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
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.”
Despite 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
“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.”
But Tailer’s post-conflict stoicism may be based on a different and more unique model, that of a people descended from a history of genocide, and it may render a different outcome for him as well.
“My father, for example,” says Tailer, “lost everything he had and buried his entire family. A person can go nuts from a single incident like I described of his background, but my father kept on living. I don’t think that what I did in the army, with all the trauma, was more than what my father experienced. There’s no comparison. Everybody deals with what he’s got. Good or bad. I look at it less from emotion, although I get more emotional hearing other people’s stories than my own, like my father breaking down over seeing a starving child but not over his own starvation. You push things away because you have to and you disconnect from the emotion and work from your
