South, north, and due west, I saw tanks bogged down in the mud of the Jordan River’s winter overflow. Towers of smoke rose from burning equipment in the fields and the buildings of the village. The clear, clean air of the desert gave way to the awful smell of warflaming fuel and oil, burning machinery, and charred bodies.
The IDF was in trouble.
And so was Matan. My communications sergeant, carrying the radio on his back, tuned into Matan’s frequency to report our position. I heard General Uzi Narkiss, commanding officer of the central command, in charge of the operation, shouting orders at Matan. “Get your forces organized and get out of the area.”
“Impossible,” Matan answered, in a voice much cooler than the general’s. “I have wounded,” he explained.
“Helicopters can take them out,” said Narkiss.
“I’m having problems getting to them,” Matan explained.
The IDF is not supposed to leave casualties behind. We are a small country, and have no unknown soldiers.
I broke in on the channel. “Matan,” I asked, “where are you?”
He gave me his position. “I’m coming to help you,” I announced, not waiting for a response. He probably would have said he did not need help, but I distinctly heard him say “problems.” I started my fighters on the mile-and-a-half run to Matan’s position north of us, handing over our prisoners to another infantry force we encountered in the field.
As soon as we reached Matan, I understood the problem. A soldier lay wounded about a hundred feet away, under intense fire from snipers. It would not be easy to get him out of there alive. But Matan’s problems did not stop there. “Another squad is in trouble,” he told me. “Their officer was wounded, so we evacuated him. Alexander took over.”
“Alexander’s a good sergeant,” I pointed out. “He can handle things.”
“I know,” Matan admitted. “But we’re getting strange reports from them. They say they are lost, and want help getting out.”
I knew Alexander, a good field soldier. Getting lost did not sound like him. The back-packed radios of the time were the best available to the IDF, but not perfect. Frustrating minutes passed until, finally, I got a response to my own calls.
“We’re not pinned down,” the voice on the radio said. “But maneuvering is difficult.”
From what he described, I placed him on the map two wadis away to the north. I told them to stay put and asked Yisrael Arazi, a good friend and my best platoon commander, to pick a dozen fighters for the rescue force. In minutes, we reached the first wadi, where we encountered a little resistance that we quickly dispatched.
Entering the second wadi, I saw Nissim, the air force lieutenant who came along as a tagalong, and immediately understood what happened.
With the platoon’s officer wounded, Alexander had taken command. But Nissim pulled rank on the sergeant and looked for what he thought would be a shortcut to the safety of the concentration of IDF forces closer to Karameh.
He tried cutting across the desert on a straight line up and down the wadis. He didn’t know it’s safer to stick to the high ground rather than down in the riverbeds, where caves, boulders, and brush make easy ambush cover and the slippery banks of crumbly sand and stone are difficult to scale on the run.
Alexander knew how to lead the squad along the ridges, where, if they encountered enemy fire, it would be easier to identify its source — and take it out. The lieutenant, ignorant of basic tactics and believing that rank, not knowledge, gave him authority, endangered my men. Nissim thought it would be a picnic. When it turned into a real firefight, he wanted out. There is nothing more dangerous in combat than a fool.
Always a little hot — blooded, Arazi hissed, “Let’s kill him now,” making sure Nissim heard. Alexander smiled weakly behind the tagalong’s back. I swallowed back my own anger, hushing my angry platoon commander with a wave of my hand.
The air force lieutenant tried stammering an explanation. I cut him off with a glare. “We’ll straighten this out when we get back to the base,” I vowed, and ordered the soldiers into formation for the hike back.
I took the center, keeping an eye on our flanks, while the platoon fanned out with about five meters between each soldier. We worked our way over the first ridge, alert for any enemy movement, sweating under the midday sun in the desert.
Heading down into the wadi from the ridge, I left behind a threeman squad to provide cover from the cliff top as we slipped and slid down into the riverbed. We slalom-dashed across the dusty wadi floor and climbed the crumbly limestone wall up to the next ridge. Reaching the plateau, I called over the squad left behind. Now we gave them cover in case of enemy fire erupting in our footsteps. They made it across without any shooting, and we started down the second wadi. With me in the center, Arazi took the point.
Just as we reached the most dangerous part of the move down into the wadi, exposed on the slope, fierce, effective fire burst at us from up the wadi’s path. I hit the ground, about halfway down the slope, aware of my men doing the same around me.
“I’m hit,” Arazi shouted, about thirty yards below me in the wadi bed. He collapsed beside a rock jutting from the wadi floor, clutching at his stomach. Bullets raced across the riverbed, kicking up the dust in tiny cyclones around him-and us.
Above, the three fighters on the top of the ridge returned the enemy fire coming at us in bursts and singles, a constant attack from more than one source. Well hidden, the enemy caught us with nowhere to hide. We were pinned to the ground by hot lead screaming overhead and smacking into the ground around us.
I scanned the scene. We could make it across the wadi to an outcrop of boulders a couple of dozen yards ahead, on the other side of the wadi. But it would mean abandoning Arazi. I could not do that. Seriously wounded and fully exposed to the enemy’s withering fire, he was my first priority.
“Get him to cover,” I snapped at the squad to my left. They had practiced for this situation hundreds of times. One soldier lofted a smoke grenade. It toppled through the air, exploding into a billowing cloud. Three ran into the smoke screen, racing to rescue their stricken officer, knowing the thick smoke only hid them, but did not protect them from the bullets.
They knew the drilclass="underline" to get Arazi to cover before anything else. But when the smoke cleared, I saw my soldiers frozen by panic. They forgot everything. One soldier knelt by Arazi’s side, a second fumbled with a packet of bandages, and a third stood, fully exposed to the incessant enemy fire.
Bullets stormed across the wadi at us all. I shot back with my AK-47, my Klatch, as we nicknamed the Kalashnikovs captured from the Egyptian Army in Sinai the year before.
Prone, at an odd angle created by the slope of the wadi’s bank, I noticed a tiny cloud of dust rise from the ground where a bullet struck just beside me. I ignored it, concentrating on Arazi and the three paralyzed soldiers.
“Get him to cover!” I shouted.
I heard a soft moan beside me. I looked to my right. “Betser, I’m hit,” said Engel, a redheaded kibbutznik lying a few meters away. I looked him up and down. Blood darkened his green fatigues above the knee.
“It’s your leg,” I told him, offering a reassuring smile. “Not your shooting hand.” He winced back a smile at me. “Keep firing,” I said. He did.
For the third time I shouted for the soldiers around Arazi to get him across the wadi to safety. But just then, one of the three fell soundlessly to the ground beside his wounded commander.
Only a few minutes had passed since the shooting began and we had already lost two good fighters, not counting wounded like Engel, still shooting beside me. If we did not get out of there, we would all die.
“Hanegbi,” I called to a soldier about halfway between Arazi and me. “Get down there and tell them to move him to cover.”