Enter the cockpit of decorated IAF fighter pilot Ze’ev Raz, commander of the legendary Operation Opera that destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor.

“Five hundred meters. The gunsight is unlocked, sitting perfectly on his exhaust nozzle. Suddenly, he breaks left and up. He saw me—or someone warned him. That’s when I see them. When the Air Force realized that Mirages were flying on both sides, they painted ours with two yellow triangles, the Star of David, only visible at close range. I was this close to shooting down one of our own. To this day, I don’t know who it was that I almost shot down. It’s a strange feeling being proud of something you didn’t do.”

With powerful narrative prose, When the Sky Was Ours toes the line between the heroic and the mundane as it follows the personal story of retired IAF Colonel Ze’ev “Zevik” Raz: decorated war veteran, wing commander, pioneer F-16 Falcon pilot, and graduate of the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program—aka TOPGUN.

A modern-day Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, Raz recounts a riveting pilot’s odyssey, from TOPGUN training in California with the best the US Navy had to offer, and flying cutting-edge fighter jets on high-stakes missions over Iraq, to the two-and-a-half years he commanded the Israeli Air Force flight academy—one of the most prestigious military flight academies in the world.