“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. [30] “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.”
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.[31] 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-
