“No way I’m going down there,” Hanegbi answered.
“Hanegbi…” I repeated slowly and sternly. More afraid of me, perhaps, than the enemy bullets, he started running toward Arazi. But after a few strides, Hanegbi flung himself to the ground, under heavy fire.
With nothing left to do but go myself, I plucked a smoke grenade from my web-belt and flung it into the wadi. Red smoke streamed from the can. As soon as it began billowing, I dashed down the slope toward Arazi. Firing over my Kalashnikov’s sights toward the enemy, aware of my soldiers behind me doing the same, I raced to save my soldiers.
A freak gust blew the red smoke the wrong way, exposing me fully as I zigzagged across the wadi toward Arazi. Bending for my last strides, I saw the shock in his blanched face. Concentrating on his web-belt’s canvas strap, I reached for it on the run. I planned to grab it and pull him to the safety of a boulder jutting from the far bank of the wadi. My action would resolve the will of the soldiers who had panicked. Indeed, bursting into their view, lead whistling in the air around us all, I became aware of my soldiers around me beginning to move. I reached for Arazi’s belt.
And when I touched it, a blast exploded inside my head.
As if struck by a huge ax, my head felt like it had burst open. The impact jerked me upright, while teeth flew out of my mouth. Blood cascaded from my face, a thick red waterfall pouring over my torso.
Instinctively, I grabbed my throat where the bullet had ripped into my head. But as the blood poured out of me, so did my strength.
Still on my feet, I realized I was dying. The thought echoed inside me, reverberating into a singular serenity that quickly overcame all my other thoughts.
A soldier goes into battle thinking it won’t happen to him. That makes it possible to face death. It should not happen to anyone. “But if it does, at least it won’t be me.” That’s what I thought. Now I knew better.
As the officer in charge, I was the last person there who should have been wounded. But as my strength ebbed away and the sensations of my body diminished, I let go of those thoughts. The shooting around me continued, but nothing mattered anymore. I said farewell to the world, ready to die. Still on my feet, I let my hand finally drop the futile effort to stem the bleeding at my throat.
A hot blast of desert air seared my throat, surprising me as it filled my lungs, shocking me with the realization I would live — if I survived the swarm of bullets around me.
Even if I reached cover, I intuitively knew that I should not lie down, certain that if I did, I would drown in my own blood. I must stay on my feet, I thought. Not dead — at least not yet — and still the officer, responsible for my men; getting help for them became my primary concern.
I walked straight ahead, dimly aware of the shooting behind me, and started up the slope leading out of the wadi, knowing that only a few hundred meters away, Matan and his soldiers waited for us, oblivious to our predicament.
Gunshots snapped in the air like a crazed drumming. “Betser, get down! Muki! Get down!” Soldiers shouted around me. But I marched on, alone, directly up the slope.
A warm, familiar feeling in my boots made me think of home, of the fields of Nahalal, pulling irrigation pipes up a field after a night of watering. Then I realized that blood, not water, filled my boots. It soaked down through my uniform, into my socks, filling my lacedup paratrooper boots.
I do not know how long it took to reach Matan’s position, but as I marched alone, a tall target in the battle zone, I waited for the enemy bullet that would kill me and thought about all that had gone wrong.
Somehow I managed to make it all the way. No enemy bullet struck me down from behind. Ahead of me familiar faces, soldiers I trained and led, stared at me, the horror of my appearance reflected in their eyes. To my right, someone told me to lie down. I waved a hand, to say no. Every movement of my head turned into an excruciating pain reverberating through my entire body. I tried to speak, but only gurgling gasps came out.
Dr. Assa, our unit doctor, led me to a rock to sit down. Beyond his face peering at my wound, I saw Matan sending a rescue team in the direction of my soldiers in the wadi. While Assa studied my face, not knowing where to start, a medic cut open my trouser leg. For the first time I discovered a wound in my thigh. The bullet reached all the way to the bone.
“Do you want some water?” someone asked. I reached for the canteen with a steady hand. But when I tried to drink, the water only spilled down over the remains of my destroyed jaw. I looked down at the wound in my thigh and poured some water on the bleeding gash.
The wait for the medevac helicopter seemed endless. The memory of the serenity I felt in those moments when death tried to seduce me kept coming back, telling me to close my eyes. But I refused to give up living. I thought of home, of Nahalal, of Nurit and Shaul. I thought of my parents, of my family, and of my oldest brother, Udi, somewhere back in Karameh in the battle. An officer in a battalion from the paratroops brigade fighting inside the village, I wondered if he was also hurt in the operation.
A few minutes went by and the casualty who had first slowed down Matan lay on a stretcher beside me, unconscious. A few more minutes went by and Yisrael Arazi, white as the desert limestone, lay alongside him, still breathing. But when Shoham, who fell so soundlessly in the midst of the fight beside Arazi, came in, I saw he was already dead. Then Engel came in on a stretcher. He smiled weakly at me. With my lower jaw gone, my own smile in return must have been a horrifying sight.
When the medevac chopper finally landed nearby, I waited until they loaded all the other wounded before I climbed aboard, finding a seat in the rear. Doctors used hand signals to communicate with each other as the helicopter’s whirring blades lifted us into the air. They cut away Arazi’s uniform and filled his arms with needles for blood transfusions. But nobody knew what to do with my problem. I breathed through the hole in my throat. The blood stopped cascading, but it kept dripping from my face onto my soaked uniform.
I caught the eye of one of the doctors and signaled a question with my hand, shifting my eyes back and forth between him and Arazi. The doctor looked down at my friend and then back up at me. He shook his head. I glared back. He went back to work on Arazi.
We flew low, due west, through the towers of smoke from the destroyed tanks, over the green oasis of ancient Jericho, the oldest town in the world, over the bare ancient hills of Judea, until finally we were above the forested hills around Jerusalem, racing toward Hadassah Hospital.
I looked out the window. Below us, I saw an Arab peasant working in a field, using a cow to pull a wooden plow. He did not even look up at the helicopter flying so low overhead. Unaware of us, dead and dying on board, oblivious of the battle raging only a few miles away.
I stayed conscious all the way into the operating room at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital. Only the anesthesia finally closed my eyes. I opened them eight hours later.
My brother Udi stood at my bedside. Three years older than me, he is as stocky as I am tall. In my eyes, he is a strong, quiet rock of responsibility and integrity.
With my mouth and jaw wired and bandaged, I could not speak. He passed me a pad of paper. I scrawled my first thought. “Arazi?” I wrote, holding it up to show Udi. He shook his head. Arazi was dead.
I lay in the hospital for a month. My jaw was wired closed, so I used a straw for my liquid diet and was barely able to speak. A dozen of us from Karameh lay in our beds in the ward — paratroopers, sappers, tank drivers, engineers, and infantrymen. The VIPs came to visit with their questions prepared in advance, never really listening to what the wounded said, not really knowing what to say to the wounded, as if embarrassed by the whole situation.