Finally, I stepped into the familiar light, knowing that I must overcome the fear, and how I would do it. The next night, even before my father assigned the task, I volunteered. He smiled slightly at my request, as if he knew why I wanted it, and he nodded his approval.
My second trip began as the first, but when I reached the dark edge I took a breath and walked forward slowly and deliberately, forcing myself to listen and learn from the night sounds instead of imagining what they might be.
Controlling my pace and my thoughts, I marched past the rows of citrus trees and into the field until finally the house lights were as distant as the stars and I was at the end of the field, the iron wheel cold and moist under my hands.
Just as I planned, I turned it slowly until the metal screw of the faucet stopped whining and it would close no further. A jackal yelped in the dark.
I did not run. I listened. The muttering of the sprinklers died away. A soft breeze came down the valley, carrying the sound of a truck’s engine. Closer, a jackal barked. I clenched the damp soil between my toes, and listened for more.
Finally, when it seemed that every sound, shadow, and movement in the valley became as much a part of me as my callused hands and feet, I began walking back to the distant lights of Nahalal, knowing that I had learned to conquer my fear.
The lesson has stayed with me my entire life. But in 1968, as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces, deputy commander of the paratroops brigade’s elite reconnaissance unit, I would discover that it was a lesson to be learned over and over again.
SMOKE OVER KARAMEH
Like a driver getting on a crowded highway, every soldier goes into battle believing that it won’t happen to him. Except sometimes it does — especially when the plan goes wrong. In 1968, the plan went wrong. The Israel Defense Forces, which had triumphed less than a year before, failed miserably in a battle that could have changed history. And I learned of my own mortality.
My life seemed perfect in early March 1968.1 was married to my childhood sweetheart, father to a newborn son; my unit was the most famous of all the special reconnaissance forces the IDF calls a sayeret. The newspapers called us the “the tip of the spear.”
The Arab world vowed to throw us into the sea in 1967. They failed. Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization picked up where the defeated Arab armies had left off. The PLO tried to frighten our people out of Israel. Car bombs killed shoppers in downtown Jerusalem; land mines along lonely roads in the southern desert of the Negev killed tourists on their way to Eilat. By early 1968, the terror incidents had escalated into nearly daily occurrences.
We could not turn the other cheek. The IDF began pressing the government to authorize an operation to put an end to the terrorism by striking at the PLO’s bases in the Jordan Rift Valley, across the Jordan River in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.
An arid plain rippled with dry riverbeds called wadis, which carry flash floods in winter when rains fall on the yellow Judean Mountains to the west and the red Edom Mountains in the east; the Rift is all that remains of the great sea that once covered the Afro-Syrian fault dividing Africa and Asia. In the northern half of the Rift, the Jordan River divides the valley with a narrow stream of water fed from the Sea of Galilee. The river flows between a winding ribbon of green banks through the sun-stroked land until it reaches the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. South from there is the Arava’s flatland, all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba at the tip of the Negev.
Before the generals offered a plan to the government, the army needed intelligence from the other side of the border. In our capacity as a reconnaissance unit, the job fell to the paratroops sayeret. I got the job and was sent to lead an overnight foray into Jordan across the Arava, south of the Dead Sea.
One evening just after dusk in mid-March, an armored corps officer and an officer from the airborne sappers (explosives experts), followed me across the cold, shin-deep waters of Nahal Arava after a winter rain on the eastern plateau above the Rift.
The three of us spent the night scouting around two tiny Jordanian villages, Fifi and Dahal, counting a handful of Jordanian military vehicles parked by two little police stations. Back in Israel by dawn, the armored corps officer reported confidently to headquarters that he foresaw no problems for the heavy equipment to get through the mud we had encountered.
I disagreed. The flash floods of winter sweeping across the flatland left behind a deceptively shallow mud. I reported my views to the intelligence officers who took our reports. But in the senior command’s eyes, the armored corps officer was the expert, not me. Now, they wanted a second reconnaissance mission, to a place far more dangerous than tiny Fifi and Dahal — a town called Karameh.
A Jordanian farming village north of the Dead Sea just over the Jordan River from Jericho, Karameh became the PLO’s main base in Jordan after the Six-Day War. They turned the sleepy village into the center of international terrorism against Israel and the West. Preaching a rhetorical hodgepodge of pan-Arab liberation, Palestinian self-determination, Marxist revolution, and jihad—Islamic holy war against infidels — the armed irregulars in Karameh plotted for airline hijackings, urban bombings, and assassinations, often with Soviettrained instructors.
In Fifi and Dahal we counted a handful of Jordanian military vehicles and even fewer armed Palestinians. But at Karameh, said intelligence, more than two thousand armed Palestinians, as well as a few dozen Soviet-backed terrorists from Western Europe and Japan, trained for terror missions. Planning a recon for such a target takes time. The PLO didn’t give us any. A few days after the Fifi-Dahal mission, a land mine blew up a busload of high school children on a Negev road. Several died and dozens were wounded in the worst incident of its kind since 1967.
One of the advantages in our tiny country is that a soldier is never far from home — or the front. I heard the news of the bombing on the radio during a weekend at home in Nahalal with my wife, Nurit, and our baby son, Shaul. Like me, Nurit was a child of Nahalal, and she was a niece of Moshe Dayan’s. We lived in a little three-room house shaded by two tall date palms planted by Dayan’s father, who, with my grandparents and five other couples, founded the Jezreel Valley settlement in 1922. When we married in February 1967, she inherited Dayan’s childhood home, a few doors down the road from my grandparents’ house, where I was born.
Hearing the news about the land mine in the Negev, I did not need a radio report to know the government would want the army to react immediately. Like every soldier on active duty in the IDF, even on leave at home I kept my weapon — an AK-47 Kalashnikov — always within reach. I geared up and headed out the front door to my army-issued car, a frog-eyed Citroën Deux Cheveaux.
Back at Tel Nof headquarters in central Israel, sayeret commander Matan Vilnai took me along to the brigade planning session. The Jerusalem-born son of Israel’s most famous guide to the Holy Land, Matan went to a military high school, choosing an army career early in his life. (He eventually became deputy chief of staff at the end of 1994.)
As the most junior officer in the session, I kept quiet — but listened and watched carefully — while the colonels and generals plotted the brigade’s maneuvers around Karameh. IDF chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev wanted a plan to punish the PLO in time for the next morning’s government session. He got it.
It was called Operation Inferno, and for the first time since the Six-Day War, the full strength of the IDF would head east over the Jordan River into the Hashemite kingdom.