intellect. Maybe it’s genetic. If my father could deal with his situation, I can deal with mine.”
And even though his father’s experience highlights for him the necessity of Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland, Tailer says it also has been a lesson in fairness and tolerance for him. He does not hold his father’s history as an excuse to hate or punish Arabs, even those who are fighting against him.
“I get crazy if I see someone mistreating another person. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Arab or not,” says Tailer. “It drives me crazy because of knowing what my father was subjected to. I was very clear with my soldiers: no violence or raising a hand to anyone and honor the other person. There was no veering from procedure among my staff or my soldiers. They knew I would lose my cool if that happened. I was very cut-and-dried on that issue. No wild west. We do what we have to do, go in and get out. The border can be messy and things can get violent but if you don’t need to be violent for the mission, that’s where the boundary lies. I don’t tie in the Palestinian history to my father’s. Their story is about nationalism and independence and not about genocide or murdering a nation. There’s no connection between the two histories whatsoever,” he says.
While he and his father were closer to the political right during their younger years, they’ve moderated and both agree that a two-state solution, one Jewish, one Arab, is the only chance for peaceful cohabitation in the region.
“After I went into the army I never feared Arabs, and that’s not from a macho place. I understood with time the differences in mentalities the two sides have. I don’t fear them,” says Tailer. “I have a lot of Arab friends. I’m not afraid. I don’t hate. I’m not willing to put myself into the realm of hatred. I’m not willing to hate them because that’s the lowest form of emotion I could have. It’s not a logical feeling, it comes from emotion, and I’m not willing to conduct my affairs from an emotional place. I had no Arab friends during my childhood. The concept of the Palestinian problem formulated after the military service when I realized that to be right about this country isn’t enough. I defined it out of my world of values: to continue to maintain a Jewish state with a Jewish majority state to protect us, we must turn into a two-state solution. I must say that I have concluded that not from the Palestinian distress that surely exists, but mainly the emerging reality of an ongoing conflict unbridgeable between the two [Palestinians and Israelis].”
With his last fight four years behind him, Tailer is and has been back where he prefers to be, in the realm of his family. While he may get excited talking with members of his unit, remembering the stories of their past exploits, this is where he lives, in the civilian world, working, taking care of his family, taking long runs with his dogs, dozens of kilometers, alone with his thoughts. While Tailer says he prefers to look forward, it is his family’s history and his own memories that have informed him of his duty, his sense of belonging and of who he is and where he should be.
“I also have the feeling that this is the only country for the Jews… I know what can happen to us without a country. I know it’s very important for us to stay here and see our future and children’s futures here. And that’s not from a place of idealism. It’s because I know what could be. I see it through my father’s history. Living somewhere else is not an option for me.”
Even if that requires that he continue to live fused, both soldier and civilian, waiting for the next call-up. Or that years from now, if the conflicts are not resolved, his son may also have to do the same.
Chapter 11: Into the Deep
At a dive spot called Karpata on the island of Bonaire, there’s an old anchor in about thirty feet of water embedded in the rock and coral that some believe was a ship’s last effort to steady itself in an unyielding storm but that eventually snapped under the strain of wind and waves.
If you follow the chain from the anchor’s eye over the reef’s ledge it will lead, like an earnest promise, into the secrets of the deep. On this day, the waves are choppy as we make our surface swim to the spot above where we know the anchor to be. We give each other the signal to descend, thumbs pointed down, and then drop beneath the surface like pebbles sinking in a pond. There’s a small pressure against our chests as we displace the increasingly colder and darker water around us.
We are slightly flared, like free-falling skydivers, but the only air we can feel is in the high-pressure cylinders strapped to our backs and the nitrox bottles clipped beneath us on the D-rings of our web harnesses, which, with 32 percent concentration of oxygen, will be toxic at the depth we’re going to but life-sustaining in the shallows of our decompression time, once—if—we make it back up.
For my friend and me, fellow dive master and former sniper in the Dutch army Sebastiaan Schoonhoven, this is not just a foolish endeavor but nearly an idiotic one, yet we feel compelled to do it anyway, to test our courage, to test our limits, to flout the laws of physics and physiology, lab mice in control of our own destiny, trying to learn how far, how deep, you must go to finally forget.
Schoonhoven is the first person I meet when I arrive one early May morning in 2009 at the Bonaire dive shop where he is already a dive master and where I will be training to become one.
“Can I help you?” he asks me warily as I walk around the open foyer area, before the other employees get there. He and I each came to this rocky, scrubby little island in the Dutch Antilles under different circumstances but for similar reasons: we are seeking some closure to the wars that still haunt us.
As a sniper, or, as the Dutch say, a long-distance shooter, with the Netherlands army’s 11th Air Mobile Brigade, he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. But he’s happy to draw the distinctions between us. Within minutes of learning about our common conflict zones he tells me, without a whiff of irony, “I hate journalists.”
“Get in line,” I tell him. It’s not like I haven’t heard the sentiment before.
Over the next few weeks I only see Schoonhoven sporadically, as he’s the shop’s primary boat driver and dive master, while I, as a forty-six-year-old man, begin my Karate Kid–type diving apprenticeship, in which I paint, fill air cylinders, haul empty tanks, repair scuba gear, fix boat docks and even serve rum punch for Monday-night appreciation mixers with the customers, all in exchange for the knowledge and training I need to become a dive master myself.
For me, as I mentioned earlier, it’s a useful and voluntary exile from my Los Angeles home, following the slow, whimpering death of my last relationship, and an attempt to outrun my growing sense of self-hatred stemming from the mistakes I feel I made as a combat correspondent.
Schoonhoven’s circumstances are similar only in the sense of needing an urgent escape from bad judgments. Following his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Schoonhoven became increasingly restless.
“I needed to drink and drink, one beer after another,” he tells me one day while we’re filling tanks together at the shop, “just so I could fall asleep.” I’m thoroughly familiar with the process. Insomnia and alcohol and drug abuse are the holy trinity of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Later, after he begins to trust me more, Schoonhoven tells me over a few beers after work at a bar called Cities that back in Holland he had started drinking more heavily, using recreational drugs and getting into fights.
“It’s exciting,” he says after taking a sip of his beer and looking out over the water, almost nostalgic. “You’re all pumped up and hitting each other but don’t really feel anything because of the drinking and other things.”
But Schoonhoven knew he couldn’t continue this way for long. Since he was also newly married, he had to be concerned with more than just himself. When his wife, Carolien, a schoolteacher, was offered a job teaching in Bonaire, the couple thought that leaving Holland might be a good way to give them both a fresh start. She would teach, he would drive a boat and lead divers underwater and both of them hoped they could leave the wars behind.
