Israel's Next War by Martin Archer

Author:Martin Archer [Archer, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: [email protected]
Published: 2015-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

****** Sergeant Dov Lindausky

My M-60 was among the first of the Third Battalion’s tanks to cross when the six battalion-sized columns of our brigade’s armor and service vehicles began crossing the Jordan River in the middle of the night. We crossed as soon as the first pontoon bridge was usable.

It was a relief and rather exciting to cross the river. We’d spent all day Wednesday moving through the West Bank before we finally stopped on our side of the Jordan to unload our tanks and APCs from the tank carriers and sent the carriers back. Our brigade’s mobile bridging equipment and combat engineers had been traveling at the head of the column; they needed less than an hour to throw the first of four pontoon bridges across the narrow and muddy Jordan River, one for each of our battalions.

I wasn’t taking any chances; I ordered my gunner and my loader, Issak and Reuven, to climb out and all three of us rode on top of the tank while it slowly crossed. Shaul, the driver, the only regular in the crew and the man who spends full time maintaining our tank, merely cursed under his breath and talked to himself the whole time we were crossing—I could hear him on the tank intercom as the bridge and the pontoon boats supporting it moved up and down under our weight.

Our recon platoon went over first so I didn’t need to worry about our getting shot at for a few minutes. Besides, there is no sense taking a chance on the bridge failing.

“Okay. We’re over,” I shouted to Isaak and Reuven as soon as I felt the lurch as the tank treads hit land. “Mount up.” Jeez it’s already getting hot.

Less than a minute later our rebuilt and modernized M-60 was following about thirty yards behind the company commander’s tank as Benny charged up the gravelly slope ahead of us. More precisely, we’re moving up the slope through the great cloud of dust and black smoke being thrown back at us by Benny’s tank and throwing up a similar cloud of our own behind ours.

There’s no question about it—it’s tense advancing up the side of a hill into potentially dangerous territory without being able to see what’s on the other side. As you might imagine, I’ve got my sand goggles and face mask on and I’m anxiously holding the handles of the turret machine gun and trying to see what’s ahead; my gunner, Issak, an Arab-speaking construction foreman from Jerusalem, has an armor piercing round in the chamber. But then the captain’s tank moved over the rise ahead of us and nothing happened.

Hot damn. Benny made it. We’re in Jordan unopposed. Maybe Issak was right when he said the Jordanians are going to welcome us, not fight us.

After Shaul drove our M-60 up and over the rise I used the tank intercom to direct him to a position about fifty meters to the left of Benny’s tank. A slight depression over there will give us a bit of cover.

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