The Things They Cannot Say (20 page)

Major Lior Tailer, Israel Defense Forces

609th Reserve Infantry Unit

The Wars in Lebanon (1989–90 and 2006)

Chapter 10: The Quiet Soldier

As a five-year-old boy knowing we were being hit directly by the Syrians, it had quite an effect. I remember my mom would set out clothing on a small bench in the house so that the minute there was an air-raid siren, we'd grab the pile of clothing and run down to the bomb shelter.

T
he conflict is only three weeks old (and will last only a month) but, at least in Lebanon, it has been spectacularly destructive. When I meet Major Lior Tailer at a western base in Galilee in August 2006, the thirty-eight-year-old reservist already looks war weary. But considering the high operational tempo of his 609th Reserve Infantry Unit, it's understandable. It's been mission after mission across the border into Lebanon, usually at night, seeking out Hezbollah bunkers and trying to destroy them in advance of a larger Israel invasion force currently being mounted. The unit has reportedly killed sixty fighters so far and taken ten prisoners without a single loss of their own. Part of that, Tailer knows, is because of the unit's experience. Even though reservists like him have left their civilian lives suddenly to put on their IDF (Israel Defense Forces) uniforms again after Emergency Call-Up Order 8, they are not new to Lebanon.
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Like Tailer, many of them have fought across the border before, specifically during the 1986–2000 invasion and occupation of south Lebanon.

“It's the same Lebanon, it's the same terrain,” he says during my interview with him. “The difference is in the quantity and quality of the weapons we face.”

According to Tailer, the most deadly weapons, for the IDF, are the broad range of antitank missiles Hezbollah has acquired, including American-made TOWs, which they buy on the black market.
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“It's complicated,” says Tailer, from personal experience. “It's not army versus army warfare. They [Hezbollah] do have an organized fighting doctrine but it's not based on making contact. It's more of guerrilla warfare tactics. They want to draw you into an area where they have booby traps and they can use their antitank missiles.”

He believes the only way to find them effectively is to outlast them in a war of nerves.

“The name of the game is patience,” says Tailer. “You have to be methodical, moving forward slowly, and see who makes the first mistake, then capitalize on it.”

For Tailer and other reservists who've suddenly made the shift from citizens to soldiers again, the process is both natural and unsettling. Here at the base, in between operations they sleep, play cards, smoke and talk about their “other” lives.

For most of them, they're lives they just left after getting Order 8.

Reservists call it “flipping the bowl,” meaning that you have a nice table set with plates, napkins and bowls of food, then all of a sudden it's turned upside down and the whole thing is a mess, as if the tablecloth has been pulled out from under the setting.

“Emergency Call-Up Order 8, this is a rare animal that is both particular and peculiar to Israeli society,” says Tailer. “It's understood they don't use this for superfluous reasons. If you get one, the gravity of it makes the switch for you. It's not an easy moment. It's a defining moment in your life. It will be the difference between everything that came before and everything that came after.”

What came before for men like Tailer was history, a complex set of circumstances initiated by prejudice and hatred, leading to a multinational migration here, to this place now called Israel. It's a nation so steeped in conflict and struggle that only the very young or very old are really free of the obligation, when called upon, to kill and die to preserve it. This has also meant that for many in Israel a large portion of their lives will be spent with their identities fused. They are both soldiers and civilians, not either one or the other.

I seek Tailer out again four years after first meeting him on the Lebanese border in 2006 while I'm reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict that will become known in Israel as the Second Lebanon War. A friend who lives in Israel has tracked him down at his home in Haifa for me. I pose these questions about how his past has shaped him both as a civilian and as a soldier. The story he tells is a rich but not completely unique history for many Israelis of Eastern European heritage. He says his father, Yaakov, now eighty-four, is a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family under the Nazi occupation in Ukraine during World War II.

“My father ended up in a place worse than a concentration camp or work camp. They rounded up all of the Jews and had them walk to villages near the Ukraine border and sealed them in. They couldn't get out so they starved to death or perished from illness.

“My father saw his two siblings [brothers] die on the death march to this place. Later, he buried his father, mother and remaining brother when they succumbed to starvation and illness. The thing that saved him was that before the war he had been sick and hospitalized with typhus [a bacterial infection] . . . During the war, when everyone was dying of it, he was already immune. His childhood illness saved his life but sentenced him to witness the death of his family. He even had to dig his father's grave with his own hands.

“At least when you get to a camp they kill you outright. At a work camp they work you and give you food,” says Tailer. “What they did to them was to round them up and leave them to die. There was no medical attention—nothing.” Tailer's father was there for two torturous years—from 1942 to 1944. He escaped to a Ukrainian village after his family died, where he worked on someone's farm in exchange for lodging and food. After the war he came back to his village and found nothing left. He lived in an orphanage in Romania before deciding to migrate to Israel.

He got there after first traveling through much of Europe, finally coming to Israel with the Irgun, or Irgun Zvai Leumi (the National Military Organization), also commonly known by its Hebrew acronym Etzel. The Irgun was a Jewish Zionist paramilitary group that conducted attacks against both Arabs and the British Mandate in Palestine from 1931 to 1948. Israel attempted to absorb the Irgun into the new national army, the IDF, but they initially refused to be assimilated and continued to operate independently.

Tailer's father was on board the
Altalena
, a weapons cargo ship that the Irgun had purchased and was using to bring weapons and supplies into Israel. When the
Altalena
arrived on Israel's shores in June of 1948, the IDF ordered the captain to surrender the ship and its cargo of weapons. When the ship's captain did not submit, the IDF fired an artillery round that struck the
Altalena
and set it on fire. The entire ship and its cargo was in danger of exploding like a giant ammunition dump. The
Altalena
's captain ordered the hundreds of Irgun fighters to abandon ship.

“He was on board the infamous
Altalena
weapons cargo ship,” Tailer says of his father, and when the dust cleared, he set foot on Israeli soil in 1948 with only the underwear he was wearing because he had to jump ship. He, like most of the other Irgun fighters, was finally integrated into the IDF.

“But they made him gain weight first because he was so thin from the war,” says Tailer. “He was immediately sent to the front lines. He always joked that if he'd been killed at the time, no one would've known. He didn't have any family left in the world.

“That's why he's a big family man. He loves home; the fridge is always bursting with food. He gets very emotional about things. A picture of a hungry child in Congo can tear him to bits.”

Tailer's mother was born in Haifa, Israel, but of a Czechoslovakian father and a Hungarian mother who had both fled Europe in 1933 just ahead of the Nazi rise to power. Their families, who stayed behind, were killed in Auschwitz.

Tailer's parents met at a party in Haifa and married shortly after. He worked for the electric company and she was a teacher. They eventually had three children, two boys and one girl, with Lior in the middle, “the sandwich,” he said. But his mother felt the need to help fulfill the Zionist dream of settling the “wild west,” which was more challenging than living in a big city like Haifa. So the family moved to Hatzor HaGlilit, a frontier town in northern Israel. The violence surrounding Israel touched Tailer at an early age, most notably during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when a coalition of Arab forces, led by Egypt and Syria, attacked on Judaism's holiest day, Yom Kippur.

“As a five-year-old boy knowing we were being hit directly by the Syrians, it had quite an effect. I remember my mom would set out clothing on a small bench in the house so that the minute there was an air-raid siren, we'd grab the pile of clothing and run down to the bomb shelter. There was a lot of tension in the shelter because families were together in them. It was the entire neighborhood. There was a lot of solidarity between people but also a lot of tension because of the small, cramped space. We helped each other but also a lot of fights broke out between neighbors and friends.”

Tailer says that despite the violence that surrounded him during his childhood, it was filled with the two essentials: learning and play.

“During my years growing up my mother bought every encyclopedia on the market,” says Tailer. “We had an entire wall at home that was full of encyclopedias. To me it was more about knowledge for the sake of knowledge, less about specific authors I would follow. I'd read the encyclopedia from cover to cover to garner knowledge. To this day there's still that wall at my parents' home.”

Tailer says he was introverted as a child, but not awkwardly so. While he read voraciously, he was also into sports, running, soccer, playing basketball.

“I loved to run and hike and sometimes in the past I would run and play soccer and go hiking all in the same day. I was out of the house a lot.”

It was a routine that would later serve him well when he joined the army.

“In the army I was one of the best physically fit guys in my unit and also in the officers' unit,” says Tailer.

In 1986, at age eighteen, Tailer was conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces for three years of “regular” service as required by Israeli law. But Tailer was not content to just be another soldier. His older brother had served in the legendary Golani Brigade and he was determined to do the same.
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“Golani is one of the three best divisions in the army. It's the unit that won the War of Independence for the country,” says Tailer. “Getting there is one thing and staying is another.

“You also have friends in other units and you know in other units it can be better. Easier,” he says. “For example, when you go three days without sleep and you're constantly training, you're sleeping standing up. Then you arrive at a tent camp after a long hike, and the officers say, ‘It's eight
P.M
., go shower and then sleep.' In those days, officers could do what they wanted. God help you if you got an officer who was slightly not okay in the head,” he says with a laugh. “It's not like that today. So the officer would tell you to sleep. After only a half an hour of sleep, they'd get you up and tell you to put on your uniform and go out again. That's something that can absolutely break you. Three days of continuous, grueling training is okay but when you've already showered and slept for half an hour you can lose it having to get up again and go.

“I remember nights out in pouring rain with the entire pack drenched and seeing homes up on hillsides off in the distance. I could see the coil lights of the space heater through the windows and I felt like I was going to break. Another night we slept in tents and it was raining and we were in a stream in a little valley and the tents were swept away with the stream and we were so tired we didn't care. Our officers tried to rouse us and they couldn't. We just wanted a few more minutes of sleep. The tents were gone, we were drenched and had no dry clothes. But we didn't care. They had to punch us to get us up. All of that is absolutely normal [for training]. Some people can take that in stride; others who seem really strong physically, after two nights of that they fall apart. It depends upon the person. Once during live ammo training, someone shot someone else out of sheer exhaustion.

“I took it all very easily,” says Tailer. “There wasn't a mission I missed. I was never hurt during training. The only thing that got to me but didn't break me was that I liked to sleep. A few nights like that without sleep would make me crazy. I would lean up against a wall and sleep standing up.”

But perhaps because of his mental toughness, even more than his physical stamina, Tailer made it into the unit and volunteered for Raven Golani, the unit's tank-hunter battalion.

“I chose it because that's what interested me at the time. It had a lot of sex appeal,” says Tailer. “We would get to drive around in Jeeps. As a young guy that's cool.”