by Moshe Betser
“My God, the phone lines work!” he shouted. “Give me, give me, I want to call home. Let them know I’m okay.”
“Okay, okay, relax, hold on,” I said, “I’ll finish my call and then you can make all the calls you want.”
I said goodbye to my wife, then handed over the phone. But almost as soon as he started talking, a massive Syrian artillery barrage began, much more concentrated than the one an hour earlier. He shouted down the line to his wife that he was okay and then we both ran back to Operations to find out what they knew.
Tank battles raged all over the Golan. The Syrian tanks outnumbered us ten to one. The 188th Armored Brigade began with fifty-seven tanks and field off six hundred enemy tanks, at a cost of 90 percent casualties. The Seventh Armored Brigade began with seventy tanks and was decimated.
More news came in. Reservists arriving on the front reported that chaos in the rear had slowed their arrival. General headquarters back in Tel Aviv sent word for everyone to hold on until reinforcements arrived. But nobody could say how long it would take. Meanwhile, a handful of tanks field back endless waves of enemy armor trying to get across the plateau.
But Barazani had some good news for me. Raful had made a decision. He wanted Sayeret Matkal squads to go tank-hunting in the morning. I could finally get some rest, knowing that the next day we had a mission.
COMMANDO VS. COMMANDO
There’s no sleep during a war. Not a real sleep. Not a deep sleep in a bed. I catnapped here and there, and on a few rare and lucky occasions, I grabbed an hour or two. In Nafah that first night, I went into an empty office, pulled up a chair, put my feet on the desk, and leaned back, making sure to face a window so that daybreak would wake me even before the sun came out.
When it did, I ran cold water over my face and went out to check the troops deployed in their positions around the camp. Morning mists veiled the scene, but as daylight rose, the scene became vividly clear. Our American-made Pattons, and British-made Centurions, their Soviet T-52s and T-54s, the tanks and jeeps and APCs and half-tracks that went into the battle of the first two days of war, lay about the camp like so many broken toys.
While I was inspecting a post hit during the night by a Syrian shell, a radio call suddenly came in from an officer at the northern edges of the camp. “Helicopters,” he reported. “Coming in from the northeast.” I looked up in that direction.
Three enemy helicopters crossed the horizon from east to west. I expected them to break south along the Tapline Road, which runs north-south across the Heights and used to carry oil from Iraq to the port of Haifa when the British ruled the Middle East.
Now, just off the Tapline Road, the choppers began descending into a field about two kilometers north of Nafah.
“Yonni!” I called on the radio. “Choppers landing about a kilometer and a half north of us.” We both knew that we needed to get to the choppers before the enemy soldiers they carried managed to deploy, obviously heading toward Nafah. Sayeret Matkal always prefers attack over defense.
As soon as Yonni confirmed, I put out another message to all the team commanders to get the fighters onto the APCs on the double. We converged at the APC parking lot and together we raced out of camp heading north on the Tapline Road.
The whole terrain in that part of the Golan is undulating hills, wild fields of rocks and boulders and dry, thorny brush. From the road, we saw the choppers disappear behind one of the hills and then, a few moments later, rise into the sky and start heading east toward the Syrian border.
Yonni led the force in the front APC, my company behind him, followed by Yuri’s unit. A dozen APCs stormed up the Tapline Road toward the landing point of the three choppers, which I figured could carry about fifty soldiers. We had almost twice as many fighters.
Yonni ordered a halt on the road about three hundred meters from the hill where the Syrian forces had landed. We leapt down from the vehicles, moving in a classic assault-force deployment. Everyone knew what to do.
We raced forward, producing as much firepower as possible, using it as cover while we advanced from boulder to boulder. Assault is the essence of the IDF combat doctrine, and we needed constant fire and movement forward to avoid being pinned down.
Just as we reached the halfway point up the hill, about twenty meters from the top, their fire began hitting us. We shot back, continuing our attack, running and shooting, running and shooting, without stopping for any cover, all of us knowing exactly what to do. Hand grenades began flying through the air.
“Grenade!” I heard someone shout. Three hand grenades tumbled through the air over my head. I threw myself to the ground to take cover. Back on my feet before the dirt finished hitting the ground, I continued my advance, pausing only to reload my Kalashnikov.
Nearly at the top, we began throwing our grenades. More than a dozen flew into the air at the Syrians. The explosions clapped thunderously, putting an end to all the shooting, leaving us in control of the hill. Around us, twenty-five Syrian commandos in brand — new camouflage uniforms lay dead. We grabbed vantage points all around the hill, scanning the area for more Syrian commandos.
My force lay to the east of Yonni’s on the hill. We communicated by radio, yet we were close enough to hear each other’s shouts. We knew we had conquered the hill, but the morning mist and the ragged terrain of the brush — boulders, natural ditches, and old tank trenches below us — were perfect camouflage for the enemy in hiding. Every once in a while, one of our boys shot at something moving suspiciously in front of us.
The mists evaporated in the morning sun. Looking east, I saw a helmeted head rise and then quickly duck out of sight about thirty meters ahead of me. I recognized the depression in the terrain as an old tank trench. “Yonni! Enemy in the tank trench! Cover me! I’m attacking!” I shouted, and at the same time signaled my force to follow my assault. But as we rose to attack, I saw Yonni, followed by about ten fighters, already heading toward the enemy position, firing as they moved.
I quickly ordered my force to change tactics and provide covering fire to keep the Syrians’ heads down while Yonni and his soldiers ran toward the trench. We improved our positions as we continued firing, heading toward the tank trench.
A sharp cry burst out of Gidon Avidov, a young officer from Nahalal, a few meters away from me. He looked down at his belly and collapsed.
“Medic,” I called out. Two soldiers grabbed Gidon and pulled him to cover. Yonni and his forces reached the trench, shooting down into it. I ran the last ten meters, followed by a dozen of my men, adding our gunfire to the trench.
Enemy soldiers, all dead, lay piled together where our fire drove them into a corner of the tank trench. But did we get them all? Yonni and I wondered. We took cover amidst the boulders and brush, surveying the scene ahead. Again we lay on the ground in the silence that followed so much noise, listening for the presence of any survivors trying to move across the terrain. Occasionally, the crack of a rifle fired by a soldier thinking he spotted something moving ahead broke the silence.
Finally, a Syrian wearing officers’ insignia rose from behind a boulder ahead of us, hands over his head. “Don’t shoot!” he shouted in English, and then limped forward, his camouflage fatigues dripping blood from a wound in his leg.
“Don’t move,” someone shouted in Arabic at him.
The Syrian stopped. “You’ve killed them all,” he said sorrowfully as we approached carefully, making sure he was alone.
“How many?” Yonni asked.
“We came with forty-two soldiers,” the Syrian admitted.
Yonni and I had our men count the bodies. When we added the prisoner, their commanding officer, it came to forty-two.
Gidon Avidov later died in the hospital. Baruch Tsur, a reservist from Moshav Hatzeva, died in the field, despite the medic’s efforts. A few other soldiers suffered light wounds.
Well equipped, the dead Syrian commandos carried new AK-47s, East German binoculars, commando knives, and food. The Syrian major told
us we had taken out the most elite commando force in the Syrian Army. Determined, aggressive, and motivated for battle, we could not allow ourselves anything less than our best performance. But we didn’t give them any time to appreciate the professional reception we gave them.
THE HILL BEYOND THE VALLEY OF TEARS
I still wanted a proper assignment from Raful to take the Unit across the lines to go tank-hunting. But Raful had other problems on his mind that Monday, forty-eight hours into the war.
Fifteen hundred Syrian tanks had attacked on Saturday afternoon. By Monday morning, Avigdor “Yanosh” Ben-Gal, commander of more than seventy tanks in the Seventh Armored Brigade when the war started, was down to his last seven. The 188th Armored Brigade was almost gone. Its commander, Itzik Ben-Shoham, and his deputy died trying to hold the Tapline Road running north to south on the Heights.
I tried to be patient waiting back at Nafah for a connection through to Raful. At midday, in the Operations office, Barazani answered a phone, listened for a minute or two, and then said, “He’s right here.” I was certain Raful was on the other end of the line with the tank-hunting assignment when Barazani handed me the phone.
But Avraham Arnan’s clipped voice spoke to me from the other end of the line. “What you doing there?” he began. “I’m coming to …”
I interrupted him with my answer to his first question. “We’re chasing the war, Avraham,” I said. “We fought a Syrian commando unit. Baruch Tsur and Gidon Avidov are dead.” Silence fell on the line. Baruch Tsur had served under Avraham in the early days of Sayeret Matkal, when Arnan still commanded the Unit.
But then his crisp voice repeated his first question. “What are you doing there? Get back to camp. Our soldiers are too valuable to be killed in battle.”
“Avraham, what’s wrong with you?” I asked him. “The country’s at war …”
“Stay where you are,” he interrupted me. “I’m on my way.”
He pulled up in a jeep half an hour later and came into the operations room, calling me outdoors for a private conversation.
“Listen,” he began, without any formalities. “You must return those soldiers to the base. They are special. Very special. You know that. They are for missions between wars, not during them. Let the armored corps take care of it.”
Because he was the Unit’s founder, our relationship with Arnan was special, especially because of his private fight with cancer, to which he refused to surrender until the very end. But I disagreed strongly, and spoke my mind.
“This is the people of Israel’s war,” I told him, “not a private war between the armored corps and some enemy. No soldier has blue blood. The Unit is in this war and we will fight it, the best way we know how.”
He thought for a moment, and then came up with an idea. “If you want to do something, there’s a mission for you. Capture a SAM-6 for intelligence.”
The newest Soviet SAMs made an umbrella protecting most of the enemy’s side of the battlefield, foiling the air force’s attempts to hit the advancing Syrians, or even collect aerial intelligence on their positions. We both knew stealing a SAM-6 was something Sayeret Matkal should have prepared for before the war, not during it. But I did not want to argue missions with him.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll try to do that, too,” I promised. “But you cannot expect me to sit by idly while the country fights for its life,” I added.
“I want to speak with Yonni,” he insisted.
I shrugged. “Do what you want,” I told him. Nonetheless, as he crossed the field where we stood outside the operations bunker in Nafah, I thought about what he had said.
True, our vocation was for the little wars between the big wars, for special operations. We had practiced ways of taking out SAMs of all sorts, using models of every known surface-to-air-missile system.
During the War of Attrition, an IDF operation literally plucked a Soviet radar station out of its position in Egypt, a coup for our intelligence. And we knew how to neutralize a SAM-6 by striking at the radar guidance systems, not tediously trying to destroy the missiles themselves.
We could go in and stealthily take a SAM-6. But a job like that required planning, logistics, intelligence. Just as we needed some intelligence to show us where to find tanks, we needed intelligence to show us where to find the mobile missile batteries, which the Syrians constantly moved, precisely to stymie our efforts to locate them.
Caught in the vicious circle of not having aerial photographs of the SAMs, because the air force could not get over the mobile batteries, I felt frustrated, yet also inspired with an idea. As soon as the war ended, I decided, we would begin preparing dossiers for action in case of the next war, and not just special operations between.the wars. Meanwhile, we had a war to fight.
I did not wait to hear about Arnan’s conversation with Yonni. If Yonni would have told me that he agreed with Arnan, I would have said no, just as I told Avraham.
But the conversation with Arnan made me impatient for work. I decided to go see Raful. I drove out of camp alone in a jeep to Raful’s mobile division headquarters, still run out of an APC in the wild fields of the central Golan, a couple of kilometers away from where we beat the Syrian commandos.
“Yesterday we talked about tank-hunting,” I said when he became free for a moment from the radios and the maps. I said nothing about our success against the Syrian commandos. “We await your orders.”
He stared at me for a long second through tired eyes. “Come,” he finally said, jumping down from the back of the APC. “Let’s go see Yanosh.”
I followed him to a jeep. He drove in silence past destroyed tanks from both armies, heading east. Suddenly, he began mourning aloud lost soldiers of the 188th and the Seventh brigades by naming them. He used words we rarely let cross our lips, like bravery, dedication, and heroism.
“The best two armored brigades in the IDF,” he grieved. “Nobody ever did such good, serious work.” It was the highest praise of all from a son of the Jezreel Valley.
He praised their officers, like Itzik Ben-Shoham, the 188th Brigade commander, who fell trying to hold the Tapline Road, and Yanosh Ben-Gal, who pulled together the remains of the Seventh and 188th, to hold the line against the Syrians. He referred to Itzik in the present tense. But we both knew that Itzik had died on Sunday morning, holding the Tapline Road.
We joined Yanosh on a hilltop overlooking a valley that would become known as the Valley of Tears for all the killing that went on there in the first days of the war. Together, we counted killed Syrian tanks, most facing east as if they had tried to escape back across their lines. We lost count at 120.
Many of the enemy tanks looked unscathed, abandoned before they even fought. And through binoculars, we saw Syrian tank crews walking away from the battle, toward home. For a moment, it reminded me of the Sinai in the Six-Day War. But I shook the comparison out of my head, knowing too well what had happened in the first sixty hours of the war. In 1967, the Arabs ran. They fought in 1973.
Raful broke the silence. “Here’s what I suggest,” he said to Yanosh. “Muki and his guys can hit the tank crews refusing to surrender and can bring back the usable tanks.” Not a bad idea, I thought, though I preferred hunting tanks still on the attack.
But Yanosh had a better idea. “This battle is over,” he said. “I think it’s time to begin preparing a counterattack.” He pointed east into the valley, over the dozens of broken and abandoned tanks. “They’re done here. We should use the Unit to go on the offensive.”
In our army, a subordinate officer can disagree with his commander and not be afraid to say so if he thinks he has a better idea. I agreed with Yanosh. He looked ahead, a critical skill for a leader. We both waited silently for Raful’s answer. I thought about the considerations going through his mind.
Battles still raged on the Golan. The Syrians took the strategic reconnaissance post we won from them in 1967 on the snow-topped peaks of Mount Hermon to the north. We had used that position to look dow
n on vast swaths of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, filling it with the best electronic surveillance system available to us. Now, the Syrians could use it to watch the entire northern half of our country.
Tough tank battles continued in Hushniyeh, south of us on the Golan, where Giora Zorea took the other half of the Unit when we first reached the Heights on Sunday in our APC convoy. And much further south, Egyptian forces continued pouring across the Suez Canal into Sinai.
I agreed with Arnan about one thing: the armored corps bore the brunt of the war, not the infantry. The war began with the largest tank battle in history, fought with incredible courage, in one-against-many tank battles. Looking out over the Valley of Tears I felt a tremendous appreciation for the hundreds of tankers who died halting the enemy attack.
But I also saw a lack of sophistication in the battle. Force against force, like in World War One, the battle lacked all the technological and tactical skills that I believed gave Israel the advantage on the battlefield. We were the best night fighters in the Middle East, but the generals did not use us at night. We surely could have done a lot more: reconnaissance missions to locate targets; hitting enemy supply convoys and Syrian tank parks; sabotaging operations behind enemy lines.
In those first few days, the war’s course was set at the level of individual soldiers, by people like Avigdor Kahalani. All of Yanosh’s battalion commanders received medals for valor after the war. Kahalani won the medal for courage, the highest decoration of all. His battalion decimated, he fought back from his lone tank an endless wave of Syrian tanks trying to pass through the Valley of Tears east of Kuneitra, an abandoned Syrian town we took in the war in 1967.
I had listened to Raful on the radio network talking with Avigdor, whom I knew as a shy, smart fellow who survived massive burns in the Six-Day War as a young armored platoon commander and stayed in the army over the years, rising to command a battalion. After he finally retired from the army, he went into politics.
