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

by Moshe Betser

  Few people can surprise me in the desert. Amos could. “Muki, I want to talk with you,” said Amos softly, coming up on me from behind, Fuad in his wake.

  “I’ve made up my mind, Amos,” I said, knowing what they wanted. “I’m going home. And I want my reserves in the paratroops.”

  Amos sighed. “I know. But if you’re not going to stick around to help Fuad take over the unit,” he said softly, “then do something else for me. Go to Tel Hashomer to the induction center. Take over the Shaked recruiting station. I want him,” Yarkoni said, using his black fist to point toward Fuad, “to have the best recruits you can find.”

  I owed Amos for taking me into Shaked after the argument with Raful. It was only a month, and I could spend a lot of it at Nahalal, only a couple of hours north of Tel Hashomer. None of us knew that war would change all my plans. Instead of mustering out in June 1967, I would see my first war.

  FIGHTING FOR HONOR

  Maybe it was our upbringing in a cooperative settlement, maybe because we were so close-knit as a community, maybe because as children we worked out our aggressions in the hard work of farm chores; whatever the reason, the kids from the Jezreel Valley of my youth had no experience with the raw violence of hatred or intentionally inflicting pain on another person.

  In great physical shape and motivated by patriotism, like youth anywhere we considered ourselves brave. But while we grew up knowing full well that we would go to the army-and hoped to be among those who would face the enemy, making him die for his country rather than us for ours-we knew nothing about real violence. Raised to understand the necessity of violence for self-defense, we forswore the expression of hatred that gives rise to irrational violence. I hated terrorists, not Arabs. I hated war, not the army.

  I went camping every year as a boy with Noar Ha-Oved, a scouts-like movement affiliated to the moshav settlement movement to which my parents belonged. Each year we went to a different campsite for a couple of weeks of living under the stars, hiking the countryside, and visiting historic sites. One year we went to Jerusalem, another to the Negev, a third to Galilee. Our counselors were also teenagers, two or three years older than the campers.

  The year I turned fourteen, we went to a woods near Hadera, halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. We camped in a wooded grove at the far edges of the town. At the far end of our camp field, a field faucet much like the one in the back of the house at Nahalal provided water. Five of us went over one afternoon with our canteens to fill up.

  But, reaching the tap, we encountered something we never saw before: kids from the town and city. They dressed differently, they spoke differently, they behaved differently. We wore sandals and shorts. They wore shoes and long pants. To us farm kids from the Jezreel Valley, they seemed to exude a mysterious threat that made no sense.

  “What do you want?” asked their leader, a little taller than the others, just as I was taller than my friends.

  “We’re from the camp down the field,” I explained, speaking for the five of us. “We have permission to use this tap,” I added, taking a step toward the faucet.

  He sidestepped, blocking my access to the tap. “You can’t have any,” he said. “Beat it.”

  It astonished me. I wondered what gave him the right to deny anyone water. But even more confusing was our fear.

  I remember those seconds clearly. Nobody had ever challenged me so forcefully. The showdown became a matter of honor. My grandparents and parents taught me never to back down. To give in to the threat, to run back to camp to report to the counselors instead of taking command of the situation, would be shameful. But the other option, to face down their challenge, seemed beyond any of us. None of us ever fought for real, with the intention of causing pain to the other. At most, we wrestled. “We’re here to get water,” I repeated, as leader of my friends. “We have permission.”

  “Beat it,” their leader scoffed at me again.

  The tension rose. I knew I had the right to take the water, and I understood in that moment that, ready or not, I would stand up for my rights even if it meant a fight. They looked like they knew about fighting. That turned into a second shock for me. All I knew about fighting came from the outdoor movies at Nahalal in summer, and I knew that was not for real.

  Innocent and ignorant of fighting, throwing a punch or slapping someone was outside the realm of my experience. I saw the experience of violence in their eyes. Yet, behind the aggression and the threats, I also saw a nervous fear. In that instant I realized that fear is as much present in the enemy’s mind as it is in your own, and the winner is the one who can conquer his fear.

  It all boiled down to a decision. Either we fight or we ignore them, try to take some water and see if they challenged us further. Their leader took a step forward. My body tensed as I realized that we had reached the point of no return. I did not know how, but I knew I would fight.

  Just then, one of the counselors from our camp came running. He flew into the tense scene without stopping to ask questions and did what needed to be done. He went for the biggest kid, punching him once in the face. The gang leader reeled backward, falling to the ground. His friends ran. A moment later, the city kid jumped to his feet and ran after his friends.

  I stood there, open-mouthed, watching the city kids’ retreat, for the first time in my life understanding the nature of fighting.

  I carried that memory for years, until it gave birth to one of the tests I conceived to grade the new Shaked recruits. In addition to the usual tests of physical endurance and team spirit, I wanted to judge the candidates on their ability to use violence.

  I lined them up in two rows facing each other. “Now, take turns hitting each other,” I commanded.

  From their expressions I could tell that most did not understand the order.

  “Slap your partner. Across the face,” I explained. Nobody would get really hurt. But I would quickly see who field back and who hit with too much pleasure, who still did not understand the order and who tried but did not follow through.

  “Is that how you slap someone?” I asked, approaching one of the hesitant recruits, using my most pleasant voice. I learned a long time ago that the only reason to raise my voice is to be heard over noise, not to impress anyone with my authority.

  The soldier shrugged. I walloped him with an open-handed slap on the cheek, sending him flying. “Now you hit me,” I said as he recovered. But he was afraid-after all, I was an officer.

  “Hit me,” I ordered. He threw something too soft to count. Again I walloped him. Again he climbed back to his feet. And again I gave the order for him to slap me.

  By then he became mad. But I could take care of that later, teaching that anger is a good motive but a terrible tactic. When he hit me as hard as I hit him, I knew I could make a soldier out of him.

  I wanted to see if they overcame the psychological barrier resulting from inexperience. After all, it is always better to experience conflict on the drill field before getting to the real thing in combat. I did not want soldiers who enjoyed inflicting pain. I did want soldiers unafraid to use force.

  NOT THE SIX-DAY WAR, THE THREE-HOUR WAR

  I thought I would recruit the new Shaked class and then go back to Nahalal. But Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, made other plans for me-and Israel-in mid-May of 1967.

  Barely a week after my arrival at Tel Hashomer, Nasser suddenly blockaded the Red Sea, preventing ships from reaching Eilat, our southernmost port. The threat of war turned even more serious when he evicted the UN peacekeeping troops posted in Sinai since the 1956 Suez campaign and began massing troops and armor on the border between the Negev and the Sinai.

  Television broadcasts from Cairo and the rest of the Arab world showed millions of people in the streets screaming support for jihad, an Islamic holy war against us. They planned to drive us into the sea, said the Arab leaders, mobilizing their armies.

  Nasser sent his entire army up to our borders. The IDF mobilized its reserves. War looked inevi
table. And I felt I belonged in the paratroops when it broke out.

  Shaked was a great outfit for daily security work guarding the borders, but in a war, I reckoned, the paratroops would get to the most important battlefields. Believing the army bureaucracy might overlook me because of the overlap between the end of my active service and my assignment to a reserve unit, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

  I gave the recruiting station command to the Shaked sergeant and headed to the paratroops brigade, where they welcomed me with open arms. They planned a drop into Sharm al-Sheikh, at the southern tip of the Sinai, far behind enemy lines. I joined the planning.

  It took Amos less than twenty-four hours to find me. “You’re the best tracker in the country.” I sighed, recognizing his voice and knowing what he wanted — for me to return to Shaked.

  “I didn’t have to track,” Amos said with a soft chuckle. “I know you, and I know where you’re from,” he said.

  Maybe as a son of the Jezreel Valley he meant that he would have done the same. It is too late now to ask him — he passed away in the late eighties. But to his credit, he never gave me the feeling I needed to apologize, and never said anything more about the incident.

  He gave me back the troops I had just finished training, plus dozens of additional soldiers called up from the reserves. Just as he promised, I was leading a company-size force at the age of twenty-three.

  Beefed up by reservists, Shaked split up into several forces spread out along the Egyptian front lines forming rapidly in front of our eyes on the long line dividing the Negev from Sinai.

  Assigned the lead reconnaissance position for the First Battalion of the Ninth Brigade under Arik Sharon’s divisional command, my battle orders were clear and simple. As the advance reconnaissance unit for the battalion, we would move into Sinai ahead of Sharon’s armor, seeking out enemy positions to attack. If we could take them on our own, we would. If not, patched into a radio network with Fuad and Amos, we would pass the intelligence back to brigade headquarters, for the artillery or our own armor to handle the enemy position. We were going to be the first Israeli soldiers over the line into Sinai, with the entire strength of Arik Sharon’s division behind us.

  It meant two weeks of excruciating waiting. In the city, on the home front, they dug bomb shelters and worried. At least we kept busy.

  Every night we patrolled the Egyptian lines, a fifteen-minute drive away across a desert plain broken by gravely dunes and wide mouths of ancient wadis that had not seen rain for millennia. Every night, more Egyptian tanks and artillery lined up against us.

  Daytime, we dug in and prepared our own attack. Israel is much too small to allow any enemy penetration of the country. The basic principle of combat is to assault. Ambushed, assault. Under fire, assault. Not blindly, of course, not without thinking. Think, plan, but then assault. It might cost a life, but if you don’t assault, you’ll lose everything as the enemy closes in. The principle of combat for a single unit, it is also the general principle for the entire army. We cannot afford to let a single enemy tank cross our lines.

  Indeed, while they announced their intentions to invade our country, we planned to fight back by invading theirs. Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers arrived in the south to face the hundreds of thousands of Egyptian soldiers lining up a few miles away to the west.

  Those of us on the line felt confident, especially in combat units like mine, where we planned on taking the initiative in the war. But the government hesitated. And public self-confidence drained away day by day. Meanwhile, the Arab frenzy for war mounted. History appeared to make it a life-and-death battle for us. With the Holocaust less than a generation away, once again the lives of millions of Jews were in danger, simply because they were Jews.

  For two weeks, the politicians tried to avoid war, while we worked to prepare for it. The economy came to a halt, with the full-scale call-up that put all the able-bodied men in the country into the trenches. And on the front lines we prepared: daily parades — morning, noon, and evening. Daily maintenance of vehicles — jeeps, command cars, and half-tracks; physical training every day, including running, weapons practice, and hand-to-hand combat. Sweat dries fast in the dry heat, and at night stiff breezes swept across the plain. We worked hard, waiting for the war to begin.

  We barely slept those two weeks. I kept the soldiers busy in daytime, keeping equipment in shape, learning maps, and drilling. At night I patrolled by jeep and on foot, bringing eyewitness reports on enemy troop formations to command headquarters, where they updated the aerial photographs and other intelligence reports arriving from headquarters.

  The radio and daily newspapers only told us that the government met or the UN met, that Jerusalem appealed for a peaceful resolution, and the foreign minister spoke with his counterparts from the superpowers. Meanwhile, Nasser’s speeches to a million enthusiastic followers in Cairo promised the Arab world a victory as great as Saladin’s victory over the Crusaders.

  In the Night of the Wells I learned that a soldier’s first border crossing is a primal experience. You live all your life in a country with an enemy on the other side of the border. You cross the border expecting an ambush. But when you cross the border and see that the enemy’s side is just like yours, with the same vegetation, the same orange groves, the same sand and stone, you realize that on both sides there are simply peaceful citizens who want to live quietly, working their fields or living their lives.

  Nonetheless, in special operations like the Night of the Wells, you know how you’re going in and how you’re coming out. It is your initiative, based on your plan. That moment of paranoia crossing the border — and the alert serenity that follows — is almost a luxury compared to the feeling on the eve of war. In war, all you know is how to go in. You can never know how you will come out.

  Just before dawn on June 5, 1967, the orders came down to get ready. Up and down the line, engines rumbled in the darkness that gradually gave way to the brilliant light of the sun rising in the east behind us.

  The first wave of planes, weighed down by bombs and flying low against radar, flew overhead just as the sun came over the horizon. They flew away from the rising sun, westward into the enemy’s eyes. And we raced after them.

  It took fifteen minutes to reach our first encounter with the enemy. A gravelly dune loomed ahead. I raised a hand, and the three jeeps and three armored personnel carriers behind me came to a halt.

  With the sun directly behind me, my shadow carved a slender black line down the middle of the dune as I made my way up. Just below the ridge, I fell to a crawl. The latest intelligence — indeed, my own eyewitness observations from only two nights before — made me expect twenty or thirty tanks laid out in formations in the flat plain of a wadi’s mouth gaping open to the mazes of mountains in Sinai, where the Children of Israel wandered for forty years.

  Already crawling up the ridge, I sensed something wrong in the air. The sky darkened, with thick black smoke rising in columns.

  Now, as I lifted my head over the ridge to look down on the enemy, expecting to see dozens of tanks moving into action, I saw the source of those black, smoky clouds. I raised my binoculars. Behind me, soldiers whispered, wondering about the delay. And at first even I did not understand what had happened.

  The towers of smoke rose from more than a dozen tanks burning like torches in the morning sun. Other tanks stood motionless in the sheer white plain of the wadi mouth. Dozens of jeeps and trucks lay scattered across the landscape like broken toys.

  “Someone has already been here,” I murmured to myself, looking down on the strange scene, knowing it was impossible. We were supposed to be the first over the line. Shocked — and thrilled, as the meaning of what I saw sank in — I scanned the horizon from north to south, trying to make sense of the scene, realizing that the air force had indeed preceded us.

  And in the distance, the most amazing sight of all: thousands of Egyptian soldiers trudging west, escaping the battlefield, trying
to walk home far across the Sinai Peninsula to the Suez Canal and Egypt, beyond.

  I called my observations back to Amos and Fuad in the Shaked command car, elsewhere in Sharon’s advancing army.

  “I want to take my force down to investigate,” I summed up.

  Fuad responded with a refrain that I would hear over and over again during the coming hours and days. “Okay, Betser,” he said, “but go slow and safe.”

  Our anticipation quickly turned into astonishment as we sped into the smoke blowing across the plain. Then, as we drove directly into the center of the first flanking camp, our amazement at the destruction of the tanks turned to horror.

  From the distance, the war looked like an angry giant had broken his toys. Here we saw the real cost of war: as the smoke swirled around us, the broken toys turned into broken people. A severed arm pointed nowhere. A head, its mouth open, looked surprised that the rest of its body was gone. The wind carried the thick stink of burning flesh.

  I stood up in the jeep, raising a hand to call for a halt. Below me, an Egyptian soldier lay on his back, the flies already gathering in the open cavity of his charred chest. His smooth face was too young to need to shave daily. Where did he come from, I wondered. Cairo? Alexandria? Or a peasants’ village on the banks of the Nile? I felt sorry for him, so far from home. I thought of my home, and how close it felt.

  A moaning Egyptian soldier broke the quiet. I signaled the medics to look for survivors and treat them. Looking back at my soldiers, I saw my own shock reflected in the eyes of the young soldiers I finished training only a month before. But in the eyes of the older reservists, who went through the ‘56 campaign in the Sinai, I saw something else — an understanding of the pain experienced by those of us who never before saw such destruction coping with the initially overwhelming feelings of horrified awe at the result of war.