“This will be tough for you, Amir. You’re used to being high up in dogfights rather than down below pounding sand like the rest of us,” he smiled.
Nachumi and the pilots laughed.
“If I’m hit, Amir will be in command,” Raz added, becoming serious again. “If Amir is hit, Amos is in command. After escape, once everyone has checked in, I will call headquarters and let them know how many of us made it.”
He looked up from his notes and eyed the pilots sitting before him.
“So, if there are no other questions . . .”
Eitan stood up from his chair next to Ivry and walked to the front of the room. The men stirred in their seats a moment, then a deep silence filled the room as the general stood before them.
“This is an important mission, and a dangerous mission. I worry for your safety,” he said, his voice clear and strong, but strangely soft. “If something happens, I want you to know that we’ll do all we can to rescue you. Don’t try to be some special kind of hero in the face of torture. Tell them what you have to. We want you back with sane minds. We understand what you’ll be going through.”
Yadlin realized the general was addressing them like a father. Eitan had just lost his son, and he could not stand the thought of losing another of his “children.”
“Your government and the people of this country are appreciative of your efforts and sacrifice. Your willingness to risk your lives, so we might live, will never be forgotten by Israel. This is no ordinary mission. Never before has the Israeli Air Force flown an attack to such a distant point—and for such an urgent need. Our history as a nation and as a people is at stake.”
Eitan looked at the faces of the pilots sitting before him, indeed, like schoolchildren at their desks.
“You’ve all read the Bible. You know the history of our people. You know how God brought Moses and the Jewish people out of Egypt. You know the battles Joshua fought to gain entry to the Promised Land. You know about the just rule of King David and the wisdom of Solomon. You know about the dispersion to Babylon. We’ve kept our identity as a people. And now, nearly two thousand years later, we are reunited as a nation.
“Our people have overcome the agony of the Holocaust. We’ve gone through a modern-day exodus. We’ve survived wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, the War of Attrition in 1970, and the Yom Kippur War. And now we are faced with the greatest threat in the long history of Israel—annihilation and destruction of our country with atomic bombs by a madman terrorist who cares nothing for human life. We must not allow him to achieve the ability to build the bomb that could destroy us.
“That’s what this mission this afternoon is all about. Protecting our country. The future of Israel rests on your skill and ability to destroy that nuclear reactor. You must be successful—or we as a people are doomed. This is a pivotal point in the history of Israel. . . .”
Eitan raised his arm, his hand tightened into a fist. His voice now was strong, loud but without being raised.
“If we are to live by the sword, let us see that it’s kept strong in the hand rather than at our throat!”
The room seemed to almost shake with the energy pulsing through the bodies of the men. One could almost hear a roar echo in the silence. Embarrassed by the hypnotic focus his words and passion had wrought among the assembled men, Eitan tried to defuse the tension, pulling out a bag of dates—a notorious staple of prison food in the Middle East.
“Here,” he said, offering the official fruit of Iraq to the troops. “Have some of these. You’ll have to get used to them where you’re going.”
The men, including the assembled generals, broke into laughter as each pushed forward to grab a date and share in this final “toast.”
As the men began to gather their kneeboards and file toward the doorway, Ivry called out.
“God be with you.”
The pilots suited up back in the barracks. Each man wore a lot of gear. First the flight suit, then the G-suit, the torso harness, survival gear, and finally, once in the cockpit, the helmet. For a normal flight the special suits were not a problem, but the pilots would be strapped into these uncomfortable combat clothes for nearly four hours. Sleeves that pinched under the arms or a collar that chafed at the neck could be painful and distracting after hours cooped up in a stuffy cockpit. Then each man grabbed two PRCs, emergency radios about the size of a Walkman that sent out a homing signal to the rescue choppers in case they were shot down. Normally a pilot took only one along. But there was nothing normal about this mission. No one wanted to take a chance of being stranded in the Iraqi desert with a dead PRC. The men clipped the radios to their torso harnesses and headed out to the four vans waiting to take them to the hangar.