No joy broke out in the fourth plane as we lifted off from Entebbe. We all knew that Yonni was seriously wounded.
Ehud met us in Nairobi. He had flown to Kenya on Friday to help organize permission to land for the flying hospital in the Boeing and refueling for the planes on the way back from Uganda. The fighters stayed on board, but we opened the rear ramp for fresh air. I went down the ramp to greet Ehud.
He was probably aching to hear from me what had happened back in Entebbe. But only one thing interested me just then. “How’s Yonni?” I asked as we shook hands and then hugged.
“Wounded,” Ehud said, “but he’s going to be okay.”
“Ehud,” I pressed. “I know it was serious. I saw him. Tell me the truth.”
“The doctors are working on him right now.”
“Please do me a favor, go see what’s going on,” I asked Ehud. “Find out about Yonni.”
He grimaced a nod and left me waiting for him on the tarmac beside the plane.
While I waited for him, I called Giora, who had led the break-in of the VIP room, to tell me how his team took down the two terrorists they found.
“We broke in,” Giora told me, “and found two people in civilian clothes. We couldn’t tell if they were terrorists or hostages. ‘Who are you?’ I asked them. But they said nothing. I thought maybe they couldn’t understand me. But before I could try asking again, one of them pulled out a grenade. I gave a shout and we took cover, but added our bullets to the explosion. The terrorists died from the blast and our bullets.”
I smiled at him. But my joy was short-lived. Ehud had come back — and his face said it all. Yonni was dead.
I was left with the task of telling the fighters inside the plane.
I climbed the rear ramp of the Hercules back into the plane, where the Mercedes and Land Rovers were lashed to the floor, the fighters gathered close to hear the news.
“Yonni’s dead,” I began, pausing to let the news sink in. “We did our duty. We succeeded. Successfully. This is the painful price we sometimes have to pay in this kind of war. But we continue.” I paused for a second, then added, “Now we go home.”
Throughout the airplane, most of the fighters slept for the ride home. I couldn’t sleep. I sat up front in the cockpit. The natural loneliness of the commander had never sat so heavily on my shoulders. Usually after such an operation, Yonni and I sat together, talking about what had just happened and what we planned next.
Now, alone, I tried to understand what Yonni had been thinking when he decided to take out the Ugandan. He had obviously believed that the Ugandan soldier was threatening us. He didn’t know what I knew — that presenting arms and calling out “Advance” was routine drill for a Ugandan soldier.
We could have driven right past any sentry. And even if the sentry became suspicious after we passed him, in those few seconds of his confusion, we would have reached the terminal building and begun our real work. Indeed, the entire plan was based on the idea that we were ready to endanger ourselves by driving past “enemy” soldiers on our way to the canopied entrances to the terminal in order to go ahead with our mission.
Obviously, I realized, Yonni had believed that with his and Giora’s silenced guns, they could quietly eliminate the threat from the lone Ugandan soldier. But he could not have foreseen that the Ugandan would be only wounded and, getting back on his feet, would then be cut down by one of our own soldiers using an unsilenced weapon.
I found comfort in the fact that despite everything — the wounded Ugandan, the bunched-up run to the building from fifty meters away, the blocked entrance to where I had expected to break in — the Unit knew how to react fast enough to nonetheless surprise the terrorists before they could harm the hostages.
Deep in my thoughts, I was startled when the pilot turned to the Voice of Israel’s radio frequency and we heard a pre-dawn news report in which Israeli government “sources” confirmed international media reports saying Israeli troops had destroyed the Ugandan Air Force. Still facing another three hours of flight within reach of enemy aircraft from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our mission was not yet over. Someone in Jerusalem couldn’t wait to make the announcement and was endangering our lives by doing so.
We flew directly to the Tel Nof base, far from the public eye. Rabin and Peres waited for us at the plane’s door, shaking our hands as we came off. Then they gave short speeches thanking us for our accomplishment. Rabin spoke to us like an army commander. Peres spoke of our contribution to the fight against international terror.
Amiram Levine came up to me right after the speeches, and while we waited for the choppers to take us back to base, he told me they had appointed him that morning to replace Yonni.
A few hours later, back at the base, Amiram ran the debriefing, which we field in the mess hall. Usually, only those who took part in an operation attend. But this time Amiram broke precedent. He invited all the members of Sayeret Matkal on the base.
First the officers, then the crew commanders, and finally each individual fighter reported on what he did and what he saw, especially in those few seconds between the time the Ugandan soldiers spotted us and the plan went wrong because of the silenced .22s and the long blast of Kalashnikov fire that followed. The soldier from the Land Rover who fired his Klatch explained that when he saw the Ugandan get back up on his feet and aim at us, he feared for our safety. The driver of the Land Rover said he also was worried and decided to try to run over the Ugandan.
We did not celebrate a victory that night. For the Unit, even one casualty is proof that our performance did not match our plan. To maintain its abilities, a unit like Sayeret Matkal must always learn from its mistakes, facing honestly and truthfully what went wrong.
Into the night we talked about what had happened, each of us, from our own point of view, trying to understand what went wrong on the night of our most famous initiative. This was mine.
EPILOGUE
One successful counterblow against terror does not put an end to the war. In March 1978, after terrorists hijacked an Israeli bus north of Tel Aviv and twenty-seven vacationers died, the IDF swept into Lebanon in what became known as the Litani Operation, pushing the terrorists north out of their bases in southern Lebanon.
But by 1981 they were back, and then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared Yasser Arafat to be Adolf Hitler’s successor. With Arik Sharon his defense minister and Raful the chief of staff, no holds were barred to try defeating the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose aspirations for a state conflicted with the right-wing government’s belief in the Greater Land of Israel.
For the third time in nearly twenty years in the army, I was assigned to get PLO chairman Arafat. This time, I scattered dozens of special-forces snipers into besieged Beirut, looking for him and other key PLO personnel. But by the time we found him in our scopes, the United States had brokered a deal giving Arafat safe passage out of the city. Nonetheless, my riflemen came back with the Polaroids proving they had indeed had him in their gun sights.
Operation Peace for Galilee was supposed to last a few weeks. By its third year, it was my son Shaul’s turn to go to the army. Now, for the first time, I could understand my parents’ silence about their fears for my safety. I was faced with an even worse dilemma. In my last job in the IDF, I would be involved in the planning of operations my son might be asked to execute. I did not want to spend long hours waiting behind a desk for him to come back from a mission instead of being there by his side to protect his flanks. And at forty, I had to admit to myself that no matter how hard I tried, the twenty-year-olds would always be in better physical shape for the job.