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Levy's choice By Meron Rapoport Tags: yariv mozer  Two weeks after the start of the Second Lebanon War, Yariv Mozer, 30, owner of a production company in civilian life and a munitions officer in the reserves, received a telephone call from the commander of his artillery battalion. Mozer's battalion was part of Central Command and so was not called up, but his commander had a request. The munitions officer in a reserve battalion in Northern Command had gone into shock after a barrage of Hezbollah rockets landed on his unit. Perhaps Mozer could come to replace him? Mozer agreed, without a call-up notice - basically, as a volunteer. He packed his things and headed north. At the last minute, he also took his video camera. And thus was born the film "My First War" ("Hamilhama Harishona Sheli" - produced and edited by Yael Perlov, with support from Noga Communications, the Rabinowitz Foundation and Arte/ZDF), which will be screened next week at the DocAviv Festival. It is a film about people in the war, and especially about people after the war, about the scar this war left on their souls. A year and a half after it ended, the Second Lebanon War seems like an unsightly stain that someone hastened to scrub off his clothes. As if it never happened, as if it were an embarrassing incident everyone would prefer to forget. The reservists' protests died out some time ago, the Winograd Committee report melted away faster than the snow in Jerusalem, and Ehud Olmert is still prime minister. Not popular, but still prime minister. The protagonists of Mozer's movie, who were selected at random, also prefer to keep quiet, to try to convince themselves that life is going on as usual. Advertisement "I don't talk about the war with anyone, not even with my parents," says reserve sergeant Idan Taller, a medic in a tank battalion. But he can't bring himself to delete from his computer the pictures of congealed blood inside a tank that was struck, taken shortly after the bodies of the dead were removed. Of all those who appear in the film, one person in particular stands out: Lieutenant Colonel Ilan Levy, an artillery battalion commander in the regular army during the war and currently in charge of overseeing the reservists in the artillery corps. He captured Mozer's attention from day one. Mozer liked to call him "Sean Penn." Lieutenant Colonel Levy's younger sister is former Miss Israel Ilanit Levy, who is married to singer Eyal Golan. "I'm not 'the brother of,'" Levy stresses. "She's my little sister. And he's my brother-in-law. Not the other way around. I have four younger siblings and they're all successful. And I look at each of them the same way. What's outside doesn't matter to me." But Levy isn't a star just because of his appearance. It's more for something he did during the war that would seem contrary to military discipline. Levy received an order to send a patrol force into Lebanon, but when he arrived at the opening in the border fence, he realized that if he carried out the order, his soldiers would be killed, for nothing. He decided not to follow through. Another force that entered through the same opening, on the same unsecured route, came under fire and incurred casualties. Levy, with his decision, saved his soldiers' lives. Levy won't come out and admit it, but he evidently understood perfectly well the concept of "a war of choice." He had a choice, and he decided to keep his soldiers in Israeli territory. He decided to keep them alive. Levy's decision is revealed in the most impressive scene in the film, his formative moment. Shortly after the cease-fire, the officers from the artillery support unit gather for a summing-up talk amid trees heavily laden with fruit that hasn't been picked in the 34 days of the war. This was Mozer's first war, and the first real war most of these officers had participated in. Not only do they feel like victory slipped out of their hands, they feel like the army did, too. "We got chills when we heard about how Armored Corps soldiers abandoned their tanks," says Captain Udi Guri, a reservist who served in the division headquarters during the war. "We projected a lack of confidence. We weren't able, we the commanders ... [to influence] how the soldier felt and how much confidence he had to follow his commanders and go into Lebanon. We, as commanders, do our job for years just for this moment, so we can say to our soldiers: 'We're going into Lebanon and we're putting our lives in danger.'" One of the younger officers protests. He says Udi should speak for himself, that he shouldn't generalize. The deputy battalion commander, Dudu Goren comments: "It's not his problem or my problem, it's the problem of the whole country." The deputy division commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eyal Rosen, joins in the conversation: "Udi is not just saying things out of nowhere, he's talking facts ... As deputy commander, I heard a lot of statements like - if it's not this way or that way, we're not going in. And I had the feeling that there were people who didn't want to do the mission, plain and simple." At this point, Ilan Levy intervenes. "There were fears. I called them risks, identifying risks," he says quietly. "I knew that I was going in [to Lebanon] and that I probably wouldn't return with the entire battalion. As a commander, I have to give the soldiers the real lowdown, and the lowdown is that if I, as a commander, enter a route that is not secured, and I don't receive normal protection, it's my obligation to bring this up with my commanders and to inform them about the risk." From the start of the war, the artillery corps operated from within Israel. Ahead of the operation that took place during the final 48 hours of the war, it was decided to send artillery units into Lebanon to provide cover for the advancing forces. Levy's regular battalion was chosen to be the first artillery battalion to enter. "I was at the gate," Levy says, describing the decisive moment when he decided not to take his soldiers in, "with an armored personnel carrier, with 11 soldiers and three officers, after a briefing on entering Lebanon, after everything, and they told me, 'Go.' I decided at that point, in terms of the need that existed at that moment and the risk that existed, that I wasn't taking them in, and I informed the division head of staff who was standing next to me: 'I'm not taking them in.' Because in my understanding, the way things were prepared, in that constellation of things, the risk exceeded the benefit. I didn't get it from anyone in an organized fashion. And by the way, the convoy that did enter was almost all burned up. And I made the decision, not anyone else." Too high a profile Ilan Levy shows up in civilian dress for our interview in a Tel Aviv cafe, a year and a half after that dramatic moment. Aside from the gray hair, with an earring in one ear and a red polo shirt, he justifies the "Sean Penn" nickname Mozer gave him. If things had turned out a little differently, he may have only played the role of a battalion commander in a movie, not in real life. He had contact with the world of glamour and fame long before his sister Ilanit, who is 11 years his junior (He's 36, she's 25). But he decided it wasn't for him. "I didn't dream about the army when I was a teenager. It wasn't even at the bottom of my order of priorities," says Levy. "I dreamed about other things. I was a Festigal kid. I performed with everyone: Yizhar Cohen, the Like a Gypsy Trio, Ilana Avital. Say any name, I sang with them. After that, they took selected children from all the Festigals and we performed all over the country for three years. They called us Yaldei Tehila ('Children of Fame'). We did musicals. It was interesting. Apart from that, I worked for a living and also played soccer in Haifa with Eyal Berkovic." So show business runs in the family? Levy: "We grew up with music and joy in the house. We call it joy, you call it show business. Ilanit picked it up at home apparently." Levy adds that he never dreamt of being a singer, and knew that soccer, like singing, was just a hobby. Still, when he enlisted, he wanted to be accepted into the military entertainment troupe. "I took myself out of the running for everything else, even a pilot's course, because I thought I'd go into the entertainment troupe," says Levy. "I had promises that I'd make it into the troupe. But my combat profile was too high. So I went into the Artillery Corps, and I don't regret it for a moment." He has kept up his singing, he says. During the war, Eyal Golan ("my brother-in-law") came to sing for the troops. Levy joined him for a duet on the song "Elohai" by Arkady Duchin. When Levy got married a few weeks ago, they performed the duet again. When the war broke out, Levy immediately saw what was coming. When then chief of staff Dan Halutz promised the government that the whole business would be over within a few days, Levy gathered the soldiers from his battalion and told them that there was a long war ahead of them. He even disseminated this assessment in writing. "Out of my appreciation for the enemy and how he'd operate and what I knew he had, I understood that the shooting wouldn't stop, that it would be a long story," explains Levy. "I thought that it was just about impossible to achieve in a short time the objectives that were defined. It's true that on the military side there was no decision that we're going to war for 34 days. No one in the army told me, 'Be ready [to fight] for a month.'" His quick grasp of the situation may have partly stemmed from the fact that on the very first night of the war, Levy's battalion, which was operating from within Israel, took a direct hit from Hezbollah fire. "We got hit with major amounts of ammunition," he says. Levy says he wasn't surprised. He shifted the force to a new position, without casualties, and immediately continued firing. But other soldiers who are interviewed in the movie say that it wasn't until they took direct fire on their artillery batteries, six or seven kilometers from the border, on their entry points into Lebanon, that they realized they were in a real war, that this wasn't a movie. When Mozer interviewed Levy not long after the war about his decision not to take his troops into Lebanon, tears welled up in Levy's eyes. "I look at my guys now and think about what would have happened had I decided differently," he told Mozer. In our interview last week, a year later, Levy tries at first to play down the dramatic significance of his decision. "As far as I'm concerned, there are no dramas in war. There's a system of decision-making on the basis of facts," he says. "With the intelligence data I had, I understood that if the soldiers were to enter this route, they wouldn't carry out their mission. The cost in human life wasn't the central consideration. My judgment was that I could accomplish this mission in another way. If the mission required taking in 12 soldiers or even 50 soldiers, I would have done it." In the army there's a hierarchy, and what you did goes against this hierarchy. You were told "Go" and you decided not to go in. Were your commanders mistaken in their assessment? "Every decision I made in the war was approved by commanders; in this case, too. In this mission, given the information we had in the field, right before it was time to enter, I decided that it was not vital at this stage to bring in the patrol force. War is a kingdom of uncertainty, and so I made a change in the way the mission was to be carried out in accordance with the picture of the situation in the field. I received backing for this decision. My mission wasn't just to take people in. My mission was to take in a patrol unit. I decided that the patrol mission was not vital. I'm completely comfortable with the decision." Also because of what happened to the force that entered Lebanon afterward on that route? "The situation required me to make a reassessment. It's true that both the force that entered before me and the force that entered after me got hit by anti-tank fire." You're presenting this decision as a coolly rational move. It was a fateful decision, a decision about human life. "In retrospect, it was a fateful decision. Not at that moment. I don't know where I'd be today if I'd made a different decision. It's possible that if 12 of my guys were killed, I might not be in the same place, I might not have remained in the army, I might not be sitting here and talking with you about the war as calmly as I am now." Touched by 'sickness' Despite the blunt remarks in the officers' conversation about the troops' loss of faith in them, Levy says he never felt "a single crisis" throughout the war. He had full faith in his commanders. "The people who commanded me are the best people we have in this country, the salt of the earth," he says. The objective was clear to all the soldiers, at least in his battalion, and when the order came to enter Lebanon, the soldiers jostled for every spot aboard the APC. Idan Taller, the reserve medic who served in a tank battalion during the war, listens to the conversation. He says he had his first shock when they got off the bus by the entry point, before going into Lebanon. "We started coming under fire," he recalls. "The bus driver stopped and said 'Let's go!' and everyone started running to find shelter among the tanks, while shells were falling on the hills around. One guy went into shock and we had to evacuate him." The second shock came when Taller was already in Lebanon; he's not certain where ("They told us the name of the village but I don't remember it"), and one of the tanks was hit by a rocket. Taller arrived on the scene shortly after that and entered the damaged tank, his camera with him. He will never forget the sight of the dead soldier and the stench of burnt flesh, but he chose not to take any pictures. "I didn't want to have that preserved on my camera," he says. He waited until the body was removed and then took pictures of the tank's bloodstained insides. The pictures are still on his computer, but he doesn't show them to anyone. The third shock came when he learned that Yaniv Cohen, a medic who worked with him, had been killed in another tank. Idan, you've heard Ilan. He commanded an artillery battalion. You were in another battalion. If you were to meet your battalion commander, what would you say to him? Idan doesn't think twice: "If he were here, I'd give him a slap. He sent me without having any idea what was happening; he said to me: 'Run, jump into the tank' and whatever happens, happens. If I had been killed, he would have said, 'Okay, Idan died.' If I had known it would be that way, I wouldn't have gone." Levy fidgets a little in his seat, but chooses not to react. Idan Taller is not alone, not by a long shot. Mozer's movie focuses on six men he happened to talk to during the war. He gave a ride to Taller, who was hitchhiking, another officer served in the battalion with him, another soldier he met right before he headed into Lebanon and right after he returned from there. After the war, he went to track them down, and as soon as he found them, they immediately started to talk, to pour their hearts out. "We're not similar at all, each one of us comes from someplace else, but we all have something in common: We were all touched by the sickness," says Mozer. The "sickness" derives above all from the tremendous disconnect between "normal" life in Tel Aviv or Kiryat Ata or Holon and that "other" life as a reserve soldier. This gap has always existed, but it seems - or so the movie indicates - that the Second Lebanon War hit the reserve soldiers harder than wars in the past. Israel has changed, it has got onto the fast lane of money, high-tech and travel abroad. Mozer himself experienced this disconnect when he came home on his first furlough from the North, from the "war zone," as he called it - where the streets were empty and the cities deserted and the woods and open fields were burning all the time from Hezbollah fire. "It was like hell," he says. "I arrived in Tel Aviv and I was in shock. It was like a parallel universe." Mozer, who is openly gay, did a round of the gay bars in the city. "People asked me: 'Where have you been? We haven't seen you around lately.' I said that I was in the war in Lebanon. And then they said: 'We didn't know they drafted gays, too.'" Aharon Yehezkel, who works in high-tech and is a reserve captain in the artillery corps, relates a similar experience: "On the first day of the war they called me from work and asked me what was up with the application I was working on," he says. "I told them that I was in the middle of a war and couldn't answer them. Then they said: 'Fine, if we have a problem, we'll call you tomorrow.' They just didn't get what was happening. It's natural that in war, life on the home front goes on, but in this war there was no acknowledgment that there was a war on. People just skipped over that." In one of the strongest scenes in the film, Yehezkel is shown returning from a furlough. Where were you, Mozer asks. "You'll love this," Yehezkel replies. "I'm coming back from the funeral of my cousin, Aharon Yehezkel. The same name as me. He was killed in Lebanon. He's my favorite cousin. Every summer vacation I would go to be with him. "I don't really want to come back here," Yehezkel continues, but what I want doesn't fit with what has to be done. You shift into automatic. I don't feel good, but in terms of functioning, there's no problem." Today, Yehezkel admits that he has a serious problem with functioning as a result of that war. "I go from being a high-tech guy to a combat soldier in an instant," he says. "But coming back the other way takes me a long time. I commanded 100 soldiers, and was in charge of all this equipment. I was in a place of maximal excitement, and then I returned to my normal life and everything seemed petty and irrelevant. I'm not responsible for anyone. It seemed like the simplest, single-cell kind of life." During the war, says Yehezkel, whenever he was left alone, he'd find himself on the verge of tears, but wouldn't let himself go over the edge. "In war you're a decision-making machine," he says. He also remembers his incredibly restrained response to the death of his beloved cousin in Lebanon. "You, as an officer, have to totally suspend your emotion," he says. But this sharp transition from civilian to soldier and back, "this leaping between worlds," as he describes it," comes with a price. "You don't pay the price right there on the spot," Yehezkel explains. "You have credit. But the payment is too steep." For Yehezkel the price came in the form of post-traumatic stress. He left his job, spent a couple of months on the beach, traveled abroad, went to study at university, but couldn't bring himself to take the exams. For many months he wouldn't answer phone calls from people he didn't know. "I didn't understand what was going on with me, until a friend told me I had to get help," he says. "I had the phone number of the unit for treatment of shell shock in case I had to give it to my soldiers. I made the call myself. I don't hide the fact that after the war I had to go to a psychologist." Despite everything, Yehezkel doesn't see himself not reporting for reserve duty the next time he's called, even if it's for another war. "I can't conceive of not going,'" he says. "It's a matter of upbringing." But nevertheless, he, too, has his misgivings. Once, he says, he even said that his cousin had been killed for nothing. "To a certain extent, I feel that what happened to him was a waste, but on the other hand it's not a waste because he did what he had to do." Like Taller, the medic who can't remember where he photographed the damaged tank, Yehezkel can't remember the name of the place where his cousin was killed. He only knows that it was in Lebanon. But Yehezkel also has a warning to attach to his patriotism. "There are two motivations for going to war," he says. "The first is that the country is in mortal danger and the second is that you know that the one with whom you're going to war knows what he's doing. But if your feeling is that you were told: 'Go on, go into Lebanon. We're not sure exactly what for, but if you die we'll know there's an enemy there' - then you say to yourself: 'I don't want to. You go instead.'" Bookmark to del.icio.us   Clear, present danger Survey : 52% of youth believe Israel faces existential threat. Feeling guilty Europe's criticism of Israel is more than just anti-Semitism.   1.   Levy`s Choice 05:49  |  Ben 05/04/08   2.   Disgusting 08:29  |  Ofer from Ofer 07/04/08   3.   he endangered me 14:19  |  soldier 07/04/08   4.   Soldier 14:57  |  Soldier 07/04/08   5.   We don`t make them the way we used to... 18:22  |  URI 07/04/08   6.   Cowardice 20:57  |  Sam 07/04/08   7.   Levy`s 22:53  |  Ori 07/04/08   8.   Levy`s Choice 23:00  |  Ori 07/04/08   9.   LEVY`S CHOICE 23:02  |  Norbert Schachter 07/04/08   10.   Why no court martial 00:38  |  Dan (Capt. u.s. Army 08/04/08   11.   To #10: That`s why we lost 100 instead of 5000 (and 250000 irak 01:35  |  Army MD 08/04/08   12.   My first War 19:59  |  Philippe Tasca 09/04/08   13.   My First War 20:03  |  Eric 01/05/08

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