REFLECTIONS ON THE YOM KIPPUR WAR,
1973,
FORTY YEARS LATER, YOM KIPPUR 2013
By: Eliyho Matz
“Ithaka
gave you the beautiful voyage;
Without
her you would never have started your journey.
She has nothing else to give you.”
From
“Ithaka” by CP Kavafy
The Yom Kippur War
started on October 6, 1973, and its repercussions continue until today, Yom
Kippur 2013. For me personally,
the war started in 1965 when I ran away as fast as I could from my high school
in Rishon LeZion. I fled to a kibbutz
in the Upper Galilee called Ayelet HaShachar to recover from a very bad high
school experience. Rishon LeZion
was an old Israeli village, today a large city, which did not particularly
shine its light on me. The studies
at my high school, the Gymnasia, were complicated for me; my ability to focus
was limited, the teachers were obnoxious, and I had very few good friends. In
short, as we used to explain it many years ago, the dancer always complained
that the floor he danced on was uneven, and therefore he could not dance
skillfully. I can say that I was bored
and lazy in my studies, I can say that it was difficult for me, but it was very
clear to me just then, and I was only sixteen, that the teachers were
incompetent and the principal and his vice-principal were out of touch and
ineffective, and so I picked myself up and ran away to the Upper Galilee. How I arrived at this decision to go to
the kibbutz I cannot explain exactly.
It is possible that in my subconscious the Israeli pioneering propaganda
and the achievements of the kibbutz movement, and possibly other reasons that I
do not know, swept me up and brought me to the office of the kibbutz movement in
Tel Aviv, and there one of its members picked me up and drove me to
Ayelet HaShachar.
Upon my arrival at
Ayelet HaSchachar, I started working.
My immediate supervisor, a lazy kibbutznik, a short and tough individual
by the name of Dan Ziv (nicknamed Zift),
explained and showed me how to crawl beneath chicken coops filled with manure,
and how to remove that manure and load it into a wagon, which took it to a
compost pile. The chicken coops
were used to raise chickens for a few months, after which they were sold and
taken to slaughter. The old manure
had to be removed before each new crop of new chicks arrived. I adapted quickly to the work, but a
serious manure-remover I was not.
Dan Ziv left me at the coops with another Israeli kid and a toothless
Australian tourist/worker, whom the kibbutz promised to provide with a new set
of false teeth upon completion of his work. I learned from him a very unique dialect of toothless
Australian English! We worked
together in the coops for about three or four months, but the smell of the
manure is still with me today.
While working with the manure and making sure to shower each day after
work, I began to get to know the kibbutz members. I started to hear opinions and all sorts of gossip about the
place and its people. I spent most
of my free time reading history and literature books, so in one way or another I
began to prepare myself on my own for the high school baccalaureate exam in
those subjects. Later on, I had an
opportunity to work in other areas of the kibbutz, including the dining hall,
apple orchards and bee hives, and I even became a guard for a short time. Eli Ziv, Dan’s brother and a graduate
of Sayeret Matkal, one of Israel’s
most courageous military units, taught me how to drive a jeep and explained to
me the basic uses of the submachine gun, the Uzzi. In the course of my stay, I met many of the kibbutz
members. I tried to make friends
with them, but in as close a society as the kibbutz was, doing so was difficult
to achieve. It is true that here
and there I made some friends, but I could not really develop a deep
relationship with anybody, including with the kibbutz women. And if there was one woman whom I
liked, she did not give a damn about me – her name was Rina. The upside was that my lack of social
progress gave me a greater opportunity to read, study, and ride a bicycle outside
the area of the kibbutz. I had an
opportunity to wander in Tel Hazor, which is an ancient archeological site
adjacent to the kibbutz. I had an
opportunity to ponder various issues of life, as well as to study history and
read literature. The sad thing
about reading these subjects on my own was that I really did not understand
much about them. My integration
into the kibbutz was difficult; the kibbutzniks were selfish, and the moment
eventually came when I turned eighteen and had to join the Israeli
military. And since I wanted to be
a big gibor, or hero, I decided to
join the Tzanchanim, the Israeli
paratrooper brigade. Apropos, Dan
Ziv must be today seventy-five or eighty; Colonel Dan Ziv was already a
decorated hero of the Paratroopers in the battle of Mitle Pass in 1956, and in
the 1973 Yom Kippur War he conducted an atrocious battle, as well as an idiotic
one, in the Sarafaum on the west side of the Suez Canal. With Dan Ziv, I did not have that much
opportunity to express ideas; he did not say much, and besides he was not
particularly well educated.
Whenever I met him, he used to say that we have to be strong – this was
a very interesting idea.
Company B, Platoon
D, Regiment 202, February 1967, and here I was in the Paratroopers. The company commander was Nachik Alon,
the son of a famous Israeli historian.
Ever since my youth, I would say my early youth, I wanted to understand
and comprehend history, philosophy, and literature. I thought that by joining the Tzanchanim I would have the opportunity to do so. Of course, I did not have any
historical or philosophical tools to understand those issues. Suddenly, from a normal human being, I
was transformed into a paratrooper.
The process was not easy.
My platoon commander was Eli Strikovski, tough and rough, not well
educated, and not too smart. He
tried to transform me, Eliyho, into a courageous soldier, but apparently failed
to do so. He apparently did not
see in me what he expected from a “real” soldier. I participated in the platoon’s military activities, I did
what the other soldiers did, but a serious soldier I was not; nor could I be
one even if I really wanted. I
could never take “soldiering” as a serious business. And it did not matter who taught that business. Strikovski must have sensed this, and
one day when I asked him for a special leave for my cousin’s bar mitzvah, he
refused, and he also, apropos, mentioned that he could not grant leave to a
lousy soldier that he considered me to be. My attempt to request this special pass from my company
commander also failed. It took me
awhile to respond to my platoon commander, but approximately a year later the
opportunity presented itself (to be described below). Later that year Strikovski was severely wounded in an
ambush, but he continued his military service. During the Yom Kippur War, by which time he had changed his
name to Sorek, he won a medal for heroism at the Suez Canal, which was the same
region where I was located during that time.
To anyone familiar
with modern Israeli history, it is well known that in June 1967, Israel went to
war against its neighbors because they all threatened her existence. This war was named the Six Day
War. The Israeli Paratroopers were
in full intensive exercises before the war; I know this because my unit was
also involved in this training. Mentally,
it was a very difficult time because we were surrounded by many enemies. My unit of new paratroopers had just
been recruited in February 1967, so we did not have that much time to go
through all the paratrooper exercises.
We did a quick and short parachuting exercise. Our parachute instructor was Amiram Ziet, a cool person and
a very social one, at least one light in the darkness. The war process was coming to a
crescendo, and Eliyho got on Strikovski’s nerves, and for one reason or another
he inflicted a punishment on a small group of us: “You are not going to war,
you are staying on the base, I do not take lousy soldiers to war.” Immediately I became depressed even
though I was not exactly the hero that the “General” (actually “Lieutenant”) Strikovski
was. For in any case, a soldier is
tested by his ability to shoot, which I could do as well as anybody else; I
also learned how to run, jump and parachute along with the others. It is true that I had never
participated in any battles, but don’t soldiers need to participate in order to
be tested? But Strikovski decided
that my small group was not going anywhere, that we were going to stay on the
base. The evening before the war
broke out, we were in a gloomy mood, wandering aimlessly and desperately. Go and tell the wide world that we were
left behind at the base because the lieutenant considered us to be lousy
soldiers – not a pleasant thought.
But then, in the midst of our gloominess, no sooner had our unit left, a
young officer whom we had never met arrived, gathered us politely around him,
and explained to us that the reason we had been left on base was because we
were needed to participate in a secret mission, for which we had to leave immediately,
with all our equipment. We were
quickly driven to some location in the northern Negev (Israel’s southern
region). To our surprise, there
were some helicopters waiting on the spot, already engaged in an
exercise/mission, in which a special force was prepared to enter swiftly into
Egyptian territory to do something that was not clear to us. Our group was supposed to carry out the
simple task of blocking the road that led to the location of the attack. A very interesting mission, one
requiring much courage, and in retrospect one from which probably none of us
would have returned. Suddenly, I
was back to being a paratrooper.
We stayed at that place that evening, and in the middle of the night the
commander of the mission announced that because of the swift advance of the
Israeli forces into the Sinai, there was no more need for our mission. We immediately were taken away by
military trucks to an air force base, and in the early hours of midday we were
regrouped with a paratrooper force near the tarmac for a different mission, to
jump into battle at Sharm el Sheik at the southern tip of the Sinai
Desert. So our small group became
part of a larger force led by Sergeant Shlomo Stein, a moshavnik from Kfar
Achim. We, those lousy soldiers
whom Strikovski left at the training camp, were suddenly joining forces to
parachute into battle, and as a result, if we were to survive this battle, we
would receive “Red Wings” to indicate our successful jump into enemy territory
in wartime. We walked to the air planes,
which were a type not familiar to us, a Boeing military plane used during WWII
for cargo and parachuting. We were
around 250-people strong. The
group consisted of representatives from different paratrooper groups. Some were older, and we were the
youngest ones. I don’t remember
recognizing anyone outside our small group. It was a very tense flight, and it took awhile. We were protected by some air force
planes in the air, and finally we arrived at Sharm el Sheik. As the moment came close to jump from
the airplanes, the commander suddenly announced that we were not going to do
so. The reason was not yet
clear. But as soon as we landed on
the dusty tarmac of Sharm el Sheik, what had happened did become clear. A small naval force of Israeli commandos
had arrived an hour before we did and found that the entire Egyptian brigade
had fled and disappeared. All that
was left were rows and rows of canned beans and tomato sauce! The naval commando force we met there
included among its group a fellow from Kibbutz Ayalet HaShachar named Oded
Landsman, and another kibbutznik from Kibbutz Ma’agan by the name of Ami
Ayalon. Ayalon later became the
Chief of Israeli Naval Operations as well as the Chief of Israeli Interior
Security, and a member of the Israeli Knesset. He also won a medal for bravery in a military operation in
which he was severely wounded. I
had met Ami two years earlier while I was in National Service at his
kibbutz. He suggested to me not to
swim or dive here in the Red Sea because the sea was filled with too many
sharks. I accepted his
advice. Since we had nothing to do
at the place, we were subsequently sent back to Strikovski and our base in the
north.
During the Six Day
War, our military unit 202 fought mostly in the Gaza region. We suffered casualties, with some dead
and a larger number wounded; I do not have the actual numbers. Immediately after the unit returned to
base from Gaza, we were redeployed to Gaza City. There, some of our unit became entangled in activities and
atrocities that until today it is hard to figure out. Eventually, I did not see the unit anymore. Fortunately for me, I guess Strikovski
had enough of me. Imagine how it
would have looked in the history of the Israeli Paratroopers: a small group of
Strikovski’s rejects parachuting into Sharm el Sheik, and Strikovski missing
that military action altogether.
Within a few days, a young officer arrived with a pick-up truck, spoke
to our company commander Nachik Alon, and, without saying much or even
introducing himself, he instructed me to get into the back of the truck. I was taken to the newly conquered West
Bank. The officer’s name was Amnon
Lipkin, later changed to Shachaq, and he was one of the most arrogant and
antipathetic people I have ever met.
He was the commander of a small paratrooper unit called “Duchifat,” nominated to the command
after the previous commander, Ehud Shani, died in battle north of Jerusalem.
Amnon later on in his career became Israeli Chief of Staff. I had no clear military profession at
that time; I had just jumped from airplanes a few times, and in military jargon
I was “nobody.” I joined the
communications department of this new unit on the West Bank. Each one of the soldiers had his own twisted
ideas about life and the military, and our sergeant was Yossi Angel from the
well known Angel Bakeries in Jerusalem.
Today Yossi Angel, aided by his father’s advice and money, has relocated
to New York City where he has opened up a bakery and tried to reinvent the
American muffin! I meet him
occasionally for a quick greeting, and to taste his muffins. Anyway, the unit was in the midst of
intensive training. The original
idea for this Duchifat unit was that
it would be something between a tank unit and a paratrooper unit, but its end was
tragic, and trying to combine these two forces was probably one of the biggest
mistakes that he Israeli military made.
In a later battle which our unit participated in, we had too many
casualties, and within a year the unit was dispersed. I was one of the last ones left to take apart the
communications equipment. After
that, I was sent to a new paratrooper command that had been especially
established to train young paratroopers.
One of the first commanders in this unit was an older paratrooper named
“Tarzan.” He was there for a short
time, and after him came Yaakov Chalabi.
Once, at the end of his service, Chalabi took me with him on a trip to
Bethlehem. It was
Christmastime. This trip to
Bethlehem changed my entire life, not at the time that I was there, but a few
years later (to be clarified below).
In Bethlehem I met a sergeant from the military police by the name of
Yaakov Sharabani, later changed to Sharon. Yaakov was not exactly the healthiest person, and probably
needed some connection to be accepted in the military. One of his best friends was an elderly
famous paratrooper by the name of Yecheskiel Baum. Anyway, this paratrooper unit that was organized to train
young paratroopers had a few changes of commanders, and one day a new commander
arrived, Colonel Amos Yaron. Amos
lived in those years in Rishon LeZion, a very short distance from my parents’
home. I do not know how it
started, but I began driving his military vehicle back-and-forth between the
West Bank and Rishon. Lo and behold,
one day Strikovski arrived in our unit to fulfill a job as an instructor. I had the opportunity to tell Amos
about my past association and experiences with this “gentleman,’ and made sure,
with Amos’ agreement, that when I was called upon to drive him to Tel Aviv he
would be compelled to sit in the back of the truck, rather than on the front
seat near me. I did not speak to
Strikovski, and he did not speak to me.
I served with Amos for about half-a-year, or perhaps a bit more, and I
joined him on a few occasions at some very important military exercises in which
he was a judge. One of these involved
crossing a canal, which replicated the Suez Canal. This exercise took place toward the end of 1969; the
exercise later became a reality in the 1973 war, which I will return to
later. I met at that time a young
officer by the name of Eli Cohen; in 1973 Cohen was the first Israeli
paratrooper to cross the Suez Canal.
He later became a member of the Israeli Knesset. In the final year of my regular military
service, I experienced one of the most exciting things that happened to me
during my service, or maybe even during my entire life. A young driver by the name of Shabtai
Shevili arrived at our base donning big glasses — I guess he could not see well
– and during his first day at the base he turned over in the vehicle that he
was driving. Fortunately he was
not hurt, but he was definitely shaken, as was I. We became friends, and I’ll always owe him a large debt of gratitude,
for he introduced me to a relative of his who resided in Jerusalem by the name
of Abram Jana Soramello. One of
the most interesting Israelis I ever met, Soramello was a joker, a smoker, a
drinker and a storyteller who spoke Hebrew and Arabic.
Finally, my regular
army service came to an end. In
the last few months of my military service I became the driver for another
Israeli “hero,” Asaf Villin, who later changed his name to Chefetz and became a
commander in the Paratroopers and then the commander of the Israeli National
Police. His failure in the
military was due to the fact that he irritated the renowned Raful. Asaf was known among Israeli
paratroopers to be a very courageous soldier. He was a kibbutznik from Kfar Menachem. He met his wife Sarah at our unit; she
was our clerk. One day, Asaf asked
me to join him to go to a place in the West Bank. When we arrived, he pulled some dynamite and other equipment
out of the jeep and tried to blow up an empty building. The problem was, we did not distance
ourselves far enough away from the building to avoid the fallout from the
blast, but luckily we were not hurt.
I met him later at the Mitla Pass in 1971 when I was working in the
Sinai Desert on fortifications, and he was the commander of Unit 890. I felt that he looked at me disdainfully,
perhaps wondering what I was doing there, and I never saw him again. But at the end of my military service
he wrote me a personal letter of recommendation in which he cited me as a
responsible and dedicated soldier.
I still have his letter at home, and I look at it occasionally, and
wonder.
During the final
year of my army service I began preparing myself, mostly in the evenings, for
various exams that would lead me to entrance into a university. Finally I returned to my parents’ home
in Rishon LeZion. I found a few places to work, but I failed in all of them
until eventually I found a job with a famous photographer, Nahum Gutman (not
the painter). With Gutman I worked
for approximately six months as a photo journalist, publishing pictures in most
Israeli newspapers. One day while
working in photography, I met a relative of mine, an engineer who was working
on the fortifications at the Suez Canal, and he hired me for a job there. I walked by foot and traveled by jeep
all over the region of the Canal.
I also worked on the road that led from Tasa to the Suez Canal. During the Yom Kippur War, that road,
called “Akavish” (Spider) became the main road the Israelis used to invade
Egypt. After half-a-year there, I decided that I wanted to begin serious
studies, so I enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I
registered for courses in Israeli Literature and the History of Jews. In October 1972, I arrived for the
first time as a student at the Hebrew University and settled in at the G’vat
Ram campus. I arrived with very
little money, only some small savings from the various jobs I had done, not
knowing exactly how I would survive.
On my first day I took a walk around the campus to look around, and
suddenly I saw my old friend Yaakov Sharabani Sharon. He was at that time an assistant to the security chief
at the university, and within a few days he hired me to work for him at the
security department of the university!
Now I had a chance to study and a salary to support me. One day while I was on security duty
standing near the Biology building, a short young American woman wearing
glasses asked me how to get to the National Library. A friendship developed between us, and we are now together for
forty years!
I
did not have a chance to be at the university for two months before I was
called for Reserve duty, which extended from the end of 1972 into the beginning
of 1973. This time I was placed in
a different military unit as a driver for the deputy commander of the unit, and
unfortunately I could not escape my duty.
In the meantime at the university, I was taking complicated courses with
Professor Stern, Professor Shaked, Professor Yosef Dan and others – I was
moving forward. Little by little I
began meeting people at the university and really progressing. What I forgot to talk about and mention
earlier was that my military exercise at the beginning of 1973 in reality was a
general rehearsal for the Yom Kippur War.
In 1969, I had gone out with Amos Yaron to check a possible crossing of
the Suez Canal; in 1973, we did a simulated exercise on a model of the Canal,
but this time we employed a specially made bridge on wheels. Our job was to protect the bridge as it
was rolled into the Suez Canal. The
next time I met that bridge was not as an exercise, but in battle in October
1973. As for myself thinking about
all these military exercises we carried out over the years, I never thought
seriously that we would come to a point where we would actually need to cross
the Suez Canal; it seemed like too much of a fantasy to me – I guess I was
wrong.
Meanwhile,
finally back at the university in the early months of 1973, I continued
studying and working to complete the semester, and Barbara Fichman, my girlfriend,
returned to America. I planned to
travel to America for my first time at the end of August to meet her parents
and discuss plans for our marriage.
By then my exams to end my first year at the university would be
completed. Since I was a typical
Israeli, I arrived in America without any proper clothing -- no jacket and no
tie -- and soon the Fichman family was going to synagogue for Yom Kippur
services. Without the proper
clothing, I did not attend services that morning, but fell asleep, only to be
awakened by Barbara at noontime and told that there was a terrible war waging
in the Middle East, later to be known as the Yom Kippur War. I called up the Israeli embassy in
Washington, DC, and was instructed to go directly to JFK Airport in New York
for a flight back to Israel. I
arrived in Israel within twenty-four hours and travelled immediately to the
Sinai Desert, where I joined my unit stationed in Tasa around the parameters of
the headquarters of General Erik Sharon, the “King of Israel.” This was a place I knew very well from
my work on the fortifications. In
the beginning, there was total chaos there, but little-by-little the Israeli
military managed to rearrange and organize its forces. And since we were very close to the
Sharon headquarters, lo and behold I met all the characters I missed so much:
Dan Ziv and Amnon Shachaq, commanders of paratrooper units, Strikovski, with a
special jeep unit, and Eli Cohen, who was about to become the first Israeli
paratrooper to cross the Suez Canal.
I was the driver of the deputy commander of the unit, Dubi Ravid, and
occasionally I also drove another officer by the name of Amos Schoken. (Years later he became the proprietor
of the newspaper Ha’aretz. Amos S. is a very intelligent and
courageous person. I have read his
family’s newspaper since my youth, and I always appreciated the intellectual
streak it carried. For the first
thirty years of my residence in America, I received the weekly edition of this
newspaper mailed to my home.
However, in the last ten years I have discovered that its level of
intellectualism has eroded.) We
were sitting in Tasa and waiting for an order to move. In the meantime around us the Egyptians
sent some commando forces into our area, and we caught them. Egyptian attack airplanes were
attacking us, and our unit shot one of them down. The most disturbing incident while we were waiting to do
something was the arrival of some young Israeli soldiers, the remnants of some
units that were involved in defending the Suez Canal at the first attack on Yom
Kippur. On the 14th or 15th of October, we began our move
toward the Suez Canal. Our unit
surrounded the famous bridge-on-wheels.
On the second day of our movement, Egyptian airplanes discovered us and
attacked us. By sheer miracle I
was not killed in that attack. We
also heard reports about the chaos that happened at the “Chinese Farm,” where
one of the most terrible battles of this war occurred. About fifty paratroopers were killed
there, and I have no idea how many tank people lost their lives there. While all this was happening, we were
moving closer and closer to the Suez Canal. Eventually, one of the paratrooper forces that entered into
the west side of the Canal, led by Dan Ziv, at the Sarafaum, got into real
trouble there. Many many articles
and stories have come out to relate the details of that battle. The main conclusion was that Dan Ziv as
a commander performed poorly, and it is not that he was not a courageous
person, but that his judgment in battle did not fit the reality of this
complicated event. One of the
victims of this battle, a very courageous Israeli soldier, was Asa Cadmoni. We left the Suez Canal five months
later.
When
I returned to the University, I lacked the desire to study. Classes had started in November, and
now it was the end of March of the following year. My roommate was dead, and I lost all interest in
studying. I decided to travel to
America, and so I did. About my
adventures in America I will write a different story. In the meantime, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 still provides
mountains of speculation, and there remains a total misunderstanding among
Israelis about the causes and conclusions of that war. It is possible that these conversations
about the war will not end, even at the end of days, unless maybe a little bit before
that. I hope we will one day find
some way to figure out the key to all the unanswered questions.
