Walking with the radio is uncomfortable. It keeps distracting my attention. The antenna tends to fall out, and when you bend down to pick it up, you stumble over stones that you hadn’t noticed. When you cross barbed wire you turn into an acrobat. You have to crouch and turn this way and that if you want to avoid damaging the device. And that continuous voice in your ear: "Hello Lea One - message for you - are you making progress? Have you crossed the fence?..."
And between the individual messages you keep hearing atmos-pheric noises, occasionally a weak English voice disturbs reception, and from time to time the beeping of Morse Code. After half an hour you have a headache.
Together with Israel the medic, I take a position about twenty meters behind the unit. We arrange ourselves in a defensive circle around the hill. To the left of me is the police station. I estimate that it is about a kilometer away.
I can’t dig myself a trench. In one hand I keep hold of the mouth-piece of the radio, which I must not let go. The connection may not be broken even for one moment. I try to dig a little hollow with my heels, and with my free hand I move some lumps of earth as a pro-tection for my head - a symbolic protection.
Amnon comes back. He digs himself a waist-deep hole.
"Hello Lea One, hello Lea One. We are ready, we are ready. The weapons are set up, the weapons are set up. Avor."
We wait. People take it in turns to sleep. In each trench one sleeps while the other is awake. But as radio operator I am not allowed to sleep. And that continuous crackling in my ear is a guarantee of my obedience.
"Booooooom!"
I look at the time. It is exactly one thirty in the morning. The attack has begun. The people in the police station wake up. They fire off one flare after another, and in their light our mortar crews can see their targets clearly. The machine guns and rifles bark. There is no way to distinguish our fire from the enemy’s.
I know the plan. The sappers must now be crawling toward the fence. Two hundred meters crawling on your belly, under continu-ous fire. Not a pleasant job. Particularly when you’re carrying enough explosive on your back to blow up a whole battalion.