Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [7]
We had been sequestered in a hangar on the military side of Lydda Airport. Colonel Zechariah, the founder and commander of the Paratroop Brigade, briefed us. Zechariah was a comforting sight, a sort of Hebrew-speaking Marine-type commander, working diligently on becoming a living legend.
The plan was simple enough. The Lion’s Battalion—four hundred paratroopers under the command of Major Ben Asher—had been given the “honor” of dropping deep into the Sinai Peninsula to open Operation Kadesh.
The actual site was called the Parker Monument, a marker in honor of a former British military governor. From the Parker Monument to Egypt proper, on the other side of the Suez Canal, was a distance of thirty miles. Sixteen or seventeen of those miles was Mitla Pass—a treacherous, narrow defile of mountain, rock, and cliff. An Egyptian force of unknown size was inside the Pass in fortified positions. Fortunately, we would not have to go in and try to take the Pass itself.
The Lions were to seal the eastern end of Mitla to stop reinforcements from getting through to the Sinai. Meanwhile, the balance of the Para Brigade under Zechariah would cross a hundred and fifty miles of desert track, capture three fortified positions, and link up with us sometime around D day plus two.
There were a thousand What ifs in my mind. I’m certain Dayan and the Old Man and Jackie Herzog and the rest of them had already What if ’d themselves to death.
Israel wasn’t going to initiate a war unless she was forced. She was undermanned and underarmed against Egypt alone. What if we were jumped by Jordan, Syria, and Iraq as well?
And What if the Egyptian Air Force caught us in the open ...
And What if Zechariah didn’t link up with us ...
And What if—forget it, Gideon.
The nonchalance, the downright boredom of the Lions had to be partly playacting. We did it in the Marines before battle. In fact, my dog Grover was probably the best in the world at fake macho.
The Lions were sprawled about, seemingly oblivious of the bouncing and rolling. The sergeant major checked his Uzi gun as though it were a sweetheart he never got tired of caressing.
Shlomo Bar Adon, my assistant, who had been lent to me by the Foreign Ministry, was dead asleep, his bearded angry-looking head bobbing on my shoulder, unresponsive to my elbow whacks into his ribs. I don’t know whether I could have gone through a parachute jump without Shlomo. I loved him like a brother most of the time and some of the time hated him twice as much.
I didn’t want to think about Val and the girls right at that moment. If a writer can’t block his family out of his thoughts, he can’t go to war. During years of long research trips I had mastered the art of not thinking about them. I’d get maudlin ... I’d cry at bars ... I’d never get my work done if I couldn’t get my family out of my mind. Or so I made myself believe. Val says writers are the total masters at suffering. She says everyone suffers just as much, but writers can say it better.
For a time I thought my decision to bring my family to Israel was going to work. I’d been there four months when they arrived, and was already heavily involved with Natasha. All three of my girls adapted and seemed happy. We lived in a lovely neighborhood near the sea and I had an extra hotel room a few miles away to work in. Our neighbors were mostly affluent South Africans who were bedrock Zionists and had come to settle.
Life wasn’t easy in Israel in 1956, but what was lacking in comforts was more than made up by an explosion of spirit and a lust for life and a purpose for living and a feeling of brotherly love that I never would have believed could exist in an entire people. For me, being here was reaching nirvana.
The government had shown a lot of confidence in me, and the armed forces loved my early novel on the Marines. I had finished most of the