They were shelled all the way up the narrow corridor to Jerusalem, which had been the Israelis' only access to the city since 1948. The confusion on the road was enormous. Israeli units were fighting the Jordanians on both sides of the corridor while Israeli supply trucks and infantry wound up the road trying to reach the city.
The bombardment was continuous. Night came, increasing the confusion. As they drew near Jerusalem after dark the shelling intensified. The Jordanians held the heights around the city and were bombarding Jewish Jerusalem with mortars and artillery.
Assaf's bus lost its way in the darkness and they arrived in the city late, after the paratroop battalions had already gone into battle a few hours after midnight. Assaf and the others left the bus and began running through the city in search of their units. The streets were deserted and no lights showed in the houses, but shells were dropping everywhere. They guessed where the fighting was from the intensity of the explosions and the tracers crossing the sky and headed in that direction.
The streets were familiar to Assaf because in fact the main fighting was not far from the old stone house where he had grown up on Ethiopia Street. The paratroop battalions, it turned out, had been sent on a night attack against the most heavily fortified Jordanian positions in the divided city, a complex of bunkers known as Ammunition Hill, which lay just to the north of no-man's-land and Assaf's house. At the same time another paratroop attack had been launched to the east directly across no-man's-land, toward the center of Arab Jerusalem in the valley below Assaf's house.
When the alleys became unfamiliar Assaf realized he was close to no-man's-land, but the fighting was still up ahead of him so he knew the paratroopers must have already opened a breach in the Jordanian lines. He stumbled around a wall and came upon a unit of recoilless guns mounted on jeeps which was supporting the breakthrough. They told him his battalion was in the breach up ahead. Many wounded paratroopers, some from his unit, lay in the street waiting to be evacuated.
Suddenly the area was lit up by tracers and a mortar shell fell between the jeeps, blowing one of them into the air and killing some men and wounding others and further wounding those who lay on the ground. He helped pull the wounded into buildings and helped bandage them and then moved on toward the sound of the heaviest firing, where he knew the breach had to be.
Men were rushing in every direction through the smoke and the flames and the darkness, trying to find their units and bringing up guns and ammunition and carrying back the wounded. He kept asking for his company but no one knew where it was. Shells exploded everywhere as the Jordanians poured out artillery fire from their positions along the ridges to the north and the east, trying to break the night attack on the low ground through no-man's-land.
Men were hit by shrapnel, fell, got up and ran again or lay still. It was a chaos of screams and shouts and explosions and shrapnel, of pulling back the wounded and rushing forward into more flames and explosions and shrapnel. Assaf never stopped running and crouching and running, pushing on toward the main fighting.
He had passed dozens of dead and wounded paratroopers before he saw a Jordanian soldier for the first time, dead, lying beside a machine gun with two dead paratroopers a few yards away.
To open a breach, the assault units had to break through five lines of barbed-wire fences and mines before they reached the first Jordanian bunkers. Beyond that front line of bunkers were more bunkers and connecting trenches and fortified gun emplacements between stone houses and stone walls. The fighting went on in the trenches and alleys and houses, behind the walls and on the roofs and in the cellars. Bunkers and houses were taken two or three times as one paratroop platoon after another fought its way through the breach and the Jordanians moved back through the trenches into the houses, which came to have names of their own for the paratroopers: the house of the burning roof, the house with the pillars, the house of the yard.
More and more wounded paratroopers were being brought back from the area around the breach. By four o'clock in the morning dawn was beginning to break, but black clouds of smoke from the mortar barrages still covered the breakthrough area and kept out the daylight. This was a help to the paratroopers because they couldn't be seen from the Jordanian bunkers, and also a danger because it became more difficult to pinpoint enemy fire from the flashes the guns made in darkness.
Assaf was through the breach now, beyond the area of barbed wire and mines and the open fields of fire, among the squat stone houses of Arab Jerusalem which lay to the north of the Old City. He had fallen in with a platoon from another company in his battalion which was moving south along a narrow street, keeping close to the stone walls on each side of the road and fighting from house to house.
As they passed the gate to the house of the yard, which had already been cleaned out twice, firing burst out at them and two paratroopers near Assaf were hit. The platoon commander pulled one of the men back behind the wall. He seemed to be dead. The other man who had been hit managed to crawl through the gate to a hut just inside. He was spitting blood and appeared to be dying.
Assaf and another paratrooper ran through the gate into the yard, throwing grenades and firing their Uzis to cover the man in the hut. A third paratrooper was firing into the yard from across the road.
There was a Jordanian soldier firing from a trench in the yard, another Jordanian firing from a corner of the house, and a third firing from the second story. A grenade exploded against the wall of the house and the soldier on the second story disappeared. A grenade exploded in the opening of the trench and the Jordanian there disappeared. The firing stopped from the corner of the house and they went back to the hut by the gate, where the wounded paratrooper was already dead.
The platoon moved on up the road in the darkness, shrinking in size as it advanced and men were wounded or left behind clearing out houses. The large YMCA building of Arab Jerusalem appeared on their right.
Paratroop units had already passed it but now a machine gun was firing at them from the upper stories.
Assaf and some other paratroopers raced across to the door and went in. They passed a dying Jordanian soldier lying on the stairs. A burst came from somewhere and hit the paratrooper beside Assaf in the thigh.
They went up the stairs and divided, two paratroopers down the right wing, Assaf down the left. They faced long dark passages with rooms opening onto them from both sides. They had to check each room, open the door, burst in.
Assaf burst into a room with his Uzi at his hip and caught a glimpse of a terrifying enemy facing him, features distorted and blackened, a weapon at his side, ready to kill. He fired a burst and a mirror shattered in front of him. Do I really look like that? he thought.
There was no one on the floor. They crept up the stairs to the next floor and a burst of automatic fire came down the stairwell from the attic, hitting one of the paratroopers in the shoulder and hand. Now there was only Assaf and one other paratrooper. They didn't dare throw a grenade up the stairs in case it rolled back down on them, and they didn't think just the two of them could go up the stairs against a man armed with a machine gun.