Kevin Sites - The Things They Cannot Say

“The parents didn’t want her going with us,” he says, “so I tell him we can’t take her, that’s kidnapping. Put her down, we gotta roll.” Reluctantly the medic put her down in disbelief. They got back in their Humvee and drove silently back to their base. Once there Goins said he was overcome by the gravity of the decision he made to leave both girls to die. He says that when he saw his brigade commander he couldn’t contain his tears.

“I just left two little girls behind,” he explained. For the next two hours, Goins said, the brigade commander, Colonel David Sutherland, drove him around in a Humvee, inside the base perimeter, talking him through it.

It was an incident in which “Mo,” the trained soldier, had to make the decision, but “Morris,” the empathetic man, had to suffer its consequences. Goins knows that while imperfect, this psychological firewall has allowed him to be at peace with himself, both morally and professionally.

Most important, though, he believes it lets him be the officer that his men can respect but also the human being to whom they can relate.

Goins knows that when his year at Harvard is done, he will likely be sent to war again, but this time he will command an entire combat brigade rather than just a battalion. [27] In the U.S. military an army battalion is usually five hundred to six hundred soldiers divided among three to five companies. A brigade is typically made up of three thousand to five thousand soldiers divided among three or more battalions. With each promotion the responsibilities multiply, more lives are at stake and the balance between soldier and man becomes harder to maintain.

“Emotionally I’m ready to deploy, but do I have enough in my well to survive? My body armor is in my garage, it’s ready to go,” he says. “But your well is not just yours as a commander. Everyone is dipping in it and everyone’s runs dry at some point.”

But if his well does run dry, he can take comfort in the fact that there will be another Goins to take his place. His son, C.J., is currently a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

After completing his National Security Fellowship at Harvard, Colonel Morris Goins was made commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division (Alaska). The brigade deployed to Afghanistan in January 2012 and is operating as Task Force Spartan in a highly dangerous region near the eastern city of Khost and the border with Pakistan.

The conflict is only three weeks old (and will last only a month) but, at least in Lebanon, it has been spectacularly destructive. When I meet Major Lior Tailer at a western base in Galilee in August 2006, the thirty-eight-year-old reservist already looks war weary. But considering the high operational tempo of his 609th Reserve Infantry Unit, it’s understandable. It’s been mission after mission across the border into Lebanon, usually at night, seeking out Hezbollah bunkers and trying to destroy them in advance of a larger Israel invasion force currently being mounted. The unit has reportedly killed sixty fighters so far and taken ten prisoners without a single loss of their own. Part of that, Tailer knows, is because of the unit’s experience. Even though reservists like him have left their civilian lives suddenly to put on their IDF (Israel Defense Forces) uniforms again after Emergency Call-Up Order 8, they are not new to Lebanon. [28] In Israel, Order 8 is issued to call up or activate military reserve units during times of large-scale military action or imminent threats to the nation. Like Tailer, many of them have fought across the border before, specifically during the 1986–2000 invasion and occupation of south Lebanon.

“It’s the same Lebanon, it’s the same terrain,” he says during my interview with him. “The difference is in the quantity and quality of the weapons we face.”

According to Tailer, the most deadly weapons, for the IDF, are the broad range of antitank missiles Hezbollah has acquired, including American-made TOWs, which they buy on the black market. [29] “TOW” is an acronym for the American-made tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missile.

“It’s complicated,” says Tailer, from personal experience. “It’s not army versus army warfare. They [Hezbollah] do have an organized fighting doctrine but it’s not based on making contact. It’s more of guerrilla warfare tactics. They want to draw you into an area where they have booby traps and they can use their antitank missiles.”

He believes the only way to find them effectively is to outlast them in a war of nerves.

“The name of the game is patience,” says Tailer. “You have to be methodical, moving forward slowly, and see who makes the first mistake, then capitalize on it.”

For Tailer and other reservists who’ve suddenly made the shift from citizens to soldiers again, the process is both natural and unsettling. Here at the base, in between operations they sleep, play cards, smoke and talk about their “other” lives.

For most of them, they’re lives they just left after getting Order 8.

Reservists call it “flipping the bowl,” meaning that you have a nice table set with plates, napkins and bowls of food, then all of a sudden it’s turned upside down and the whole thing is a mess, as if the tablecloth has been pulled out from under the setting.

“Emergency Call-Up Order 8, this is a rare animal that is both particular and peculiar to Israeli society,” says Tailer. “It’s understood they don’t use this for superfluous reasons. If you get one, the gravity of it makes the switch for you. It’s not an easy moment. It’s a defining moment in your life. It will be the difference between everything that came before and everything that came after.”

What came before for men like Tailer was history, a complex set of circumstances initiated by prejudice and hatred, leading to a multinational migration here, to this place now called Israel. It’s a nation so steeped in conflict and struggle that only the very young or very old are really free of the obligation, when called upon, to kill and die to preserve it. This has also meant that for many in Israel a large portion of their lives will be spent with their identities fused. They are both soldiers and civilians, not either one or the other.

I seek Tailer out again four years after first meeting him on the Lebanese border in 2006 while I’m reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict that will become known in Israel as the Second Lebanon War. A friend who lives in Israel has tracked him down at his home in Haifa for me. I pose these questions about how his past has shaped him both as a civilian and as a soldier. The story he tells is a rich but not completely unique history for many Israelis of Eastern European heritage. He says his father, Yaakov, now eighty-four, is a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family under the Nazi occupation in Ukraine during World War II.

“My father ended up in a place worse than a concentration camp or work camp. They rounded up all of the Jews and had them walk to villages near the Ukraine border and sealed them in. They couldn’t get out so they starved to death or perished from illness.