|
Everyone was quite tense, not knowing what to expect, but at some point they
started hearing cannon fire and explosions and they realized that they were
getting closer to the action. Soon, the explosion got much louder and closer and
Joel realized that they were under attack. He closed the hatch on his side and
looked through the periscopes that were offering a minimal view of his
surroundings. The view did however allow him to see that some of the tanks were
already on fire. The Centurion is a formidable war machine and under different
circumstances, it would have subdued the inferior T54/55s and even the T-62s. In
this case however, the night was pitch black and they had no night vision
whatsoever. They had driven straight into an ambush and were being picked off
like cherries from a tree. Joel looked to his left and saw a tank getting hit.
He switched his vision to the right and saw another tank getting hit. He
resigned himself to his fate knowing with a dead certainty that his tank was
getting it next. Strangely, he did not feel any panic and did not even stop to
consider that in another minute he might be dead. He grabbed his little backpack
and his Uzi, strapped them around himself as securely as he could, and got ready
to bail.
As soon as he felt the impact, he threw open his hatch and jumped out. Baruch
had apparently not ducked down so he had been hit by the blast sideways and
thrown onto the transmission cover. Bialy, the gunner, jumped out after Baruch
and between the two of them they got Baruch off, carried him a little further
and laid him by the side of the road. Joel had no idea what to do but he did not
feel like there was any call for action anywhere so he just grabbed the dirt and
lay still. After his tank got hit two more times, it went up in a blaze of
glory.
There were little pebbles on the side of the dirt road and Joel could
actually hear them get hit with machine gun bursts and fly away sometimes with a
prolonged pinnng. He thought they sounded so realistic, just like in a movie.
Bialy and a few of the other guys started running in all kinds of directions.
Three of them got hit and knocked off and soon he lost track of Bialy. After a
while, the shooting died down a bit and looking at what was left of his company
of 14 tanks, Joel saw that two of them were turning around and starting to drive
back the way they came. He helped the few remnants of the other orphaned crews
pick up the wounded including Baruch and lift them up to the flat transmission
and motor coverings. Somehow they made it back to some base, probably Nafah. He
spent the next day in somewhat of a daze, drinking coffee, eating stuff that he
did not later remember and taking a swig out of his vodka once in a while. He
must have slept that night, because he remembered waking up the next morning and
realizing when he stripped to take a shower that the right sight of his fire
retardant drabs was peppered with a fine grid of tiny holes. On further
examination, he found that some tiny little bits of shrapnel or something, had
gone through there and into the skin of his arm, thigh and that a few had hit
his rib cage as well. |
