14 March 1990
 
Masada
 
The Pakistani Supreme Court judges fired by ex-strongman Mussharif have been reinstated, and the oily bastard Nawaz Sharif has stared down the elected President of Pakistan, “10%” Zardari. I guess that is good, if the nuclear arsenal is secure this morning.
 
I don’t like the passivity of watching things play out there any more than the new Administration does. I’ll put that aside for the moment, like I have the Mexican problem, but trust me, some people around town are plenty freaked about that.
 
I can’t take another day of being a financial punching bag. Mr. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was on the television last night. It was an unprecedented interview, quite candid. The backdrop of the formal marble meeting rooms of the headquarters down on the Mall were intended to reassure us, and in a way, it did.
 
The Chairman told me that everything was going to be fine, if they stabilized the banking system, and we should see the decline settle out by the end of the year, and then see the return of growth in the next.
 
There is going to be a bit of a challenge there, which as he notes, is going to involve reigning in the money supply and raising interest rates to combat the inevitable inflation.
 
It is a comfort to know that we are on the same sheet of music on that, and it means we better get our collective asses in gear to get ready, since the Fed is not a precision device like the flying machines we used to launch off our aircraft carriers.
 
In fact, listening to the Fed Chairman made me think that this is closely akin to watching someone try to play a grand piano with a sledgehammer. Accordingly, I am making plans to move forward and gamble on the future.
 
I think that is good. Like I say, I am tired of waiting around for things to fall on our heads. There was a time when I did not feel disempowered, which may have been wildly illogical and associated with the ignorance of youth. But it was fun.
 
That is why I turned away from the Fed Chairman in his marble fortress downtown, and to the desert along the shore of the Dead Sea, twenty years ago.
 
It is a challenge writing about this in words that are approachable. There are two ways to do it; you can translate on the fly, which renders the cryptic and ironic military shorthand stiffly formal, which it is not, or provide crib notes and let the real sound of it roll on. I’ll provide a glossary at some point, but not this morning. It would start with the titles that formed our names. I was Spy, of course, and Chop was the young supply officer whose name derived from his position as the Supply Corps Officer, or “Porkchop.” A “CAGMO” is the Carrier Air Group Maintenance Officer. The Ship is the mighty USS Forrestal, or FID, from the commissioning motto “First in Defense.”
 
The rest of the names and systems are straightforward enough- CAG would be The Man himself, our Commander and the World’s Greatest Attack Pilot, and his Deputy would hence be DCAG, whose callsign was Grog.
 
This is from a time not so long ago, in a place that is half a world away.
 


(Masada Cable Car)
 
14 March 1990, In Port Haifa
 
By 1030, it is clear that what we need is a road trip to clear the evil humors lurking in the temporal lobes from the night before. Chop and CAGMO are going to Tel Aviv to look for deep discount diamonds, so eight of us set off for Masada with CAG in the lead and Deputy on the Wing.
 
After some minor confusion in getting out of town we find the four-lane and blast off toward Jerusalem. I m navigating and the maps we have do not have route numbers on them, being more of the National Geographic persuasion than the usual filling station map. I have plenty of information on the map about the Dead Sea Scrolls but am hurting for the correct turns. We detour around the capital and head up the road for Jericho.
 
We roar through blasted nothingness. Bedouins living in tents just off the road. Sheep grazing on thorns on the ridge lines. Badlands. Then off the tabletop and we roll downhill, down through sea level, down to the lowest spot on earth.
 
At the base of the hill an enterprising Israeli has pulled in a trailer, erected an awning, placed some chairs and opened the Lowest Diner in the World.
 
Lutt-man cracks we should dig a basement for the place and open a bar. We could call it “The Scroll Lounge” and really have the lowest place ever.
 
We stop at the marker and have our pictures taken. The inscription on the side claims we are 415 meters, or 1362 feet, below sea level. Then we mount up again in the two sedans and take a right turn on Route One and head south, hugging the shore of the Dead Sea, the water brilliant blue, the barbed wire un-weathered on the security fence.
 
This is a place of raw, wild, blasted and unearthly beauty. After 55 Kilometers we see an immense flat-topped mesa in the distance. We are approaching Masada.
 
Masada occupies the entire top of an isolated mesa near the southwest shore of the Dead Sea. It is a rhomboid-shaped rock that towers 1,424 feet (434 m) above the level of the sea. Which means if the Med ever came this way in another Great Flood, the summit would be an island sticking up about eighty feet. The table-top of the mesa has an area of about 18 acres. Some authorities hold that the site was settled at the time of the First Temple (c. 900 BC), but of course that is not the time for which it is remembered.
 
This is the place of Herod the Builder, 37–4 BC, king of Judea under the Romans, and for its resistance to the Roman siege in AD 72–73.
 
 Although other rulers liked the site as a place of refuge, it was Herod,who made it a royal citadel. His constructions included two ornate palaces (one of them on three levels), heavy walls, defensive towers, and aqueducts that brought water to cisterns holding nearly 200,000 gallons of potable water.
 
After Herod's death (4 BC), the fort was captured by the Romans, but the Zealots, a Jewish sect that staunchly opposed domination by Rome, took it by surprise in AD 66. The steep slopes of the mountain made Masada impregnable.
 
Following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70), the Masada garrison, last remnant of Jewish rule in Palestine, refused to surrender and was besieged by the Roman legion X Fretensis under Flavius Silva.
 
The Tenth- the Straits Legion- was raised by Augustus at the end of the Republic and was recorded as being in existence as late as 410 AD, which is not a bad run for a military outfit. Their symbols were the bull, the holy animal of the goddess Venus, a ship, the god Neptune, and a boar. That would have gratified the VA-37 Bulls and the VF-11 Red Rippers, who share the Boar, but none of those guys were on this little trip.
 
Masada was a tough nut, but the 10th Legion was taking no crap off the Jews. It took an army of nearly 15,000 legionnaires and almost two years to subdue the fortress. The assault was conducted by way of a sloping ramp of earth and stones to bring their soldiers within reach of the stronghold.
 
The defenders, a thousand men, women and children, watched the ramp slowly mount up from the desert floor. Under he leadership of Eleazar ben Jair, the Zelaots chose death over surrender, drawing lots for the order of their demise the night before the final attack was expected. When the sturdy legionnaires of the 10th pushed the wooden bridge pushed over to join the ramp to the rampart, they found only two women and five children left alive to tell the tale of the mass suicide.
 
With brief interruptions in the 2nd, 5th and 6th centuries the place was abandoned until the creation of the State of Israel. The Arabs- and their Palestinian successors- called it As-Sabba (“The Accursed”).
 
What we saw from the car park below was the result of the excavations of Israeli archaeologists in the mid-1950s, the same time Egypt’s Nassar was pulling on the British Lion’s tail.
 
Throughout 1955 and 1956 Nasser pursued a number of policies that would frustrate British aims throughout the Middle East. He began to align Egypt with the Saudis, whose Royal Family was the hereditary enemy of the Hashemites of Jordan- and recently enough, the Transjordan on which soil we stood.
 
The British were ultimately ejected from the region they had ruled since World War One, and the Israelis began the remarkable transformation of their new state. The initial digs at Masada were followed by a massive effort in the early 1960’s, and orchestrated by a man named Yigael Yadin, assisted by thousands of volunteers from around the world.
 
In the 20th century Masada became a symbol of Jewish national heroism, and it is now one of Israel's most popular tourist attractions, and a place where newly-commissioned IDF officer take their oath of allegiance with low fly-bys by IAF jets coming out of the Negev Desert. .
 
We could have taken the “Snake Path” that winds up 900 ft to gain access to the lower fortress. We were touring, though, not on a pilgrimage. We took the cable car 1900 feet to the top. We wandered past the storehouses, looked at the palaces, and the cistern that still contained water. The sun is brilliant and the breeze refreshing. Among other wonders in a day filled with the extraordinary, I walk into the oldest extant Synagogue, one that served this garrison in the days of the Second Temple.
 

(Masada Annoted)
 
At the western edge of the plateau, we looked down at the Roman siege lines that snake six miles around the base of the mountain, and sealed the occupants up as the assault ramp was built.
 
Looking down, the outline of the Castra (military camps) are distinct. It is as it the last 1900 years never happened. The Roman ramp has weathered a bit, but it is right there, in your face, just at the Zealots last saw it.
 
It is eerie and real and tremendously moving. As we gazde down at the assault route I confess to CAG that I found myself drawn more to the solders of the 10th Legion who invested the place than to the Zealots who defended it.
 
CAG smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said softly "I was IN the 10TH Legion."
 
The tee-shirts for sale at the souvenir stand below read: "Masada shall not fall again." F-16s roar by on low-level training flights. This is a special and holy place.
 
DCAG has a flat on the highway headed back north; after some minor excitement in trying to find our where the spare is hidden we blast on.
 
The ride back to Tel Aviv is long and I dozed. When I awake, I provided erroneous directions to the hotel but we made it anyway.
 
We packed our bags on the run, as much has transpired in the business world since we have been away. Mark's wife Trish was hospitalized with an emergency gall bladder operation; Scooter is panicked about five new action items that the Staff has dreamed up.
 
We have to get back to work. The ride back up north to Haifa takes an hour and fifteen minutes. We wheel into the port complex and get the car parked where the Hertz people can find it..
 
The Senior Shore Patrol immediately buttonholes CAG, and begins the litany of woe from the night before. CAG changes from Dad to Commander. Boating is easy for a change and in the wink of an eye we are Naval Officers again. We clamber up the A-Com ladder and into the hangar bay and up to the 03-Level below the flight deck.
 
Up in the office we discover no mail and Deputy discovers his on-again orders are off again.
 
He is as low as I have seen him, and he wouldn't have looked out of place on a stool at the Scroll Lounge.
 
The events of the day have been catastrophic. The Conference on the 16th is back to being on the 15th. There are eighty things to do. This doesn't look good. Maybe I will get off the ship again and maybe I won't.
 
One thing is clear, however, this has been a power tour for the ages. The other thing is that when the ship pulls out of here, the next dry land on which I walk will be NAS Cecil Field, Jacksonville Florida.
 
It did not turn out that way, but it was something to think about as the 45th Marlboro of the day smoldered in the ashtray on my desk in Mission Planning.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com