—ISAIAH 13:3 Hagai Katz couldn’t believe his luck. Among the first operational training unit (OTU) group at Hill, he had become a founding member of the IAF’s newest and most modern fighting squadron. Tall, trim, with thick, sandy brown hair, Katz looked like a high school quarterback, but with the intellect of the president of the chess club. Though too proud to have ever admitted it, as a “nugget”—a rookie pilot—stationed at Beersheva in 1973, Katz had looked up to the base’s famed Phantom squadron fliers Iftach Spector, Doobi Yaffe, and Amir Nachumi. Indeed, to the young trainees in Katz’s unit, the veteran Phantom drivers were celebrities. Stuck in “conversion” at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, training half the time in the French-made Orugan fighter jet and half the time in the more sophisticated U.S. F-4 Phantom, Katz found himself forced to stand on the sidelines like a spectator and watch Spector’s elites fly off to battle Syrian bandits over the Golan while he remained behind.
