 With 14 aerial victories in two different aircraft, retired Israeli Air Force Brigadier General Amir Nakhumi has played major roles in many combat missions. Nakhumi graduated from pilot training and earned his commission in 1968. During the war of attrition at the Yom Kippur War, he flew over 100 combat missions. In the first air battle of the Yom Kippur War, Nakhumi and his wingmen engaged a force of 28 enemy MiG fighters, downing four. For this action, he earned the E-Tour Hammer Fet Medal for battlefield service above and beyond requirements. Following his tour as an F-4 squadron commander, Nakhumi took command of Israel's first F-16 squadron. After completing F-16 training at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, he immediately began training for Operation Opera, the Israeli raid to destroy Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, which was capable of producing materials required for nuclear weapons. After multiple failed diplomatic and covert attempts to stop Saddam Hussein from acquiring the nuclear capability to strike Israel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin authorized the aerial raid. On 7 June 1981, Nakhumi along with seven wingmen flew through unfriendly airspace at 100 feet above the ground for 600 miles to enable the surprise attack. In 30 seconds, the eight airmen dropped 16 2,000 pound bombs through the reactor, destroying Iraq's nuclear ambitions. This attack immediately drew strong international criticism and was condemned by the United Nations. However, ten years later, the mission was celebrated by those who'd condemned it when the Desert Storm Coalition was able to liberate Kuwait from a non-nuclear Iraq. Air Command and Staff College is proud to honor Brigadier General Amir Nakhumi as an Eagle. Please join me in welcoming Brigadier General Amir Nakhumi, interviewed by Major David Scher. Folks, I need a waiver here. Although I'm practicing English for the last, I don't know, 65 years, I still think in Hebrew. And in order to articulate my thought here, I need to translate online the Hebrew to English. And it is kind of difficult because Hebrew is from right to left and English is from left to right. And I can maybe give you an example, an episode that I had when I flew AH-1, Cobra helicopter, as part of my job, night formation, night transformation. Now, you imagine that a fighter pilot, when you want to add power, he goes like this. When you want to, in a helicopter, you want to add power, you go like this. So imagine how is it to keep up formation at night when all the time you have to think forward, backward, forward, backward. So this is about translation from Hebrew to English. I also reckon that you folks want to hear the story, dull story of the raid on the nuclear reactor. So why don't we just follow George Lucas and start with episode four, and then if you can buy us some more time, then we can go roll back to episode one, two, and three. How about that? Sounds good, sir. Sure. Absolutely. I'm very sure. Sir, if you don't mind to start, how about we go to November 1980. Can you explain what was going on at that point? Yeah. Why don't we go back 5,000 years ago, and we start, and we look at the neighborhood that we are living. I think the best way to describe it, if I was an American boy, I would tell you I'm from Brooklyn. No, no, it's not. Okay, somewhere here. There is a mountain with olive trees. When Abraham, the father of both the Jews and the Arabs, was called by God to sacrifice his son to show his devotion to God. And luckily for him, he did it. He went up there, took his son, put him on a stone, took the knife, and wanted to slaughter his son for God. And then God said, hold it. You approve your point. Here's a goat. Put the goat inside. And he put the goat. And for that time, all of the world, maybe except China, wants this mountain. It started with the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, Romans. After the Romans, when they turned into Christianity, came Mohammed from Mecca. And after him, the Crusaders came. And after the Crusaders, the Turk Ottoman Empire came there. And after them, UK, Britain and France came there. And only in 1948, when the United Nations decided of some kind of separate this small land, by the way, from here to here, 500 kilometers. From here to here, 80 kilometers. From here, Tel Aviv, to the border, 8 kilometers. So can you imagine the neighborhood? By the way, we call ourselves always an aircraft carrier because we have so many airplanes, and this looks like an aircraft carrier. So if we jump to 1921, the British, like they did in several places in the world, they make arrangement there. They put up the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. They set up the King Faisal in Saudi Arabia. And in Palestine, which was the name of Israel today, they put the High Commissioner. In 1963, in Iraq, a nuclear program started. And because basically, Bakker was the president of Iraq, but Saddam Hussein was the man behind the throne and he did everything. So what we were seeing along this time, basically until 1978, that Saddam planned to build an atomic program for weapon grade under the coverage of atom for peace. And 10 years later, when I was invited here, when this was recognized, I asked the people who were invited there, Iraq, atomic weapon for peace. They are drowning in oil. Give me a break. So it went on and on. But just by jumping, because we don't have too much time for that, people who want to make research on this can get these slides and make some, if they want to make a research. And I would want to jump to October 1980. At this month, government, Israeli government has two critical meetings where all, as you see in the video, that all the diplomatic efforts, all the covert operation that the Mossad did, didn't help. The program went on. And Menachem Begin said in this government meeting that there is a clock above our head and it's ticking. And he meant that according to the information that he had, that in September of 1981, the nuclear reactor will become hot. It means that they will put in the uranium. And that means that if we will attack it there, it will be a second Chernobyl. And nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to do that because the only goal of this military action is to stop the program, not to make collateral damage. So it set a deadline for the time of the attack. And another thing that he wanted is that the government will vote unanimously for the raid. He didn't want in the government or ministers that would say abstain or against. He said, I want everybody to think it over and unanimously vote on it. The Minister of Defense, the late Azar Watzman, was opposing and he resigned. He was opposing for that because he was afraid that our important peace with Egypt will be broken because of that. So this was his view and he was opposing and he resigned. At that point, I was one month after I returned from Hill Air Force Base. It's also a very short story because our country, Israel, was scheduled to get the F-16s, sometimes in 1984. However, in the first country outside of the US and outside Europe was Iran. Iran has a package of 75 F-16s, scheduled to be delivered in 1980. And they were manufacturing them back in Dallas, Fort Worth. But in 1979, as you remember, the Khomeini Revolution took place and the Shah of Iran, which was friend of the West, actually had to leave the country. And at that point the US government decided to embargo Iran and all the things start piling in the backyard of Dallas, Fort Worth. So one came with a good idea to ask the US government, why don't we take the Iranian airplanes? Look how history is flying. Let's take the Iranian airplanes first. So it was agreed and because of that was really harsh to back here to US 12 pilots which was picked from the other pilots' squadrons. And I was chosen to be a squadron commander of one of the two squadrons that are in the base one in the north of the country. And we came here for checkup on the airplane. We flew 23 missions. We also threw two missions in the backseat to learn how to land from the backseat in order to be able to be the trainer to instructor in Israel. And we came back to Israel. In November we were called to the commander of the Air Force, myself and the other squadron commander. He told us that he wanted us to concentrate on air to ground. And he said, all right. And he said, I don't want you to start dissimilars with F-15. It's too dangerous. And probably he had a phone call from one of our pilots who was here. He called his friend in the F-15 squadron in Israel. He told him, clean up the pylons because he was an F-15 pilot and he flew the F-16. He told them they have to clean the pilot from the airplane if they want to fight. And they were afraid of this hot between the two squadrons and then he said, you go to train to ground. But this was not the reason. Because one month after that they called us and there was a big map on the wall with all the headquarters and there was a circle there and they said, here is a nuclear reactor. We looked at the range, 600 miles straight line. And we think that the F-16 that we both can do it without refueling. So we went back to the squadrons, we start training. We start making long range missions. But how can you fly 600 miles on a country which is 300 miles long? And all of it is occupied in habitat and you cannot fly over in habitat area. So the only place we could fly is here in the Negev Desert, which is kind of 100 miles. So what we did, we start flying from our base here in the north. We flew back over the Red Sea here. Because Sinai at that time was half Sinai was still in the hand of Israel. It is only on the process of the peace of Egypt. So we flew down here, we flew back here, we flew back here. We bombed here and then we start flying back and forth until we reached the full range. And also it has to be in a very high secrecy. Because secrecy is all about it. If they will find that they come, then hell will come from the other side. If we can surprise them, we can handle the heavy air defense that was there. There was there one brigade of SA-2, one brigade of SA-3, one brigade of SA-6, 200 shoulder-mounted sands, and about 120 quad, 23 quad anti-aircrafts. I don't know what the name of this is. ZSU-23. Yeah, that is the name. And it was heavily defended. So the only way to penetrate that without NEW, because we didn't have whistles, and we didn't have NEW on the airplane, they would just clean Iranian airplane without anything, no shaft, no flares, nothing. And so the only chance to penetrate this is to come really on the deck, smoking on the ground, and just make a real pop-up, and bomb it, and egress. So we start training on that, and then we found the problem. The airplane still didn't have any release envelope. Nobody released from the airplane 2,000 Mark-84 bombs. The American program at that point didn't do it. They didn't jettison the tanks in the presence of bombs. And we didn't know what happened because the tanks go like this. They can hit the stabilizer. So we started the program, a very crushed program, with one very brave pilot that took the job to close it out and jettisoned the tanks to see what happened. And we started the program for the release of what we planned to do because our job was, in the reactor, the target was not on the surface of the reactor, but 40 meters down to the core of the reactor. This is what we had to destroy because there is the heart of the reactor. All the rest is the infrastructure dome and things like this. And in order to reach the bombs down there, the bomb has to penetrate 40 meters in the ground and the trajectory of the bomb is something like this. So we have to calculate this, what is the delay of the fuse that we have to use because we were using simple Mark-84 with the delay fuse. Two on the airplane, we have two M9L, two Mark-84 bombs and three tanks. This was the configuration. I know that there are many stories that there were guided bombs and other things that we just hide behind the LL, some kind of civilian tracks with all eyes. We just flew very low from here because we were deployed here. This is an air base near Elat. We just flew, this is about what we did. And then we came back the same way. Here we climbed to 40,000 and negotiated the headwinds of the whole world, 100 knots of handweed. And it took forever because the sun is going down and we are chasing the sun and then it became dark. Nevertheless, we planned this and we trained. But in January of 1981, my exo got killed in a middle collision in an air-to-air. We used to make a dissimilar between F-16 and F-4s, two to three because the two to two doesn't match. So we did it two to three and without any rules. It means that they can do whatever they want to do and we can do. And in one of these, there was a middle collision between a phantom and F-16. The phantom just blew the F-16 to pieces. They both ejected. The navigator got killed. The pilot saved of the F-4, but the pilot of the F-16 was killed. It was my exo. And that was really, really heavy. We continued to train. And then in the decision that the raid will be taken in May 10, 10 of May. So we deployed down here to this base, from our base, and it also decided to be taken on Sunday. Sunday is the day where the French technician didn't work on the reactor. We didn't want to kill, for no reason, French people in the reactor. So Sunday was the day. And we also decided to attack on one hour before dark. Why? Because we estimated that at least two pilots will have to eject there. If they survive the heat, they will have to eject. And the helicopter, which were even hovering here, fly to here, the CH-53, takes five and a half hour to get there. And the pilot who bailed out has to survive five and a half hour there. So we decided it's better to do it at night. But we do not make comments at night attack. We don't have any means. We have to have an eye-visual target. We did simple CCAP. And the CCAP in F-16A is pretty accurate, between one to three meter CEP. And that was enough to hit the reactor. And so we decided on 5.35 will be the time on target. And that was the deal on May 10. So May 10 is Sunday. On Friday we deployed. I told my wife, which is sitting here with us, that we are going to some secret mission in the Red Sea. Nothing to worry about. Don't worry. And we had to spend almost two and a half days there. What did you do? Two and a half days in a base? Nobody knew. They put some barbed wires around the squadron that we were there. All the base was secluded from us. And we were secluded from the base. And we had to stay there for two and a half days. And this was terrible. Because the number of jokes that I heard that was enormous jokes. And all of them are what you call black jokes. And so we decided to play basketball. So we played basketball between the two squadrons. My squadrons are all the height of me. The other squadrons are all tall. And we lost every game. And then on Sunday morning of May 10, came a beach craft with a whole brass, one of the Air Force command of the Army. They came there. And one of the intelligence officers brought the suitcase. When he disembarked from the beach craft, the suitcase opened and a whole bunch of 25 Iraqi pounds was spread over the runway. So he didn't know until then where were we going. And when he saw a bank of Iraq, then he calculated, ah, they are going to Iraq. And they brought this money and they gave us the money and said, okay, in case you have to do something after you jump, maybe you take a taxi or maybe you pay someone. Here in the 25 Iraqi, it's a lot of money. It's like 25 pounds, I think, British pounds. So we got this money and we had a brief. We went to the airplane. We cranked the engine and we started. And then my technical officer came and said, what happened? Why? He said abort. And you know what it is? You're ready? We aborted the airplane. We came back to the squadron. We were told that, okay, Begin decided to abort. Okay? What do we do now? A hundred people already in the Air Force know about it. Obviously it's not an issue anymore because controllers, other, all the E2C people, the helicopter crew all knew about it now. And it was aborted. So this was a disaster. And we also had to wait until we come back, until night. So at night we took the airplane, we flew back to our base. We didn't know what was happening. After that, we learned that at the same day, when I and Begin met with President Sadat in Sharma, Czech, and Begin didn't want to embarrass Sadat because if we attack on the same day, then all our world would think that Sadat was part of the conferencing. And he didn't want to involve him. So he decided to delay. And then all of a sudden after five days, I think, Commander of the Air Force was on some celebration of the Sixth Fleet, which is in the Mediterranean, it was in Italy. And he went to Italy to meet his friends from the Sixth Fleet. And on the way back, he called us in the squadron and said, we are doing it, day after tomorrow. So I had to go back, told my wife, we're going back there to the Red Sea. But this time we didn't go on Friday, because it was two times. This time we went on Sunday morning. But it was a holiday in Israel. Nobody flew. So we were the only one who flew this time. So we took off at about five o'clock in the morning. We sneaked along the sea. And then from here we sneaked along the sea. Here we sneaked here along the border. And we landed a low altitude there. Radio silence. And we bring the airplane. They loaded the bombs. We went into a briefing. At the meantime, at the same week, the son of the head of the chief of the army of Israel, he was a pilot. He was good killed in this base in an air accident. He flew in fear. And he lost control. He departed. And he tried to get the airplane out. But he didn't. And he crashed. And he killed. And his father, chief of the army, came in the middle of the morning. His morning. And there was a brief. At that brief, I first realized what is the weight of this mission. Until then, well, I took it. Okay. It's a special mission. It's far away. It's a new airplane. First airplane that there is no connection between the stick and this... Stabilite or air drones. It's only wires. It is the first time we flew this airplane. One engine. We were thinking what happened if the engine failed on us. All this was things that a little bit, you know, concerned. But until then, until the chief of the army said, and he said this word, that if we fail, there is only one chance. We cannot do it again. Politically, historically, we can only do it once. And if we fail, there is a chance of the annihilation of Israel. So I said, what? The whole nation is on our eight pilots' shoulders. This was the first time I felt that this is not a real mission. That this is something that cannot be failed. And we stopped thinking about how to go back. How to come back. It didn't mean anything anymore. The only thing that we're thinking, how we can penetrate this air defense and drop the bomb successfully. So all of a sudden, it was very quiet in the briefing. A heavy, heavy atmosphere. So the chief of the army saw it. So he called his aide and said, bring me the box. So he brought me a box of dates. And he said, guys, here's the date. Take them because you have to get used to a lot of dates in Iraq. You're laughing. Nobody laughed. It was a silence until somebody burst in a late ignition, what we called, and started laughing. And then there was another issue. All of a sudden, there was a miss. We're not sure what is the real time in Baghdad. And they started discussing it because we wanted to get in Baghdad one hour before sunset. And nobody could tell at that briefing, even to the chief, what is the time difference between Israel and Baghdad? Because we set the takeoff time in order to attack on 3 p.m. Israel time, which is 5 p.m. Baghdad time, 5.35. So I looked around. I saw a Mossad guy there. I said, pick up the phone, call Europe, tell his agent to call Baghdad, asking what is the time? And at the same time, asking what is the weather? Because we were concerned that there would be clouds there. So he said, well, that's not a bad idea. After 50 minutes, we got confirmation that we have in Iraq, we have a two-hour difference. And so everything was set. Okay. So another thing was that, you know, there's always surprises. Always surprises. So we have a surprise. We planned to take off from this base southward and make a big detour to go away from Akaba and then join here to the... But we go out of the briefing room. 30 knots wind from the north. And the base in all rates is 2,000 feet high. And we are loaded more than the book allowed on the F-16. We didn't care, but it is more than what is open on the F-16. So how can we take off southbound? We could not. So we had to take northbound. Taking northbound means that you have to go directly over Akaba. So we did. So we took off directly over Akaba. And guess what? King Hussein, he has a habit every Sunday to be on his yacht in Akaba. This yacht is a full command center. So he, all of a sudden, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, 8 at 16, 6 at 15, zooming eastward. He didn't confuse. Immediately he picked up the phone. We know it because we intercepted the call. He picked up the phone and he calls Aman and he said the chief of shift, call the brothers, tell them that the Israelis are on their way to Baghdad. And you know what? It is two hours before the attack. Luckily, maybe the sergeant in Aman thought the king is a little bit drunk. Or the sergeant in H3 was thinking that the sergeant in Aman is drunk. At the end, ignore it. And we pilot, we didn't know it because it was a radio silence, but imagine the guys in the headquarters, commander of the air force, commander of the army, when they know this thing, what should they do? And Rafool said, press on. So we pressed on. Now come the dull part of the story. We flew. There is a story I will tell you later, maybe if we have time. But I had a lesson learned that if you don't fly low, there is a punishment where to use somewhere. And I had this punishment, so I will tell you. But at that time I decided to fly low and you have to push the stick very hard forward to fly low because the ground is coming like this in a speed of, we flew 480 and 20 knots on the way in in order to save fuel. And only at the last time we pushed to 600. But it still, we fly 100 feet most of the time because we wanted to evade also the American AWACS, which is based in Tabuk here. And we know that the radio somewhere is here, so we wanted to evade this as well. And we flew very low. So all this way up to here, somewhere here, there was no something important, just the problem that we didn't have maps all this way. The Israeli maps are finishing somewhere here. And all this area, we had to use American maps, but they are 500,000 scale that what we had. So when we put the tracks on the American map, on the Israeli map, didn't match. Two and a half miles, so where are we flying? And we took the coordinate on the way here from the American map. So really we didn't know exactly if we are on track or not. But we decided to do a seasonal lake with an island. So we decided to catch this island and make position update on this island. And from this island to forget everything else, because we're here to read some kind of 11 minutes flight, so give or take, we will get to the target. So before that, we had to punch the external wing tanks. Just drags, but the central we didn't punch, because at that time we have only nine central tanks. Only nine, and we ate of them in the air. So we were afraid that after that there would be a war and we need these central tanks. So we didn't punch the central tanks, only the external. And really when I put the jetty son, I felt the bump and as I moved the stick, well, it works. I'm still flying. And this was one thing. Other than that, we came to this lake. We flew in two four ships independently separately, because we didn't want one guy navigating, taking the whole bunch with a mistake. So all the time I saw the guys on the horizon flying here and here. But basically we were on the same highway. And when we get to the lake, I was shocked. I looked there, water. I looked there, water. What is it? Did we get to the golf, the passion golf? I didn't know what happened, because there's not supposed to be water so wide. And then I remember that it's a 500,000 scale map. And this size of a lake is a big lake. It is more this whole area of Israel. And so we looked for the island. It was not there because it was June and water was up. There was no island. So we pressed on. And all of a sudden we saw on the horizon colors, a lot of colors. Red, yellow, green. And because we flew low, we didn't know what it is. But when we got there, we saw sails. People are sailing on the lake. It was a resort. And we flew about 30 meters. All of the people did this to us. And it was jumping from... And although there was another incident, that somebody had a great idea, he said we have to wipe up the signs from the airplanes so that nobody knows who we are. But Beggin somehow heard it. He said, what? We are going to sneak like thieves in the night. You put Star of David like this on every airplane. So one day I came to the squad and I see the technician painting huge Star of David on both wings. And these people probably saw the Star of David, but I don't think that they realized what it is. And then, for God, we pressed on and then we saw the Euphrates. Guys, the Euphrates is a huge river. Huge river. I was also a little bit concerned. I accepted a river. No, it was something I think over 200 meters. And when we pressed it, there was another surprise. The whole area is high-tensioned wires. We were flying up or down. So I saw the first guy doing like this. And then I decided, guys, we're going down there. So one told me after that that he asked himself, he wanted to ask me how to fly, but it was radio silence so we couldn't tell him. But I fly casual. And then there was a problem if we were pulled on the right place, because it was a pattern that we have to do because we have to reach 40 degrees dive. This is the way we do. We pull to 50 and then we dive 40 degrees. And it is very important that you don't pull up far or close to the target. Luckily, the Iraqi built walls around the reactor because it was attacked by Iranian on March. A futile attack, nothing happened. But they built walls about 200 meters base and about 30 meters on the top, which a lot of AAA on this was, but the walls could be seen for about 10 kilometers. Five miles. So five miles, I saw the walls. Oh my God, what we call money in the pocket. I know now to vector myself to pull on the right place, so we arranged it, we pushed. I decided to come close to the other force ship because I knew that in this case the first one just wake them up. Second one, they aim. Third one, they shoot. Fourth one, they hit. And we are five, six, seven and eight. So I said, okay, we go here. And when they flew here, I flew somewhere here, and we all pulled together. All of us pulled together. And in the videos from the pull-up of the first one, Colonel Raz and the picker of the last one, Captain Elon Ramon, sorry, the late Elon Ramon from the Columbia, 50 seconds. So we call this raid 50 seconds over Baghdad. And after the bombing, it was very clear. The dome was very clear. There was no problem. And we have to aim short of the dome so the bomb can go inside the ground to the core. And because we didn't have any cameras, you know, debrief cameras, the cameras that looked back on the F-69 to look back to sea and to report. So I make a kind of a 270 to look there. There was a big hole in the ground and a lot of smoke. So I guess it was destroyed. And then we broke the radio silence. And the protocol was that everybody has to come up with the frequency. It's a 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 with the call sign. So we go 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, silence. Call again. It's called 4. Doesn't answer. I remember from the young people, if somebody don't answer on the frequency, you have to look down to find the smoke. So I started looking there and my hair on the hand was standing. I was in the despair. And because Ilan was, he was the youngest guy, he was a captain. All of us were major and lieutenant colonel and one full colonel. And he was a captain. He was a young little boy. And I was so despair that not to hear his voice, you can imagine. So I look back. I look for everything is fine. And all of a sudden the guy said, four. OK, so we put our nose into the sun because we had to egress into the sun to prevent the bad guys from chasing us. There was a lot of missiles then at that point. There was such shooting missiles from all the batteries. But we saw them going in this many directions, but not on us. We were very low egressing from there. So there was nothing on the RWR. So there was just a show of a lot of missiles. But the AAA was tremendous. It was like you saw in the videos of Desert Storm, the first effects when you spent the night, this waterfall coming up to you. So it's the same in the daytime. The whole thing come up to you. But we ignored it because what can you do with AAA? Either it hits you or not. It's a matter of statistics. So luckily we were on the 99% of not getting hurt, or the 90%. And after 40 miles, we climbed up to 40,000 and the exhilaration was skyrocketing. Even the commander of the Air Force for the first time in the history pick up the mic, what he doesn't do, and tell us, guys, this is time to land safely. Because I landed only three times at night before this mission. So this is my fourth night landing on this airplane. And we landed safely in the base. And at 10 o'clock after debriefing, we flew back to home. We forgot what we are doing. We flew supersonic. All Israel was booming and booming. And there was a question in the parliament why the Air Force is making supersonic booms on the holiday. You have it. And I landed. I went to my wife. I told her, hey, I was in Baghdad. Where? In Baghdad. And then we went back to Tel Aviv. We went to debrief. And the whole government, the whole staff were there and they called us to the podium and they said, okay, tell us a story. Tell us a story. So one of the others said, it was done according to planning. That's it. I said, what? Where is the story? I said, no, it was done according to the planning. That's it. Sir, if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to episode one. What made you want to be a pilot? After the one. All right. I was a troubled boy from the beginning. Making troubles in the kindergarten. Our system is that you have to go to the kindergarten two years before you go to school. But the teacher in the kindergarten said that she got the holiday anymore. I'm bored. I'm disturbing everyone. I'm knocking everyone. So they sent me to the Ministry of Education to make an IQ test if I can go to school. So they make a mistake, I think, in the IQ. They had some zero there. And they sent me to school. I was five years old. I went to school in five years. So I finished school at 17. But you know, five years old, in the age of six, the boys were, the girls were about two heads above me. I was a small boy. And at 17, I enlisted. And at first, and I was not a single boy, but I had two older sisters, but at home I was a single boy. And I asked my mother the chair to sign, because the mother has to sign if you have to volunteer to the Air Force. So my mother reluctantly signed. And I went to the Air Force. But I didn't manage. The first, the first, I made a solo in the Piper Carp that was there. After that, we started the ground training. And the ground training was very hard. We have to run 30 kilometers in one time. We have to do a lot of single, two days and three days, tracks with big backpack. And I always time was taking back with the helicopter to the base. So one day, the commander of the academy called me, standing in attention. He took a note of ten shekel what it does. And he goes, and he said, Nahubi, when you start shaving, come back. And they watched me out. I went to, I immediately call some kind of friend of the family. He was a high officer in the Armour Brigade. And I told him, please, please, I want to go to the scout. I need something that I can go back to Jerusalem. I cannot go back to Jerusalem if I do something wrong. So they arranged for me to be in the scouts. And I was there until the sixth day war. In the sixth day war, I was there and we went to the war with the scouts. And we, in the sixth day war, you know the story. But then one day we were attacked by airplane, by MiG 17s. They were shooting like this because the gun is shooting up. I saw them diving and they're shooting. I was lying on the ground and they were shooting at us. And I said, I have to be there, not here. And right after the war, I wrote a letter to the commander of the air force and I told him, I am shaving. I want to come back. Surprisingly, after 10 days, I get a telegram. At that time, they get a telegram. I get a cable. I said, report to Telnov, which is one of the air base, for medical checks. So I reported there. I passed the medical checks. So they sent me to the Air Academy within the base six in Jerusalem. And who is there? The commander of the, it's General Ivry. That's the first time I met him. And I said, do you want to be a pilot? I said, yes. And I told him, listen, spare me this gun training because I've already been in a war and I was sent directly to the flight training. He said, okay, you go to the Fugamagister training. I graduated after one year. I was not the best pilot. Almost did it. And then they sent me to a Uragan. You know, Uragan airplane is a straight wing French airplane from 1949 with a big engine. And we flew that airplane. The stick was so hard. You have to do two hands to move it. And we flew this and I flew in the attrition war then. And then they moved me to F4. And in the F4s, I came to the Yom Kippur war, the 70 war. Besides opera, you were involved in multiple conflicts including Yom Kippur. Can you explain those? Yeah, I think I can relate to two missions in the Yom Kippur. I did a lot of missions in Yom Kippur, about 50. But I think two missions are more significant. The first one is that we were stationed before the war on Friday. Again, we were stationed here in Sharaman Shek. Sharaman Shek is here. And we were stationed there for night alert because there was an notion that LL flights from Tel Aviv to South Africa may be jumped by someone, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen. Someone there would jump and shoot the airline. So we were stationed there to protect. But it was only a night alert. And you can put a wingman because if a wingman is qualified, there's no lead. You can put a wingman. So there were two wingmen there on Friday, the 4th of October or 5th of October. We went down there and we arranged ourselves because the next day was the Yom Kippur, which is a total dead, nobody moved in Israel. So we didn't plan to do anything on that day. So in the evening, I got a call from Ed Quater and they told me that we have to prepare because tomorrow there will be a war. I said, a war? With whom? They said, tomorrow we are going to be attacked by Egypt and Syria together. And you have to be prepared. They said, what do you want? And they said, we want to take you five minutes alert. This is kind of an alert. So I picked up the phone to the squadron and I spoke to the squad commander and I told him, there, they want us five and there's no lead here, no flight here. What should we do? So there was silence on the other side and they said, I point you as a flight lead in 107 and shut down the telephone. To become a flight lead in air to air is half of God in our air force. It takes really a long training and so I was only captain, young captain so I took a grip. I went to speak to the crew and I told the crew, guys, they're going to be a war. I gave you permission to eat and drink because in Yom Kippur nobody drinks, nobody eats. It's kind of a feast. I said, guys, you have to eat and drink. Tomorrow is going to be a war. No, no, we are not eating. I said, you want me to write you down? I'll write you a letter down that I permit you to drink and eat. So okay, we passed that and then in the morning we wake up 9 o'clock in the morning. Nothing happened. A DC3 lens, you know, DC3 lens and a full colonel come down. He's a reserve colonel and he tells me who is the commander here and we say him. And he called me and said, okay, we have information that at night, at evening, a commander helicopter will attack the base. What do you do? What can you do against helicopter at night? I said, helicopter at night, we'll have a train. I don't know what to do. Anyway, we cannot lock a helicopter with our radar. It doesn't lock on a helicopter. So what can we do? I asked him, maybe we can flare for you and you can do, or we can drop CBUs. What do you want to do? So as we're discussing that, there's a siren. And we run to the airplanes. We connected the teleproofing. The teleproofing is kind of a cable that connects you by telephone to the controller in the near GCI. I talked to the controller, which is his master voice. He said what is told to tell us from the headquarters and I asked him, what's going on? He said, I don't know. I just was told to put you in a cockpit alert. But what's going on? He said, I don't know. And I asked him, okay, what do you see in the radar? So he said, tell you the truth, I see 20 mgs. I said, where do you see 20 mgs? I said, I see 20 mgs on the sea. I said, heading where? He said, heading to me. So I tell number two, crank, we are moving. And he said, no, no, no, no. I have a strict order that you cannot take off before they attack. I said, what? He said, yes, they have to attack first and then you can take off. I said, I thought, what do they know 400 km from here? And I told the technician, disconnect the telebriefing because he was shouting and we took off. I take off 5,000 feet. I look back to see wing when coming and I see on the runway plumes like a cotton wool. I tell the navigator, Joe, look, I'm bombing the runway. It is a war. And then he said, leave it. Here's a mig. He said, oh, you're right. And I turned to the mig and he said, jettison. I said, OK, you're right. And I jettisoned. I was really paralyzed or I was regressed from the status of my level in training to zero. And then everywhere I looked, I saw migs. Everywhere. There were 28 migs there and were the two of us. So I told the other one, we were split because you will stay over the field. I will go down to protect the navy and the hog battery and the brigade. There was another complex there. And I went there. It was over as Muhammad and he stayed. And I said to the navigator, don't look back. Just look at the radar, try to find them. But he didn't have to look at the radar because they're all over. Now I don't remember exactly what happened, really. I only remember a picture. I remember a picture that I'm flying into four airplanes like in the movies, doing some kind of this, spreading all over the sky. I remember that I was sitting in a circle in about 200 feet over the ground. There was somebody behind me shooting me. I was shooting the one in front of me. And then I got close to this mig and he stopped doing like this. And I couldn't get a real angle to shoot the missile. So I said, okay. I shut the engine down, went down to 1,500 meters and waited until he stopped rolling. When he stopped rolling, I shoot the missile. The missile got to me exactly when it was straight and it exploded. That was the first mig. And I was fascinated. I stopped flying because I saw, this is the one the pilot wants all his life. And you see this red blue with black that the mig is exploded. So I looked at that and the navigator shot me. He said, leave it. There's another mig over there. And then I came to a gunshot. I shot a mig with a gun and the navigator shot me. Aim well. I said, yes, I am aiming. But the F4, you have to use the rudder because the nose is going like this in a high AOA. And so I almost shot half of the gun and all of a sudden I hear a bump. I feel a bump in the airplane. And I said, okay, we hit. We hit. And I told him, look backward. And he said, no smoke. So I look at the cockpit. I see one engine like this, one engine like this. So the gun shooting stole one of the engine. And I got a compressor stall. And it was about 200 feet over the ground. And there was a mig here and a mig behind me on one engine. So I didn't know exactly what to do. So I sort of, in a turn, I just shot the engine, opened the engine, shot the engine, opened the engine. It opened. And then I said over the radio, okay, it's okay. I have two engines again. And we started. At the end of this, there was four, seven smokes on the ground, seven migs were on the ground. And I shot one mig that fell into the water. And we start circling. And here come the cavalry. Four Mirage came. They came with full afterburner. And they burned all the fuel until they get there. And we were now six airplane over the field circling. And we look down, we see a big hole in the runway and a big hole in the taxiway. There's one runway and one taxiway. So what do we do? Next, the nearest base, 200 miles from there. I have about 3,000 pounds on the gauge, all of us. And the Mirage has no gas. So I decided, okay, I will go first. I will land. So I remember that in the conversion course, they told us on the carrier, used to land like this. So part of the speed was break into the wheels. This is how we designed. This is how they designed the air force. Okay, we'll try it. And we came on 23 degrees, pedal shaking. And we just sink the airplane into the runway. And it went, I think, the wheel was hitting the wings, but nothing happened. And then I stood on the brakes, just stood on them. And we're just running into this. It's not a hole. It's a hill. Because when the bomb hit the runway, it brings up the tower and it becomes like a hill. So I'm running into a hill. And I stop about this far from that. My knees were shaking. So I took the lowest force that I can. I said, we can land. Okay, we make 180, we go down. I come to the alert position. A total chaos. People running from here. And I wait for the guys to come and make the clear on the gun to save the gun. And nobody comes. And we are standing there, engine working. Nobody comes to us. And I stand in the cockpit. I start to call someone to come to us. And then somebody came. They put the clearing. And we couldn't get into the shelter because there was a bomb exactly in front of the shelter, unexploded. This was the reason why everybody was in a chaos there. They didn't know what to do. They came to the bomb. They went out of the bomb. And all of the time, when I took off my helmet, I hear the sirens. And this is also something that confused people because the sirens said, ooh. And that makes people really confused. They didn't know what to do. So we went out of the airplane. And I decided that we have to take off again because they will come back again. So we're looking for the bowser. They have to fill out. There's no bowser. Where is the driver? Nobody knows. There was bowser standing there. Nobody knows. And in the meantime, I saw my wingman go through the other airplane and start taking the missile out of it and put it in his airplane because we shot all the missiles. And they landed the missiles. So they started calling about the missiles. And then I called the other leader and I told him, let's split the missiles. It's all MID. So we asked the technician to split the missile between us and them. So we had another two missiles. And we looked for the bowser. We filled it. We took away. By the time the bulldozer took away all the debris from the runway, they filled it with some sand. And we took off. And we actually then patrolled about three hours. But nobody came. So that was the end of this mission of young people. This was the first time. I claimed for five. I was credit for four. That's not bad. Whatever. So the next mission shortly, I will tell it because it has a point for the raid that there was a night when the Egyptians crossed the canal, the Suez Canal with the rafts. And the ground forces couldn't stop them. So they called the air force. But the area was fully protected by SA-2, SA-3, SA-6. And it was night that night. So they decided we do a loft. And so they calculated the release range and we start flying on the loft. But in order not to be tracked by SA-6 or SA-3, you have to fly very low. But it was a dark night. And I was scared. I couldn't push the stick to go down. I maybe flew 1,000 feet. And it's just sitting back for there. So we're pressing in. All of a sudden it's on the RWR. I see this here. And it comes big. And it goes like this. And I know that they're looking at me. So what can I do? I press on another one mile to pull up. OK. We get to the pull up. I pull up. And here, boom, the sky becomes like a flash. I only saw the cockpit. Like somebody put a flash in the cockpit. I didn't see anything. Just the cockpit. And I was somewhere here. The bomb released. And all of a sudden it become black. And then I like, I fly like using the force. I don't know. Maybe made a loop. Who knows? Because at the end of that, I found myself very close to the ground, but flying. So we went home. So we pressed home. At that night, we lost six phantom, six F-4s in these missions. So I went home. I go down to the squadron. I go to the operation board. I see myself again. I said, are you all right? I'm going back again there. They said, yes, you have a lesson there. You can go there again. So I had to fly another flight. And that time, it was a half a moon. And I pressed really low at night in order to evade this. And at this time, I don't know why. They didn't look at me. I just released it and come back. So if you don't fly low, sometime later, you will have a punishment. They punish you. So this is a young people, but there were a lot of others. Wonderful. So we're running short on time, but I did want to ask you what happened in 1982? 1982. It is episode five. Israel strikes back. We went into a fight in Syria over Lebanon because they deployed the same into Lebanon. And there was a problem with... So we went into there, and the plan was that we will knock out the air defense first. I was planning this plan in 1979 when I was a head porter. And the idea was that the best EW is Mark 84. This is the best EW. And we made a plan of pop-ups, a lot of pop-ups on the SEMs, and we actually destroyed the whole air defense in three hours. We just knocked it out in three hours, and it was clean skies. And after that, we just came in. But the Syrians, when the air defense was destroyed, they just sent the whole mix there. And there's a multi-buggy area. And in two and a half days, we shot down one-third of the Syrian air force. In two and a half days, I shot myself six. And my squadron shot 23. The other squadron 21. The F-15 squadron shot 35. So we totally shot 86 airplane to zero, to nothing. And in two and a half days. So that was actually the war of the air force because what is the war? The war is the two leaders communicating with each other. And instead of exchanging a whole lot of lead between them, when you come with the air force, and you destroy air defense, and then you saw one-third of the air force, he understood, and in 10 o'clock at Friday, he put up the white flag. And he asked for ceasefire. But Rachenbegin said, you stop the fire at 10 o'clock, we stop the fire at 12 o'clock. And we came there at 10 o'clock, I flew there, there was no single airplane in the sky. They keep up the ceasefire, and at 12 o'clock it was ended. Sir. Ms. Naomi, thank you for traveling here from Israel to be here with us. It's been fantastic for me, hopefully for you as well. Sir, is there anything else you would like to part, to give the class before we depart? As a matter of fact, yes. I want to say two things about leadership and air power. Leadership. Do you know what the difference between the man in charge and the leader? So I tell you my view about it. Man in charge may be a commander, he or she. He orders people what to do. And his authority comes from the organization, from Israel. He may himself be a loser. She, normally not a loser, but she can be a s***, but they can order from the power of the organization. From another world, the manager in a corporate, he makes people do because he pays them. Again, the power of money. But a leader makes people want to do what he wants. And how he does that? It is not that he has to tell them. They guess what he wants. Before he even said it. And he's not using some Jedi might trick. They know what he wants. Why? In my view, there's a lot of virtue for a leader when you teach them. I have one thing that I think is the most profound. Lead by example. And people will follow you. People will believe in your true motives. You believe that you are really, you go the first, you don't send people when you're in a unit, they will follow you. And they will do whatever you want without even you telling them. This is the leader. This is the air power that I want to speak about. And I can say about this, that in August 20th of August, 1940, Sir Wilson Churchill gave one of his famous speeches, which in the end he said the immortal sentence, that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. And me, after being here for this week, seeing these giants, I don't belong to the giant, I'm a midget. These are giants. Seeing them and hearing what you do there, I think that this sentence can be modified a little bit. That always in the field of human conflict will so much be owed by so many to so few. So this is your destiny.