'We saw things that no human should see - and now they expect us to return to life' | Major (res.) Maya

'I finally went to a psychologist,' a hesitant voice came through the phone. 'Well, how was it?' I asked. 'He had me fill out a questionnaire and diagnosed me with PTSD,' the young officer answered, something I could have told him long ago. 'And what do you think about that?' I inquired, as if I didn't know exactly what he was about to say.

'Well, first of all, this questionnaire is really not scientific. There are a lot of confounding variables, there are no benchmarks, nothing is objective, you need to add an analysis...'

He continued to detail all the ailments of psychological science and offer creative and incredibly analytical solutions. After all, that is what he was taught to do in the unit - to formulate problems and solve them with amazing creativity and analytical skill.

This was another conversation, one of many, that I had with an officer, a female officer, a soldier, or a female soldier with whom I worked during my reserve service in 8200. The common denominator is clear - trauma that one is ashamed to admit exists; shame and guilt alongside successes - and one is forbidden to talk about it all; close people who want to support, but do not have security clearance.

This is the story of the invisible wounds of the alumni of the 'invisible' units, those that one is forbidden to talk about. The trauma of intelligence unit alumni.

Where do you start telling about what is forbidden? Probably from the beginning.

The first phone call I received was from my father. 'Get up, there is a war.'

The first words that came out of my mouth on October 7, almost instinctively, were: 'Do you think there was a war and I wouldn't know about it?'

Yes. The arrogance. We all sinned with it.

Only recently I was still in the unit. I knew all the wonderful people there, and I trusted the holy work they were doing. I knew the sources, the warning mechanisms, the algorithms, the intelligence. I believed in the unit and its ability to warn and even prevent a war. I felt security in this belief like the security that the sun will rise tomorrow. In time, I understood.

I read all the investigations, reports, correspondence, documents, warnings that went out and fell on deaf ears. I understood the cascading mistakes, the chain of events that led to the disaster, the desperate incompetence of the leadership and parts of the operational echelon and intelligence personnel who failed in their life's mission. The only mission that was important.

It is clear to me today how all this happened and why. And yet it is hard to internalize.

The second phone call was with my commander. I don't remember if I called him or he called me. I only remember that he told me to come, so I came. We didn't know anything yet. Only that the world had collapsed. I entered the command post and was hit by a wave of heat and the smell of sweat and fear, which seems to make it hard for me to breathe to this day. With every picture, video, post, conversation, report - the heart just refused to internalize the magnitude of the disaster.

Pickups and horrors flickering on the screens spread along the entire wall, shouts and orders fired into the air, the radio frequency with the fighting force raging with battle cries - there are wounded, evacuation is needed, where is the division? 'There is no division, the Gaza Division has been occupied,' and 'there is no evacuation, be strong.' Where are the terrorists? 'Everywhere.'

I functioned on autopilot in the first few days. I didn't allow myself to think about the friends and colleagues who were murdered, about my cousin who was trapped in a safe room in Kfar Aza, about my soldiers and what they were going through. Just function without breaking. In the first few days, I didn't cry. I don't remember the first cry, I only know it came much later.

Endless obsession

In the weeks and months since, being a reservist in 8200 means replacing insane unit pride with shame and existential disgrace.

It means bowing your head at every Friday dinner before the constant, regular question: 'Tell me, how did we not know?'

It means working inside a unit full of traumatized children (yes, children), embarrassment and pain, at the most fateful moments in the country's history, and trying somehow, despite everything, to succeed in causing a change.

It means not getting to funerals because you are trapped in the command post.

It means seeing your beloved soldiers breaking, and there are not enough mental health officers with security clearance. So you hold them, even though you yourself need someone to hold you.

It means not sleeping for months on end. And not stopping thinking about the reserves every waking minute, to find another solution, another stroke of genius, another idea, another initiative that will bring the next 'gold' intelligence that will ensure that someone else returns home safely.

It means not stopping being creative, goal-oriented and motivated, sensitive and human in every action you take. People's lives depend on it.

It means being signed off on strikes that killed many. Some of them innocent. All of them human beings.

It means knowing the enemy so well, so deeply, that when you manage to eliminate those death-deserving people, you feel in some illogical place that you have lost a close person.

It means seeing every picture, video, and recording of the horrors, by virtue of your position.

It means working for a long time on the most secret thing in the world, so secret that it creates a real distance from the people you love, because you are forbidden to share anything. Until one morning it is on the news, the whole country is talking about it, but no one really has a clue. Zero credit. Suddenly your baby is public domain, and everyone has something to say.

It means leaving at 6:00 AM from an operational command post where the words 'the diamonds are in our hands' were said, and being at 10:00 AM in your bourgeois high-tech office, in a discussion with disconnected Americans about cyber and AI and cloud and money.

Speaking of diamonds, it means collecting intelligence for months on hostages. Israeli citizens. Like me and like you. And to do good intelligence, you need to develop an obsession. So you develop one. You know names. Dates. Places. Voices. Events. Sources. Details that perhaps the people closest to them will never know.

This obsession doesn't end on the day they return home, but now your only window into their lives is their story, together with all the people of Israel. And in some completely irrational place, you feel that something has been taken from you. For months you knew almost everything about them. Now, quite rightly, you know nothing.

Suddenly you see them at home, with their families, and you understand again what you actually knew long ago - that beyond the signal intelligence screen and the professional distance, there were real people there. People who went through real and terrible things that you know how to recite by heart, including names, dates, and sources.

And why on earth should you know? By what right do you have a narrative about their trauma? You, who sat in an air-conditioned room, understand their captivity experience probably better than any other person who was not in captivity themselves. But you will never talk to them. You will never hug them. You will never be able to say to her: 'Remember that day? When that thing happened? You weren't alone. I was there, behind the screen, I read and heard everything, and I cried with you.'

It means seeing the horrific state of the hostages returning home in a deal, and knowing that you could have gotten them out of there months before, if only that operation had succeeded and not failed with a colossal failure.

It means understanding before everyone else who is the hostage who is now left alone.

It means hugging your soldier after a long shift where she wasn't allowed to break, and now she is.

It means returning to your office job, or studies, or relationship, or household chores, after experiencing all this, and somehow moving on in life. And not whining, because after all, most of the time you worked daily shifts. 'You are not fighters,' 'You weren't there.' But I was.

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It costs us

These experiences, and many others that are better left unsaid, are woven like a scarlet thread into the depths of the souls of many good people from intelligence units. They are there to stay, and they disrupt the entire perception of reality. You sat in a command post where the words 'Mohammed Deif - BDA positive' and 'the diamonds are in our hands' were said. Moments the whole country was waiting for, and you are in the room when they turn from a wish into a fact. After all this, there are very few things in this life that continue to excite you. Very little meaning, interest. Everything becomes trivial, vanity of vanities. But the expectation is that we will continue to function as usual, as if the world hasn't turned upside down.

Those who are wise enough to admit to themselves that they need help (and they are really not the majority) discover an absurd reality - most resources are dedicated, rightly, to the rehabilitation of those who served in frontline and combat roles. But this war has created many circles of harm, and the perception that only those who were close enough to the fire are allowed to be burned by it is wrong.

It is terrible that people who want to claim recognition from the Ministry of Defense as victims of the 'Iron Swords' war encounter contempt. It is difficult that those who go far and look for a lawyer to represent them before the Ministry of Defense find it very difficult to find one who is also a 'secret-sharer' and can truly represent the claimant's story faithfully. How do you prove harm when you are forbidden to talk about the event that caused it?

And it is sad that there is a shortage of therapists who have the appropriate security clearance, and the treatment quickly becomes walking between the drops of the secret. You can talk about what you feel, but not about the thing that made you feel that way. In addition, it is difficult to create a collaborative and supportive community, since even within the units there is compartmentalization of secret information, and it is forbidden to open dedicated groups on social networks. 'Catch-22 8200', if you will.

The mental health systems of the units themselves are collapsing under the burden of treating regular soldiers, and are unable to dedicate resources to treating reserve personnel who are left orphaned. 'We have no mother and father,' friends and soldiers told me more than once, 'and no one cares.'

When I raised these problems before senior mental health officers in the units, I was met with desperate helplessness - 'It is not our responsibility to create a database of therapists and lawyers with security clearance'; 'The mental health officers in the unit do not have the capacity to contain reserve patients' (and even if they did, they are only allowed to treat reservists under a reserve order, and there is a severe shortage of reserve days that can be allocated for this); 'We have no ability to organize additional processing events.'

The invisible wounds of the alumni of the 'invisible' units may not have been caused by a bullet, but they are no less real. They were caused by what you saw, what you heard, what you knew, what you did, what you failed to prevent, and what you are forbidden to tell anyone. And it costs us, all of us, a lot - starting with the number of workers who are unable to return to the labor market, and ending with more or less successful attempts at self-harm and even suicide.

Save the savior

And back to the phone conversation with the young officer. 'Do you understand what I'm saying?' he asked.

I listen to him as he explains to me why the diagnosis he underwent is not good enough. He analyzes the methodology, points out confounding variables, and proposes a better model. A model according to which he is actually perfectly fine. But he is not. He was hurt. And many others were hurt with him.

Thousands of women and men dedicated - each and every one - hundreds of reserve days to find missing persons, return hostages, thwart attacks, protect forces, locate enemies, and save lives. Some of the things they did will never be published. Some of the greatest moments of their lives will remain a sentence they are forbidden to complete.

They knew things that no one was allowed to know. Saw things that no human should see. Bore responsibility that cannot be explained at a Friday dinner.

And then they sent them home.

They told them to return to work. To studies. To children. To relationships. To life.

But the war returned home with them in a way that the system does not always know how to identify. Sometimes it returned inside a person who looks completely functioning, goes to the office in the morning, laughs with friends in the evening, and explains to his psychologist with deep seriousness why the questionnaire that diagnosed him with PTSD suffers from methodological problems. And inside - broken into a million tiny particles of a shattered soul.

Thousands of women and men have dedicated the last few years to trying to save the lives of others. It is time for someone to decide who is responsible for saving them.

The author is a reserve officer in Unit 8200