Some earn respect from their soldiers by drilling so hard that the soldiers know the job as well as the officer. Others create respect through fear of their authority, whether sending soldiers out on a twenty-mile march on a freezing winter night, just because a soldier was late for an assembly, or adding another ten miles to a march because a soldier complained.
The best officers are naturals-combining distance and friendship, an aloofness with intimacy, to inspire the soldiers. I wanted to be that kind of officer like my first company commander, Giora Eitan. The nephew of Rafael “Raful” Eitan-our brigade commander, who rose to become chief of staff and go on to politics-Giora died on the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War.
Most of the other soldiers in the platoon came from the kibbutz and moshav farms of Israel, where the values of settling the land are inseparable from the values of defending it. The city boys often knew more about fighting, and in a way seemed tougher than us at first. But many of them had a hard time with the hard work, tending to complain, especially about the repetition of the drilling.
Maybe one of the many reasons farmers make such good soldiers is that we learn to be patient, whether it is waiting for the seasons or understanding that the weather is beyond control. Just as we knew that we sowed in one season in order to harvest in another, we understood that what we learned in basic training would serve us well in the reality of combat. But the grand finale of the first three months of basic training, a full-scale exercise in the Negev, shook my belief in that simple proposition.
We trucked south, then hiked into the desert, reaching our position just before dawn. The company captain gave us a rousing speech. The platoon commanders briefed us on our assignment.
I looked forward to seeing our platoons form into companies and the companies combine into battalions until the entire force of the paratroops brigade combined with other brigades into an army on the move. Now, I looked up at the row of old oil barrels at the top of a cliff. Enemy positions cannot look like this, I decided. With no minefields to cross, no barbed wire to cut, no trenches to traverse, and nobody shooting back, our company’s assignment to take the hill after a pair of air force jets hit it with napalm seemed silly. The whole thing looked fake to me. A lot of hurried night movement, then waiting for hours for nothing, did not make it any better.
It all combined with a problem that began gnawing at me throughout basic training. As far as I could tell, the army had a lot more problems than fake enemies in exercises. Our equipment was terrible. My web-belt became an obsession. It was too tight, too small, inefficient. I kept looking for ways to improve the canvas straps that I needed to carry my equipment.
On my first leave home, a month after the start of basic training, I spent hours in the tailor’s shop at Nahalal, finding new ways to sew the canvas belts to fit my long torso. I told the Nahalal tailor my problem, but instead of leaving the web-belt with him, I stayed to watch and learn. From then on, I did my own sewing, learning to baste pouches together so they would not flap against my body when I ran, wiring hooks into the canvas for more clips to hang equipment from.
The web-belts were not the only equipment problem. The small, light Uzis, with their short range and low velocity, made a good tool for house-to-house combat. But at longer distances they lost their accuracy and punch. All during the exercises, aware of the generals watching from the top of a hill in the distance, I wondered if they knew about these problems and others, like the faulty equipment, like stretchers that fell apart.
Finally, at the end of the exercise, company commanders and then regimental commanders and finally the brigade commander gave speeches summing it all up, saying how it worked perfectly. It sounded like a lot of crap to me.
But I had hopes for the second stage of our training. The officers announced that new equipment waited for us when we started the second stage of the course — parachuting. I decided to keep the faith, and at the end of the exercise I felt optimistic setting off on the unit’s traditional twenty-four-hour hundred-kilometer (sixty-mile) march through the hills and canyons of the Negev to a small air field at Sde Boker, where a plane waited to take us back to Tel Nof-and a week’s leave.
I spent the week with my friends and family at home, helping my father on the farm in the mornings and during the rest of the day hanging out with friends on home leave that week. Nurit was also in the army, and I missed her that weekend. Meanwhile, I did exactly what my brother Udi did with his friends three years before when they came home from the army — we talked about our experiences. And my younger brother Eyal spied on me and my friends, just the way I had spied on Udi.
When I returned to Tel Nof at the end of the leave, disappointment struck. The officers had not exactly lied. They issued new equipment, from uniforms to Uzis — but the same old models we already knew. On my next visit home, I realized I needed to start all over again in the sewing shop, getting my new web-belt to fit properly.
THE NIGHT OF THE WELLS
After the airplane takes off, after the release rings are clipped, after standing up, after shuffling down the cabin to the open door with the wind blasting past, after the thump of heartbeat as you fall into the turbulence, after the first few seconds before the chute opens comes the silence.
More than anything else, it is that sweet quiet above the earth that I loved in parachuting. I’m not a great lover of flying. My feet belong on the ground. But I always looked forward to the quiet that comes from being inside the wind itself.
After learning to parachute, we went to the squad commanders’ course, where sergeants are picked and future officers spotted. Thirty percent of us had already fallen out, dropped into the regular paratroops or transferred to even easier infantry units. Beginning to feel like real soldiers, we knew how to work in concerted action, aware of our skills and the force we wielded as an organized combat unit.
One day they assigned us to put on a demonstration for Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. We trucked to Palmachim, to check out the landing zone, and a huge sand dune selected as an enemy position, before climbing aboard the planes for the show.
As a boy I read newspaper accounts about such demonstrations. Usually the papers said something like “the paratroopers showed extraordinary combat ability.” I imagined all sorts of exciting things — jumps, racing jeeps, soldiers leaping into the air. Now I looked forward to being in the real thing.
We practiced a few times, but then a senior officer decided that it took too long. So the company commanders planned a little bluff. Instead of jumping with all our equipment, we left the bazookas, mortars, and heavy machine guns on the ground, hidden from the audience full of dignitaries. We jumped with light equipment — mostly Uzis — and picked up the heavy stuff when we hit the ground.
Sure enough, the next day the papers reported that “the paratroopers demonstrated top-notch ability” for the ministers. It became a joke for us. But it also worried me that the army cheated. My feelings about the army reached an all-time low.
But then they picked me as a bazooka operator for my first mission across enemy lines, a first taste of real action. Palestinian fedayeen from Kalkiliya, just over the border of the West Bank, when it was still Jordan, disrupted life almost daily in the Kfar Saba area, a few miles northeast of Tel Aviv.