The Things They Cannot Say (21 page)

While the training was brutal, Tailer says he didn't try to muscle through it, but succeeded by learning to depend on others.

“You're with those people twenty-four hours a day. I know people in the dark by their shadows. You sleep hugging each other because it's so cold you seek the body warmth. You don't erase those things from your memory. How a person talks or walks in the dark. Say you're walking behind someone for fifty kilometers. you see his back and head and shadow for fifty kilometers, his movements, you remember that, how he runs, if he snores, how he sleeps, what he likes to eat. It's fifteen people you're with in intense, tough situations. You have to trust them, that they'll guard you while you sleep, that you'll help each other during missions. You're intertwined,” says Tailer.

But that bond can also be swiftly broken.

“If someone does something that breaks your trust, he's out quickly. There's no second chance in the military world. It's a trust that evolves and is built gradually. Distrust can start with someone not coming to guard duty to relieve the other person on time. Or he didn't save food for someone when he said he would. The team coughs him out. Trust is very, very strong and important in commando units where you know that the only thing to save you in certain situations isn't your weapons, but your people and trust.”

Within just two years, Tailer moved from a minor position to chief staff officer of operations, leading men who actually fought in the field. After Israel invaded Lebanon a second time in 1982 (the first was in 1978) in response to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) attack along the northern border, Israel maintained what they called a “security zone” inside southern Lebanon. Tailer served there both as a soldier, in 1987, and as an officer for two years after.

“They [the PLO] were afraid of engagement, but there were a lot of land mines laid down by them. A lot. I was lucky that other units got hit by mines and not me. The first time I remember was when we were a ‘fresh' young unit in Yeshiva. We hear over the radio there was an explosion. That they are bringing in wounded. A South Lebanon Army soldier arrives on a stretcher.
*
He is as good as dead. There are four medics working on him and they know it's over. It's clear he won't make it. They call a chopper to evacuate him and it takes half an hour to get there because we're inside Lebanon. After half an hour I remember”—he laughs—“the pilot radioed in, ‘What, he didn't die yet?' As a young soldier, it was the first time I came face-to-face with life and death. It left its mark. For every soldier there's a first time. There are much rougher stories and rougher incidents but every person remembers his first time. At that moment I understood it can all end in a fraction of a second. For me it was a big deal. Striking.”

Later during his tours of duty, Tailer would have to both kill and see his own soldiers die. But, he says, it was not the killing and dying that would deter him from making the army a career. It was an incident of betrayal with which he was not even involved but that carried a disturbing message for him, undermining the foundation of his identity as a soldier.

On November 25, 1987, a year after Tailer was conscripted into the army, two Palestinian guerrillas launched a daring surprise attack using motorized hang gliders launched from south Lebanon in a nighttime infiltration across the Israeli border. They were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, pistols and hand grenades. One of the gliders landed back inside the Israeli security zone in Lebanon and its pilot was killed by Israeli troops. The other landed near an IDF camp near the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona. There the surviving guerrilla fired on a passing army truck, killing the driver and wounding the passenger, a female soldier, before moving on to the camp itself a few hundred meters away. The sentry reportedly ran away after the guerrilla fired on him, allowing him into the camp, where he sprayed rifle fire and threw grenades into Israeli tents. He killed five and wounded seven before being shot and killed by an Israeli officer who had also been wounded in the attack. It was later determined that an intelligence warning about the Palestinian glider plan had been ignored. But while there was much criticism in the Israeli press about the missteps that allowed the deadly attack to proceed, only the sentry who abandoned his post was charged. While Tailer wasn't at the camp, the aftermath of the incident presented an uncomfortable truth.

“What was going on was the officers were covering their asses. I was an officer at the time, albeit a low-ranking one, and I felt that at some point during the investigation they had lost their direction. It was about ass covering and I didn't feel comfortable with that,” Tailer says. “I felt that if something happened to me, nobody would back me. There was no backup. I was good at what I did but after that I decided not to continue with a military career.”

Tailer was released from regular service in August 1990 and began his new life as a civilian, at peace with his choice.

“The average Israeli goes into the army at eighteen. He goes from one framework to another, school system to army. You're yearning for the freedom after that,” says Tailer. “That's why so many go off to India and South America for extended trips after the army. They want to wake up in the morning, smoke pot, do nothing all day, have no plan. It's the antithesis of what they've just been through. Everyone talks about what they'll do towards the end of the army, where they'll travel and what they'll do. So looking forward to the travels means it's very rare to feel a letdown once you leave.”

Anecdotal evidence seems to support Tailer's assumption.

“Among Israelis I have heard a widely circulated belief that Israel has escaped the worst effects of post-combat wildness by sending its young veterans abroad for novelty and adventure before they settle down as sober civilians upon their return,” wrote Dr. Jonathan Shay in his book
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
.

Tailer enrolled at the University of Haifa and received a bachelor's degree in the history of the Middle East and got married just three years after leaving the army. He first met his wife in secondary school, but they went to their separate army units after graduation. Fortunately she was stationed near Tailer's parents' house in the north. He saw her once on weekend leave from his post and they were a couple from then on. They married at age twenty-five. Both were still students living with her parents, going to school, working odd jobs, eventually buying their own place. Their first daughter was born only a year later.

Tailer began his career selling cars, appliances and electronics, but was hired by multinational consumer product giant Unilever in 1995 and is still with them today. He and his wife now have three children, two daughters, seventeen and fourteen, and a six-year-old son whom Tailer dotes on, calling him the “jewel of his crown.”

Like his father, he finds refuge within his family, which makes it difficult for the one month every year that he has to put on his uniform and report for reservist duty, required of most Israeli males until the age of forty-three to forty-five.

“It's tough to put on a uniform and leave your civilian life behind. Making the switch in terms of career always hurts something. If you're a student it takes a toll, same with career and same with family,” says Tailer. “It's a very socio-matic [automatic] part of life here. You leave everything and go off to reserves. Your son or daughter is sick and my wife needs to handle the kids and house and joint issues together and I'm off in reserve duty. It's not easy.”

And what's just as difficult as leaving family, says Tailer, is the reception reservists often get from the IDF regulars and career officers.

“It's not enough that you come and do the service, but then you're not appreciated and sometimes you're even treated badly. You come from the civilian mode of approaching things logically and you've built up a certain level of maturity and knowledge. We work in civilian companies where calculations are based upon education and knowledge. As you get older you start asking, ‘Why?' At eighteen you don't do that. Later you ask, ‘Why do I have to?' As you get older you get reserve soldiers who are CEOs of companies who don't necessarily accept everything as de facto. It's not easy.”

This conflict underscores the fused-identity issues reservists like Tailer face that regular IDF soldiers do not. Tailer must live in both worlds, civilian and military, simultaneously. What happens when both his family and his fellow soldiers need him? For whom does his loyalty come first?

That test came in 2006 with Emergency Call-Up Order 8. Tailer was asked to lead his men across the border into Lebanon to confront Hezbollah once again. According to Tailer, an Order 8 usually happens in three stages: First is monitoring the chain of events, usually an escalation in violence that might necessitate calling up the reserves. He says this is usually a frustrating period where you track news events and try to figure out if and when you'll go into battle. Second is the call-up. It's usually done by telephone and it requires changing your mind-set almost immediately, ripping you from your family and civilian orbit to focus on your duty as a citizen soldier. Finally, during the third phase your orders are cut and you become focused on your mission and the health and well-being of the soldiers.

“My gear is in one kit. When I have to leave the house, everything's already set aside in the shed, not in the house. I have my kids' pictures in my wallet, but I don't have any sort of ceremony or ritual. If it's once a year, no problem. Hugs, kisses and such are the norm if it's normal reserves. But when it's war, that's different. I can't say it happens each time I go, but when there's war it's different and feels different. My wife cries. The kids are tense and ask questions—‘When will you come back, can you call, where are you going?' They walk me outside. It's very hard for me. The last one, 2006, was really hard. You're not young anymore. You have a bigger responsibility at that stage to family.”

Tailer is reflective about what is at stake when he actually goes to war as a reservist.

“When I came to reserve duty at age thirty-five, I was much more frightened than at a younger age. I knew the meaning of things. When I was young it wasn't a factor, fear wasn't an issue. We wanted to fight with the enemy at a younger age. There was fear, but it was pushed aside, even though we knew it could get us at any time. When you have a lot more to lose, children or family, there's much more fear. In youth I pushed it aside, the thoughts and feelings. The fear came in as a factor at an older age. Doing what I did at eighteen would frighten me to death today.”

Tailer may be a keen example of the mature Israeli reservist, a “quiet soldier” who does his duty but walls off the memories, emotions and details from his family, keeping them separate so that one may not taint the other.

“I do not share with my wife and children my experiences of war. My wife hears about my military character, especially in meetings with team members. But in my opinion there is no need to share those same experiences. They have no effect on the establishment of our family unit,” he says, matter-of-fact.

“Yes, it's a part of me. But I'm not someone who chatters. I don't talk. I don't know why but it's just the way it is. Some people talk about it and pick it apart and analyze. It's not something I feel I need to share, not at work, not with my son. If he asks I'll tell him but I don't feel a need to tell him. I don't feel it will help him with developing his character. He'll experience his own life stories alone. We do talk about it with the unit. That's where it all comes out. It's not holding back from my family or not sharing. When you're in a team you build a body that is very closed. The togetherness is tight and a lot of things stay inside. There's a lot of knowledge and experience that we share that you can only talk about and go over with a person who was there,” he says.

“If I have to sit here and explain to you about this and that in Lebanon, a story of one minute will go to three hours. I have to explain what happened, what the staff relations were between this one and that one. In the battalion it's a given,” Tailer says, becoming more animated, his pace quickening as he talks about his unit, obviously feeling the excitement and camaraderie again by just mentioning it.

“It's understood. It's easier to open it up with those who experienced it with me and who know the facts. Lots of times when people on the side listen to our conversations, it's the first time they've heard those kinds of stories.

“I carry with me a lot of incidents. However, despite the scenes that go with me, and I remember them well, they have no traumatic influence for me. Like I said before, I'm the son of a Holocaust survivor who saw his father and mother and two brothers murdered before his eyes. The repression mechanism, that probably works better for me than for others. I don't have trauma that I can't live with or that I can't suppress. I always look forward. I'm less interested in the past. I don't live on good or bad memories. I'm interested in the future and not the past.”

D
espite the mounting evidence that combat veterans may benefit from sharing their stories, rather than staying silent, Tailer's “repress it” mind-set is more typical than we may think and not necessarily a pathway to future problems, according to retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman. In his book
On Combat
, his follow up to
On Killing
, Grossman argues that soldiers like Tailer, from well-disciplined armies, regardless of nationality, are not likely to become time bombs of PTSD and are often the very antithesis of the postwar narrative we expect them to fulfill.

“They're neither victims nor villains, neither macho man nor pity party,” said Grossman during an interview with me. “The vast majority do not suffer post-traumatic stress. We don't have to undo the conditioning to kill [when soldiers return home]. It's discipline that keeps the returning veteran from destroying their own societies. We also have to find balance in telling the story of the returning warrior, don't attack them like post-Vietnam but don't turn them into victims either.”