Life as a Victory
By Judy Labensohn

War is hell—and even when it ends, the horror continues for soldier survivors. Sometimes, however, the walking wounded become shining examples of joy and triumph.

Photo: Yosefa Drescher

Anat Yahalom, 48, does not fit any preconceived image of a disabled soldier. In fact, when she parks her car in a space reserved for the disabled, other drivers shout at her to move.

All they see is a statuesque, vibrant career woman. What they don’t see—because Yahalom always wears slacks and long-sleeve shirts—are the scars from 24 skin-graft operations. They don’t see the injured blood vessels and the pieces of shrapnel lodged in her body. People who don’t know her cannot tell that part of her leg is an artificial implant and causes her excruciating pain as she ages.

Yahalom, who lives in Ra’anana with her husband, Rafi, knows she could have turned her disability into a full-time job. The National Insurance Institute would have paid her unemployment compensation. That, coupled with her monthly stipend from the Ministry of Defense for soldiers with a 70-percent disability (see "Going Beyond the Benefits" below) would have enabled her to get by.

“But I chose life,” says the dynamic mother of three sons. “I filled my life with content, rather than let the disability be the content.”

With the support of the Ministry of Defense’s Rehabilitation Division, Yahalom studied nutrition. Today, she works from her home as a dietitian and as a nutritionist for Lechem Chai, a bakery in Holon, for which she developed a line of health breads.

Israel’s disabled military population, more than 50,000, is aging. Those wounded in 1948 are now in their seventies; those wounded in 1956 and 1967 are in their fifties and sixties. As the disabled age, their physical problems become exacerbated. But for many, like Yahalom, their will to live and their love for Israel is as strong as ever.

In 1973, when she was 18, Yahalom served as chief administrator for Israel’s commander of the Egyptian front in the Sinai Desert. On October 6, during the first minutes of the Yom Kippur War, she was in operation headquarters, a trailer caravan, when she heard enemy planes approach.

“I opened the door,” she recalls. “What I saw was like Pearl Harbor—rows of planes coming toward us. I threw myself on the floor. The caravan collapsed on me. My back opened. Blood everywhere, shrapnel all over my body. But I did not lose consciousness. I called a driver to evacuate me. They took me to an underground clinic in a bunker. Nine hours later I arrived at Tel Hashomer Hospital in critical condition. The papers had already written that I was dead.”

The first eight-hour operation saved Yahalom’s life. Then she spent eight months in Tel Hashomer.

“After six months, I learned how to breathe without a machine,” Yahalom recalls. “Then they taught me how to cough…. If you get your life as a gift, nothing will prevent you from living it.”

Being confined to a wheelchair for five years did not prevent the young woman from Kibbutz Kinneret from marrying Rafi, her sweetheart before the war. Rather than enter her wedding hall in a wheelchair, Yahalom insisted on making a grand appearance: She and Rafi sat cupped in the shovel of a tractor. The day after the wedding, Yahalom returned to the hospital to continue treatment.

Nothing, not even struggling on crutches, prevented Yahalom from giving birth. Nothing—not the phantom pains she suffers in parts of her body that no longer exist or the two-and-a-half hours it takes her each morning to put herself together (due to precautions to ensure the sterility of her skin grafts) or the months she spends every year in the hospital for what she calls “repairs”—nothing can prevent her from raising funds for Challenge, a nonprofit, volunteer organization that provides outdoor sporting events for physically and mentally challenged children.

Being the first woman seriously wounded in combat in the Israeli army, Yahalom not only had to cope with her own problems, she had to teach the Ministry of Defense’s Rehabilitation Division how to deal with wounded female soldiers. Today there are about 2,500. She demanded that a woman doctor participate on the medical committee that determines the disability percentage of female wounded soldiers.

Even getting married proved a bureaucratic challenge in the 1970’s. For 10 years, Yahalom could not use her married name, lest she lose her privileges as a wounded veteran. Despite these snags, she has only praise for the division, which encouraged her to study and become independent.

When Israel Cohen opens the door of his Ramat Gan apartment (near Tel Aviv), the visitor goes from shock to awe in 60 seconds. Though the body of the 68-year-old is deformed, his soul is an explosion of positive energy.

“When I was wounded, I spoke with God,” says Cohen, seated in his living room. “I asked him for 10 years.” He takes time out from telling his war story to grasp a hot glass of tea with the silver clasps at the end of his artificial arms, clasps which have served Cohen as hands for the last 36 years. He lifts the glass to his lips, maneuvers a tilt toward his mouth, sips and then sets the glass down with a bang on the Formica coffee table.

“If I worked 31 years at Dan, that’s a gift,” says the retiree from the Tel Aviv cooperative bus company.

Before being wounded on June 22, 1967, Cohen’s hands milked cows on his parents’ moshav, drove tractors, taught new immigrants how to defend themselves against fedayeen attacks and later drove three Dan bus routes in Tel Aviv. He was 32, married and the father of two small children when he served as a battalion commander during the Six-Day War. Ten days after the war ended, the army sent him and his men to a village on the outskirts of Nablus to clear the area of firearms. While he was arranging explosives, he got shot from the second floor of a house.

“I was thrown like a missile,” Cohen says with excitement, as if the trauma that almost ended his life still causes a surge of adrenaline. “My right arm flew off from my elbow, my left hand below the elbow.” He points to his two artificial limbs. “I couldn’t see. My lung was dangling outside my body. My face and chest were shattered, bloody and full of shrapnel. Everyone—my comrades, family, even some of the doctors in the hospital—thought I would die.”

The blast earned him the dubious honor of becoming “the most severely wounded soldier from the Six-Day War”—Cohen enunciates the next two words slowly—“who survived.”

“There were others more seriously wounded than I, but they died.”

He pushes himself to the edge of his chair, gets up and walks to the bookshelf to find a photograph album. Returning to his seat, he turns the plastic pages with his “hands” and holds the book close to his face. He can’t see the war photos when the book rests on his lap; he is blind in one eye. His “good” eye has only 20-percent vision.

“Here, here it is,” he says, smiling. “This is me during the war, before I was wounded.”

In the picture, Cohen is lifting his large left thumb in a thumbs-up sign.

While reminiscing, it is obvious Cohen still loves the army. He wants his listener to understand every detail about the battles he fought—the village, the tank, the truck, the hill, the troop carrier, the handsome blonde kid next to him who was killed. Was it 36 years ago or only yesterday?

While Cohen lay in Tel Hashomer Hospital waiting for the new antibiotic to arrive from London that would ultimately save his life, Brig. Gen. Uzi Narkiss, chief commander in the battle that reunited Jerusalem in 1967, came to visit him. Cohen sized up his situation for him: “If I can’t run, Uzi, then I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl. I won’t stay in one place.”

Indeed, Cohen, who has endured more than 40 operations on his road to rehabilitation, never stayed in one place. With 100-percent disability—“Why, it’s closer to 300 percent,” he jokes—he completed high school matriculation exams, earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration from Bar-Ilan University and, since he could no longer drive buses, became director of welfare services at Dan and later, an economic adviser. Determined not to surrender to his disabilities, he worked 13-hour days, despite constant pain in his chest, legs and head.

Only if you study Yosef Yagil’s swarthy face closely can you detect the scar on his left cheek where an eye surgeon cut and lifted his skin in 1949 to reconstruct his lower eyelid. He needed the eyelid to hold a glass eye after he lost his own eye during the battle for the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948. Today, the 76-year-old Jerusalemite has absolutely no regrets about his lost eye and the shrapnel nestled forever in his nose, lip, chest and head. “Without hesitation, I would do it all again,” he claims with pride. “When your house is burning, you don’t stop to think yes or no.”

Lately as he ages, Yagil suffers from headaches from the shrapnel. He relates to it as his own personal early warning system for weather changes. “Whenever I get a headache, I know it’s going to rain,” he says with a smile.

The bullet that took out Yagil’s eye was shot by an Arab sniper on May 22, 1948; Yagil was 21 years old. He was fighting in the Hagana, the pre- state army. Immediately after the shot, he fainted. His comrades evacuated him to Misgav Ladach Hospital in the nearby Jewish Quarter. After surgery he regained consciousness. He was left with a “Moshe Dayan” eye patch for a year, until the second operation enabled the glass eye to be installed.

He was still in Misgav Ladach when the Old City fell to the Jordanians six days later. Lightly wounded soldiers were taken as POW’s. The more seriously wounded, Yagil among them, were allowed to walk down Mount Zion to the Sultan’s Pool, where transportation waited to take them to hospitals in the new State of Israel.

Fifty-five years after being wounded, Yagil does not even define himself as a disabled veteran, despite receiving a monthly stipend from the Ministry of Defense for what they define as a 40-percent disability. He has a full rich life, he says, married to Shoshana, “the same wonderful woman for 47 years.” He is the father of three children and all seven of his grandchildren live nearby in Jerusalem and visit often.

Looking back at his experience during the War of Independence, he concludes that “the result of our actions were worthwhile. Although we lost the Old City...we gained a state.” Then he adds with pride and satisfaction, as if he needs nothing more, “This is full compensation.”

Yahalom, Cohen and Yagil, representatives of Israel’s aging wounded veterans, agree there is no glory in being disabled.

The glory, it appears, resides in accepting life as a gift. Then, opening a photo album, driving to work, or just drinking a cup of tea in your living room, surrounded by family, becomes its own victory.