by Kevin Sites
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.[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 Organizati
on (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-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.