink-and never subject friends to my singing-but I enjoyed their happiness.
After a while I went off into the desert, away from the fire, to look up at the stars and consider my own future. In another few weeks I’d be a civilian again, after two and a half years of compulsory service plus the six months I put in after the officers’ training course.
Nurit was pregnant, and the farm waited for me at Nahalal. We talked about traveling to foreign countries. As a teenager, Nurit lived in Tanzania when her father served in a military delegation to that country. Africa sounded interesting. And though I never took school very seriously before the army, the idea of studying geography at university began to appeal to me.
I felt good. Though I had not seen war, I knew that I would do well when the time came. And I knew it would come one day in the future. The Arabs still refused to accept us in the Land of Israel. And when war came, I wanted to experience it as a paratrooper at the tip of the spear of the IDF’s defense of the Land.
