But now Sharon, usually petulant and always controversial, was livid. He had been arguing furiously for days with the army leaders. His scouts had discovered a narrow gap between the Egyptian Second and Third armies, and he wanted to launch his fighters through it and across the canal before the Egyptians discovered the gap and sealed it. Sharon insisted this would win the war for Israel.

Two days were lost as his superiors equivocated. They were afraid that the general wanted all the glory for himself and was falsifying or exaggerating his reports. They were terrified that moving Sharon’s division might leave the way open for the Egyptians to break through to Tel Aviv. And they also feared that Sharon was plain wrong and that his vanguard across the canal would be isolated and massacred.

Then, when Sharon finally reached the canal, he still couldn’t cross. His giant fording equipment was blocked in snarling military traffic jams.

Sharon was like a bull on a chain. An army, he knew, needs to move, attack, keep the initiative, or it becomes a sitting duck. As he waited and cursed, the Egyptians mounted a furious assault on his forces massing by the canal. Warplanes screamed in, dropping bombs and strafing Sharon’s vehicles at the beachhead. A machine gun on his command car swiveled around and smashed Sharon on the head, drawing blood and knocking him down. Briefly his men thought he was dead, but Sharon soon opened his eyes. Now, to the annoyance of his rivals, the gray-haired general looked even more glamorous, with a blood-flecked white bandage wound tightly around his head.

They accused Sharon of insubordination, scheming behind their backs, ignoring or misinterpreting orders, giving misleading information, competing with other generals, and, crime of all crimes, using his military position to lay the groundwork for his entry into politics. But finally the order came, telling the Jews for the first time since the exodus: Go to Egypt. It was Sharon’s moment. Because the fording equipment still hadn’t made it, the first tanks and infantry floated across on dozens of rubber pontoons. Then engineers strung together a couple of narrow, rickety roller bridges and poured three divisions of men and equipment into Africa, as Israel called the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal.

Now, although vastly outnumbered, the first Israeli force of twenty-seven tanks was punching forward in Egypt, destroying those killer SAM missile sites that had shocked the Israeli air force and conquering a narrow sliver of land along the Suez Canal and the sweet-water canal that led to Ismailiya in one direction and Suez city in the other. The desert lay flat and invitingly open all the way to Cairo. But as Israel built up its forces in Africa, Egyptian artillery had their range and were pouring mortars and heavy shells on the Israeli troops while commandos hiding in burned-out buildings hit the Israelis with devastating bazooka fire. It was a mess.

The army spokesman finally ended his briefing. My head was spinning. What a hellhole it must be over there, I thought. Glad I’m here. So what are we going to do, talk to some prisoners? Then came our world pool assignment. It was straightforward enough. “Hop in a vehicle, cross the canal, and find Sharon in Africa.”

What? Keith smiled at me. We could hear the rolling thunder and booms of tank and artillery war from ten miles away. There was no letup. A helicopter swooped in blowing dust and dirt as medics raced forward carrying stretchers. Three trucks loaded with soldiers rushed past.

Two other journalists would accompany us: Hugh Mulligan, the legendary AP writer, and his even more legendary photographer, Horst Faas, who had won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his war coverage in Vietnam and Bangladesh. I’d been doing this for only two weeks. I felt hopelessly out of my depth, and it must have showed. Keith patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.”

He helped carry my camera gear, understood what was happening around us, and asked all the right questions, while I was dumbstruck. For two weeks everything that had happened to me was a first-time experience. I was making it up as I went along. Now I was going to cross the Suez Canal and join what may well become Israel’s greatest military maneuver ever. Or its bloodiest defeat. But with Keith next to me and surrounded by tanks and soldiers, I was determined not to chicken out. Not that I had the option. There was no way back. As we reached the canal, clattered across the rickety metal bridge in our vehicle, an armored half-track, and turned right toward the Great Bitter Lake, with the crump of explosions behind and in front of us and the occasional bullet whining by, I resigned myself to fate.

It was dawn, and the sun was rising over Egypt. Our field of vision grew by the minute, and it revealed a frightening landscape. On the Golan, the vista had often been limited by hills, clumps of trees, stone houses, and twisting roads. Here in Egypt it resembled a grotesque tableau laid out endlessly before us: sunken commando speedboats upended in the canal, destroyed armored vehicles billowing black smoke, puffs of white in the blue sky as warplanes streaked high overhead, columns of tired infantry flashing victory signs as we drove by. In the distance was the immense desert, but close up, along the sweet-water canal, were green fields with orange orchards and palm trees, and among them devastated villages and homes pocked by bullets and shells. Wounded men lay by the side of the road, and blindfolded prisoners sheltered in the shade of the embankments. Sharon’s punch across the canal had surrounded the Egyptian Third Army, cutting off their food and ammunition supplies. Now Israeli artillery in captured Egyptian bunkers poured mercilessly accurate fire on the trapped Egyptian tank division. The horizon was dotted with burning hulks. An Israeli commander called it a massacre.

But the Egyptian high command was still calling the crossing a failed Israeli adventure, and the Israeli government still refused to confirm or deny it was even happening. One man wanted the story out, though — Ariel Sharon. We came across him eating oranges with a bemused Egyptian farmer while Egyptian corpses still lay on the ground. “Tell the world,” Sharon instructed Keith, “that Israel has crossed the canal. Two Egyptian armies are trapped.” Keith pointed out that the nearest working telephone was probably in Cairo. That didn’t stop Sharon. He told his radio operator, who in real life was a London taxi driver, to get through to the BBC. Within minutes Keith had the astonished foreign desk on the line. The connection was too poor for a live broadcast, but Keith got the information across, telling the BBC that he was in Egypt with the Israeli army, and that the Egyptian denial was, to use Keith’s word, “bollocks.” It was a world scoop. Keith confirmed Israel had invaded Egypt, and Sharon became a hero.

Then came an offer we could refuse. Five miles from the canal in the direction of Cairo, an Israeli tank division was hotly engaged with the main Egyptian defense force, which was trying to destroy the Israeli marauders and block their access to the capital. It became the biggest tank battle of the war. Military historians later called it the biggest tank battle since Stalingrad. The offer: Did we want to film it?

“Sure,” we said, “but how?” It was flat desert, and each tank kicked up its own sandstorm. Close-up visibility was nil, but from a distance I could film the general action. We thought it should be safe enough if we went out with an observation half-track—an armored vehicle covered with antennae and long-range binoculars and all kinds of electronic devices to track the battle and send guidance information to the blinded tanks. It kept at a safe distance from the enemy tanks. Hugh Mulligan, the AP writer, was smart. “I don’t need to go,” he said. “I have a pen with a range of ten miles.” But Keith said to me and Horst Faas, “I’ll go with you.”

What we didn’t realize was that, because the observation vehicle is the eyes of the tank force, it is the enemy’s key target. Knock out the vehicle we were on and you’d blind the entire Israeli tank force.

We climbed inside the vehicle, arranged ourselves as best we could on the hard metal bench, and fought for breath in the hot, musty, diesel-smelling space. The driver set off smoothly, seeking a strategic spot far from the battle. He settled on a small ridge. But before I could arrange the camera, we came under furious mortar attack. Shells rained around us with terrific booms, shooting clouds of sand into the air. As we fought to hold on in the cramped interior, the driver shot off the ridge and down onto the dunes, zigzagging at top speed while the commander shouted out, “Mines, mines, watch out for mines!” We were thrown about the inside of the metal hull, hurled into one another and into the sharp edges, everyone screaming and shouting over the roar of the engine. Shells continued to smash into the soft sand, which fortunately absorbed the shrapnel or we would have been goners. It was incredible war action, and I didn’t shoot a frame.

We came to a breathless halt right next to a small, closed-off barbed-wire compound. There was a sign in Arabic. Fortunately, we had an Arabic reader onboard. “What does it say?” someone asked. “Danger. Ammunition dump,” he answered.

“Oh shit,” the commander said, “let’s get away from here.” The driver revved up, turned, and headed for another so-called safe spot to observe the battle. Now I was sitting half out of the vehicle turret, my legs dangling in. I didn’t want to miss all the action again. Keith supported me around the waist to stop me from being thrown off as the half-track bounced along. Next to me, the gunner manned a fixed machine gun.

Only a minute later we heard a distant rumbling from the sky. It quickly became closer and louder. We looked around nervously. Where was it from? I rolled the camera just in case. It was an Egyptian jet. It roared by so low it half-filled my lens, and as the machine gunner whipped around shooting at the plane, the rat-a-tat of his rapid fire came close to bursting my eardrums. Again the driver took off, jerking the vehicle from left to right, leaving a crazy trail of sand cloud as we sped away. Then the plane, a MiG fighter-bomber, roared back and began dropping bombs on us. As we raced across the desert, the first bomb landed about fifty yards away and then a second bomb just in front of it hit and then a third. I swung the camera away from our gunner, who was yelling and shooting, to the first bomb and the next and the next, catching each explosion on film.

Keith gripped me tightly, although I couldn’t make out if he was helping me to stay balanced or stopping me from ducking for cover. The MiG was gone! We were okay. Not for long. Now he was screaming back at us from the horizon, heading right for us a second time, guns spitting into the sand. But before the fighter pilot could send us into oblivion, he suddenly jerked upward into a steep climb. An Israeli warplane was on his tail. There was a brief low dogfight, fighter jets wheeling and swooping and shooting, and the MiG, trailing black smoke, turned on its nose, its wings shaking. It smashed into the ground just over a hillock about a mile away. There was an explosion and a flash of flame. Dark smoke billowed into the sky.

I had it all on film. It was incredible. Horst Faas, the Pulitzer-winning Vietnam veteran, didn’t shoot a frame. He picked himself up from the floor of the vehicle and said it was the most dangerous situation he had ever been in. Me, I didn’t have time to think about it. I just filmed it as if it were on the movie screen.

It was weird. I wasn’t scared or shaky. I didn’t think about the danger. I had no options, so I did my job. Everything on the film I shot was in focus, although the gunner was up close, the bombs were in the middistance, and the planes were on infinity. I must have been pulling focus all the time. The exposure was perfect, although the gunner next to me was in shadow, and the desert and sky were bright light, so I must have adjusted from about f5.6 to f16 or f22 even as I swung from the gunner to the plane.

I don’t know why I wasn’t scared. It seems unnatural. Certainly, I was too excited. But I think seeing death through the camera lens made it unreal. The lens acted as a filter. The attacking plane and the bombs seemed several steps removed from my own space. As the Egyptian roared over us, my attention was focused purely on swinging the camera around fast enough to keep the plane in the middle of the frame, and I remember trying to keep the gunner in the left side of the frame for better composition. The fact that I could have been blown to bits just didn’t play a role. I was on automatic.

In war, automatic is a dangerous place to be, and I knew it even then. About four months earlier, a Swedish cameraman called Leonardo Henrichsen had shot some extraordinary footage in Chile. His pictures were still fresh in my mind. He had been on automatic, and it had killed him.

Henrichsen’s film shows a national guardsman who seems to be pointing at the cameraman from a distance of about twenty yards. But as the seconds tick by, it becomes clear that the soldier is in fact aiming a pistol. The camera does not flinch. Then there is a bang as the soldier fires straight at the camera. Still, the camera doesn’t waver, and after a pause of a second or so it pans slightly to the left, where another soldier aims a rifle straight at the camera and fires. He misses, too.

Seven seconds tick by. Henrichsen has ample time to understand the threat and retreat. But the cameraman has become an extension of his camera. He does not feel his own presence. He is not there anymore; he is no longer a cameraman but just a camera, an artificial eye. The lens has removed him from the action. The view through the viewfinder is square, like watching television. And it shows the action in black and white, not color, which distances him further. It does not register in the cameraman’s mind that he is holding a camera and could die; if instinct kicks in at all, it is fight or flight, and Henrichsen subconsciously decides to fight. But he isn’t holding a gun to fight with, just a camera. Doesn’t he understand the danger? By now the television viewer is silently screaming to the cameraman to put the camera down, but it’s too late. The soldier takes a few steps forward, still aiming his rifle. He shoots again. The camera microphone records the sharp crack. The picture whirls giddily and goes to black. Leonardo Henrichsen filmed his own death.

With bombs falling and machine guns firing, how close had I come to that? Hadn’t I understood the danger I was in? Clearly not. My adrenaline was pumping, and I have rarely felt so alive as when Keith yelled, “He’s crashed!” and the plane exploded into the desert.

That night, we caught up with General Sharon in his desert headquarters. He was standing at the center of a circle of armored vehicles, using a jeep hood as a table, feasting on caviar and champagne that his wife, Lily, had packed for him. He looked the very picture of a warrior, with his bandaged head and his company of generals and soldiers. They were silhouettes in the half-moon, with the occasional jeep’s headlight lighting the scene further and throwing long shadows.

Sharon greeted us cheerfully but was deep in discussion. At this point in the campaign, he was berating the officers in southern command about the need to continue along the sweet-water canal to attack the Egyptian town of Ismailiya and cut off the Egyptian Second Army, after he’d already surrounded the Third. But pressure was growing on Israel from the United States and the Soviet Union to stay in their current positions and cease firing. Sharon openly cursed his commanders for delaying his crossing of the canal. If they had moved when he had demanded, he said, he would have conquered Ismailiya the day before.

It was freezing at night, as the desert can be. The desert deceives you. The hot sun, the warm sand, the clear sky, the zillion bright stars — how pleasant, you think. Then, suddenly, the temperature begins to drop. The call to the world pool had taken us by surprise, and Keith and I hadn’t known we would be at the front line overnight. We had brought no clothes or bedding, just a bag with film and camera batteries. I was wearing only a thin cotton T-shirt, and Keith had a safari shirt. We slept on the sand, half-sheltered from the wind by an armored personnel carrier, covered by a piece of flat cardboard we’d scavenged. But I fell asleep with a smile on my face, and it wasn’t because of Keith next to me. That MiG! I was thinking. Great stuff!

We were in the middle of nowhere, so we couldn’t ship the film back to Tel Aviv for broadcast. That would have to wait till we got out of Egypt. I couldn’t wait to look at the film.

The next day, October 22, 1973, to our incredible disappointment, a cease-fire was declared. The savings in lives and property didn’t occur to me. This was a disaster, I thought. What good would great war film be if there was peace? Who would care, except the archives? The story had moved on. Now the TV stations would want film showing peaceful scenes of soldiers waiting by their tanks, praying, calling home, smiling, joking. They would want images of convoys of armored vehicles returning across the canal to Israel, happy soldiers giving victory signs and smoking cigarettes, relieved Egyptian fellahin offering oranges and tea to the departing invaders. The tank battle was history. Peace! Keith and I were devastated.

We went to Sharon and told him we needed to get a flight back to Tel Aviv immediately. Could he arrange a jeep and a military flight from the desert airfield? We needed to get our film back now!

It was then that I got an insight into Ariel Sharon that stayed with me forever and informed all my subsequent reporting on this controversial army general who became an even more controversial defense minister and then prime minister. When we anxiously told him we needed to get out right away because the fighting was over, Sharon laughed. “Cease-fire?” he said. “Not yet. Stay here. Come with me to Ismailiya.”

“But the government has agreed on a cease-fire,” I said.

He laughed again and raised an eyebrow.

As it turned out, the general was right. The cease-fire broke down immediately. It was never clear who resumed firing. I can only say it was no surprise to Sharon. He led his men in a last charge along the canal to the very entrance to Ismailiya, but two days later, on October 24, another cease-fire was declared, and this time it stuck. By now, though, we were back in Tel Aviv with our scoop.

What I understood about Sharon was that he would never get enough. He would always want more, another mile, another success, another victory. He was winning, he wanted to keep fighting, and everybody above him, the army commanders, the government leaders, was holding him back. This was Ariel Sharon. An inspiring leader, a bulldozer with no brake pedal.

Later, Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, who called Ariel Sharon the Israeli army’s number one soldier, told Keith that if the crossing of the canal had failed, Sharon would have been court-martialed for disobeying orders. Instead, Dayan said, Sharon was a hero, and after that war Israel needed a hero very badly.

I was beginning to learn the awful exhilaration of the battlefield, where careers are made and lives are ruined or lost. I enjoyed the anarchy and the adrenaline, but I never went as far down that dangerous road as Tim Page, the Vietnam photographer. After being seriously wounded for the third time, he was offered the chance to write a book that would, once and for all, take the glamour out of war. He turned it down, saying: “Jesus, take the glamour out of war? How the hell can you do that? You can’t take the glamour out of a tank burning or a helicopter blowing up. It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex. War is good for you.”*

War is good for you? How dumb is that? Today I’d ask, What about the victims? Sure, we film them, even feel sorry for them, but who are they? After we take their pictures, do we even bother to think of them again?

Back then, however, with no preparation for war, I was swept along by the drama and asked few questions. I was slow to understand the import of what I was witnessing. When an Egyptian soldier surrendered to our jeep on the pool trip, he lifted up his robe, and at first I had no idea what he was holding in the hand that was cupped to his stomach. It was something red and streaky-pale and mushy. It looked like raw meat. It was his guts spilling out of a bullet wound. Soldiers used my T-shirt to blindfold him. I put my arm around his shoulders to steady him as he bounced up and down on the jeep. He had an IV drip in his arm that ran dry. He kept nodding at it with wide, terrified eyes, telling me, “Finish, finish.” There was nothing I could do but keep filming. Keith helped the medics take him away, but soon we were told he had died. I felt I had landed in another world, a third or fourth dimension. I didn’t know things like this were possible, yet I was in the thick of it, filming, staying calm, aloof even, doing my job.

Looking back, I can’t say I enjoyed the horrors of war, but I do believe war engaged the senses in a way I had never experienced. I had never seen a warplane drop a bomb before, except in the movies, and I’d never felt a barrage of mortar shells shake the ground, or heard the whine of a shell overhead or the crack of a bullet close by, let alone seen or smelled a smoking body next to a burning tank. I’d never imagined what a man’s guts look like when they spill through a hole in his stomach, or the expression on his face as he holds them in his hands and asks for help.

Since my initiation in the Yom Kippur War, I have met desperate people all over the globe — people without choices and without solutions, people to whom the platitude “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right” has no meaning, because it won’t be all right, and they know it. The more I have seen of such people, the more distorted my youthful view of war has come to seem. What was I thinking anyway? Were my perceptions part of an extreme zero-sum game, in which another person’s misfortune means you value your own life more? Or were they just plain stupid, like the comment by Tim Page, which shows just how far removed young men can be from what war is really all about — pain, needless suffering, and mindless hatred?

Excerpted from "Breaking News" by Martin Fletcher. Copyright © 2008 Martin Fletcher. Reprinted with permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved.

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