"Did you prune the roses in the garden?", is the first question I ask Col. (Ret.) Golan Vach. About a year ago I met him in Turkey, as the commander of the National Rescue and Rescue Unit, during the earthquake that hit the country.
When he returned to Israel, he described in an interview the return to life after the encounter with death, through small acts such as gardening.
"Now there are no roses," he replies, "but in the kitchen window there are two solanum bushes, with small purple flowers, which form a sort of gate. When I returned home the bushes almost covered the window. It was symbolic, to round them with the scissors and allow the sunlight to enter the house. My wife, Hadar, is also in the reserves, as a social worker in the casualty system. For the first month, the older children took care of the younger ones, and after that, Hadar returned home every night. But now I have been discharged, and she is still in the reserves."
Vach was released about two weeks ago, at a ceremony for the change of commanders for the Israel Defense Forces, in which after six years he passed the baton of command to Col. Yossi Pinto ("a man and commander of his caliber, I am happy that the Israel Defense Forces is in good hands"). At the end of the ceremony, Vach took off his uniform , after three months of reserve duty that included strenuous activity of the Israel Defense Forces in clearing bodies in Otef, locating missing persons and fighting inside Gaza.
But on Monday of this week, a phone call came that sent him back to Gaza, to help with the evacuation of the spaces in the 21st disaster.
On the line was his younger brother, Col. Yehuda Vach, commander of the 1st Battalion.
"I was sitting in a cafe with a laptop, without a uniform and without a weapon, and between roles in the reserves. I resigned myself to the fact that the war continues without me. I am a person of quick transitions. I had to train myself to be able to make a switch and move on with life. Then Yehuda called and asked me to go with him to rescue his soldiers (19 As the organic commander of the soldiers, he wanted to make sure that he was doing his best. Naturally, as someone who knows and trusts me, it was important to him that I be by his side. This was a lifeline for me, because When I heard about the disaster of the collapse, I didn't want to push myself, so as not to offend the new command. The command approved my entry, and I entered as Yehuda's advisor, and in complete friendship with Pinto."
the fallen?
Heroes
In practice, the person who commanded the rescue event was Col. Elad Adri, the commander of the rescue and training brigade of the Home Front Command, a regular combat brigade that arrived first on the scene.
"I got uniforms and equipment, and within a few hours we reached the point," Vach describes.
"There were five missing at the time. We used the same tools of rescue from the earthquakes. It was difficult to gather information in this situation, where people were standing before the collapse of the buildings, so we conducted scans inside the narrow spaces, to find them and bring them out intact, even if not healthy. The incident was managed well, and I realized that my added value is as a simple rescuer with experience. I was in the trenches with our children. They are my children's age, and they are my brother's soldiers. It is a very intimate feeling, very much. Even though their souls are no longer here, I know whose names that I work with them. At this point I am a messenger of the parents, of the IDF, of the state.
When we put one of the soldiers on a stretcher, I told him quietly: 'Come on, go back to mom.'"
., Photo: Doc
Back to mom?
Maybe to mother earth.
But the thoughts of the mother from whom the life that was lost did not let go of Vach in every rescue.
"What does the mother feel? What does the mother expect from me now? After all, if she could be here, she would be here. But since she is not here, and I am here, what does she expect from me? What determination? Totally. What level of tenderness? Totally. This Says that we must find them all and take them out, in a respectful manner."
Did the experience in rescue expeditions abroad help you?
"Very much.
I won't go into details, but in the rescue of the last child, Ridvan, in the earthquake in Turkey, there was a technical situation in which we used a technique that we didn't know if it would work or not.
It worked, and the boy was rescued.
This experience brought me to a situation where I knew what to do now in rescuing one of the soldiers.
The aid delegations of the Israel Defense Forces go on a mission out of generosity to the world, but we learn and draw lessons from every incident."
You don't come out scratched from such events?
"Absolutely not. I mainly feel a very great privilege. In events, those who are injured are injured, those who die are dead, and those who live are alive. Unfortunately, I've gotten used to it. The difficulty is the families."
Vach wants to meet one of the families affected by the disaster, and intends to comfort Sagi Idan's parents from the front.
"I bonded with him during the rescue. I kept thinking about his mother, and I was very moved afterward to see her wrapped in the Israeli flag at the funeral. On a national level - 24 soldiers killed that day, 21 of them in one disaster, it hurts. It highlights the price of war. But for the mother One, the number of casualties that day does not matter. I was with Aviva Silverman, whose son Uriel was killed a week ago. I really felt her physical pain over parting with her son.
"But as a nation, I think we need to let go, and understand that war has costs. Everyone who went to war did so with open eyes, and with a willingness to pay the price. We are ready to die to protect the residents of the Otaf. If they asked all the victims from that day, if they would go out again For war knowing that they were going to be killed, everyone's answer was - 'of course'."
The friends who were killed.
Standing: Moshe Leiter (first from the right), Sergey Shmerkin (second from the right), Yossi Hershkovitz (third from the left). Sitting in the center: Matan Meir, photo: from Facebook
Perhaps the difficulty in the number of casualties is the inability to stay with each fallen, to give him a proper place.
Even if the newspaper systems make an effort, in the end, when there is such a quantity of those who fail, most of them only get a small square in the newspaper.
"We delude ourselves that the place we give them in the newspaper is their place. But their place is of absolute value, they say somewhere below the seat of honor. It doesn't matter if one faller got a cover in 'Israel Hayom' and others just a small square. Each Of whom he is a hero, and therefore the nickname 'Families of the Fallen' should be changed to 'Families of the Heroes'. What is 'Fallen'? It is the most shameful thing to have the right to fight in a war that is unjust."
Fighting fathers and sons
We meet in the lobby of the Ramada Hotel Jerusalem.
It's stormy and rainy outside, and inside there's also a rush of evacuees from boulevards.
From here he continues to the Knesset, for a meeting with Minister of Absorption Ofir Sofer.
In citizenship, along with his participation in the singing group "The Vach Family", he is busy with the absorption of aliyah through the association "Absorption of Israel's Communities" founded by his parents, with the assistance of the Mizrachi movement, the Jewish Agency and the Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption.
On October 7, he mobilized the unit, like many commanders, even before the official order 8 arrived.
At 7:30 in the morning he said goodbye to his seven children and his wife, and left his house in Beit Rimon, armed with a gun, towards the base in Ramla.
"On Route 6, I am overtaken at crazy speed by dozens of motorcycles - IDF fighters and special units, all the crazy people flying south.
A picture of the people of Israel mobilizing to fight against such savages, who rush to plug the breach with open fingers.
Not even with a fist, because some of the fingers were broken, and you just had to push your hand in and stop the flood."
., Photo: Doc
The mission for which the Israel Defense Forces was deployed was to rescue civilians from falling rockets and missiles. The members of the unit arrived at the crash sites, and rescued, among other things, a fatality in Kfar Aviv and a trap in Tel Aviv. "At 2:00 p.m. We were without a role. This allowed us to go south."
He went down with four people in the PAK, among them Pinto, who was already in the middle of an overlap.
Vach, a former fighter and senior commander in the paratroopers, was also the commander of the Zikim base in the past.
He went there, but arrived after the terrorists were repelled and eliminated.
What caught his eye was a van and an ambulance coming out of harm's way.
"In the box of the van were covered stretchers with legs peeking out of them, and on top of them stood soldiers, whose eyes I saw that they had experienced something very traumatic. That was the moment I realized that this was a traumatic event on a national level."
From there they traveled to Ofakim, where his brother Yehuda took command.
"His hand went in there to stop the breach, and we realized that the situation in the city was under control. But what is our role? What do we, as a unit with yellow helmets and rescue equipment, do in this situation?"
In the evening he received a call from Haim Otmazgin, who simultaneously serves as the special operations officer of ZAKA and the person collecting casualties and spaces of Yachsa.
"An ultra-Orthodox major in the reserves, who always knows what's going on. He tells me, 'Go to the Reim forest, that's where the event is.'"
On the evening of Simchat Torah, the raim came to the party of nature and gathered corpses under fire.
"Very quickly we were sent to take care of the burns - in an ambulance, in vehicles, in the bushes. Throughout the night, men and women were burning, and what we did was locate them, put them out with one and a half liter bottles before they disappeared, and collect them."
All that time he did not know but that his eldest son, 23 years old, who serves in a special unit, was a kilometer away from him in Kibbutz Ra'im fighting terrorists.
Similarly, Pinto did not know that his son fought in Bari, and Ariel Lubiner, a rescuer from the Vach's KPK, did not know that his son was mortally wounded when he fought in the Gaza village. "Crazy, fathers and children side by side, when all the while the sons do not answer the phones."
But he testifies that he saw and recorded everything imaginable in evil, and even more.
"In the earthquake in Haiti, there were a quarter of a million dead. We came to the streets full of corpses in a terrible and terrible condition. But it was an act of nature, and here, in the massacre of the wicked, it was man-made. I have not seen anything like it. The form of death and the context - we, citizens, brothers, asked Children the age of our children. Horror. As an IDF soldier I felt shame, shame, shame - there is no other word.
I'm ashamed that it happened on my shift."
"If they ask for assistance again - we will come."
Vach receives a certificate of appreciation from Erdogan, photo: Doc
A week later, on the way to the division, they passed by the forest again.
They took advantage of a free hour and went for another scan among the same burnt bushes.
"We didn't have a bag of victims with us, so I walked around with a bag of 'Osher witness' on my shoulder and with shoes up to my ankles in ash, and I put what I had put in the bag. Suddenly a car of journalists passed by and asked what we were doing. I was ashamed to answer. I said we were looking for precious details A value that people may have lost.
"I'm not a tall person, but when I finished an officer's course, and my holocaust survivor grandmother stroked my uniform and told me how proud she was of me, I felt 2 meters tall. After the massacre, I felt so low, and I couldn't look any civilian in the eyes."
But you've been a citizen for six years.
"A reservist is a soldier. I have been in uniform since the age of 14, since military boarding school. I am a soldier, a fighter and an officer until the end of my life."
"genius and generous and cruel" generation
In the first few days, while collecting the bodies, he celebrated his 49th birthday dismal and far from the family, with a cupcake pulled out in the field.
A turning point in the plot came at sunset, when at a bend in the levels they encountered gunfire and fighters on the floor shouting "wounded".
"I got out of the vehicle and ran to the wounded. The bullets whistling around me. I have encountered many times in the past, but this was the closest place to death. I tell myself that soon I will take a bullet in the head, and I am wearing a yellow plastic helmet. I grabbed one of the wounded man's hands, who was seriously wounded in the chest and thigh, and asked I wonder who will be the other hand that will grab his shoulder. It was the hand of Doron, my Kman, who was running after me."
They evacuated the wounded man to the nearby branch office and returned again to the encounter, where they identified three terrorists in the orchard. Vach got into the tank where only the commander and driver were, and instructed them to fire the only shell that was in the cannon towards the orchard.
There I definitely killed a terrorist, with the rifle I took from the tanker.
Then paratroopers arrived and attacked the third terrorist.
It was the most beautiful birthday present I received."
For two and a half weeks, the Israel Defense Forces worked to clean up buildings in Kfar Gaza and Bari and to locate missing persons. of missing persons who turned into voids in houses that were supposedly already cleansed. This is the main point of our pride."
On October 28, when the maneuver began, he entered Gaza with Doron.
There were those in the frontline command who criticized Vach, whose unit was left outside and abandoned without a commander.
"Criticism is a good thing," Vach replies to the claim, "but a great many decisions are measured at the end, only at the end of the war. When I entered the Strip I was not in actual command of any unit. My companies were taken from me and subordinated to other units. I could accompany them, but the challenge at that stage was small , because there weren't many casualties on the home front. That's why I thought about the next step of YACHA.
A special unit knows how to locate tasks that no one has defined, characterize them and take full responsibility for them.
In my opinion, rescuing soldiers on the battlefield is something that requires the proximity of professionals as much as possible, so it is not enough to be on standby beyond the fence - you have to be with them inside.
Another thing that turned on a red light for me is that they are going to enter a place where the destruction from the bombs is extensive, and the IDF has not fought in such a scenario in recent years, and therefore engineers and rescuers are needed in the field. The encounter of the soldier with the collapsing building is our specialty. I thought that before I give orders to people, Commanding them and giving them tasks, it's true that I'll go check the area myself. That's why I went in with Doron, and we were the rescuers in Moshe Leiter's PAK, MP in Battalion 697 in Brigade 551."
But he intended to enter for four days, but in the end he left the strip after ten days, when he realized what was required.
Upon his departure, he organized 12 people from the unit, who were divided into six teams and dispersed among different units that participated in the ground maneuver.
"Our contribution was phenomenal. We actually saved the lives of soldiers thanks to being there, by instructing which destroyed buildings should not be entered and by helping to solve problems. The command of every commander is to fulfill his mission with distinction, neither near nor nearly. But if everyone just fulfills his mission - We will not win. There are very large gaps between tasks, and you as a commander are expected to define a task for yourself, and ask how your abilities are able to serve the goal, and then initiate and strive for contact. I saw everyone around me in the army behaving like this. It comforted and moved me to see on whom the army is founded. The army The whole works in maneuver, out of a belief in the rightness of the way, initiative and creativity. Young people have grown up here who are a generation of wonder, with the spirit of the generation of the War of Independence. A people who stand up for themselves, and suddenly their soul is revealed."
But I recommend, and I also join, as someone who experienced a journalistic excursion to Gaza, to anyone who has some problems in life - to enter Gaza.
"May he experience some of the purity that is revealed inside, and come back much healthier. I have seen politicians and senior commanders meet the commanders and soldiers inside, and other people return. It is like King Saul, who had an evil spirit and David would play before him. Go inside, hear a Jewish soldier playing a machine gun - and come back Go your good soul."
Vach quotes Jabotinsky, who writes about a "genius and generous and cruel" generation.
The heroes, the trampled national pride, were returned by the warriors, when they went into battle with a broken heart.
Israelis have never lacked generosity, in his opinion.
"Israeli society is much more generous and rewarding than our media reflected, even before October 7. And now the IDF is required to be brutal in war.
Many people talk about the face of evil in Bari or Bari, but the face of evil is inside Gaza.
'There is no house in which there is no dead', it is said about Egypt, but it is said about Gaza that there is no house in which the worship of death, murder, hatred and active complicity in Israel's extermination enterprise is not sanctified.
We are able to be cruel to the Gazans, because we love people and life.
To fight them is to love the person.
Along with the brutality against the terrorists, IDF soldiers also know how to turn an old woman in a wheelchair like maybe Greenlick, a super-fighter and a super-human, with whom I worked on my second entry into the Strip. The point that became clear to me in the war is that our pursuit of good will not obscure our commitment to fight evil." .
what if
The division to which 12 members of the Israel Defense Forces were attached was released at the beginning of December, Wach was again looking for assignments. He turned to his brother Yehuda, Brigade 261, and asked him what he was missing.
Yehuda pointed to a lack of engineering capabilities for the purpose of destroying terrorist infrastructure.
"At this point I turned to the commander of the Home Front Command, Rafi Milo, and asked for mechanical engineering equipment to deal with those terrorist structures that were criminalized and that needed to be destroyed. I found out that I have sabotage officers in the unit, whose capabilities we had not used before. We re-entered the Strip with about 60 of the unit's members, and so , for five weeks, we destroyed hundreds of terrorist infrastructures in the north of the Gaza Strip, with civilian tools mobilized from the rear."
Take me to the hardest moment in the war.
"On the national level, it was on hold before the maneuver. On a personal level - it's the loss of Moshe Leiter, with whom I grew up in Kiryat Arba and my husband. Our parents are friends. Inside, I also knew Yossi Hershkowitz, and we sang together in the depths of Gaza, but I was closest to Leiter."
He received the news about the PAK who had boarded a cargo, four days after he said goodbye to them and left the Gaza Strip, on his way home, on his first day after about a month. "That Saturday evening I went home.
I was wounded in the waist by shrapnel from a charge, I wanted to take a shower, change a bandage and wish my 9-year-old son, our little one, a happy birthday.
But at the Beit Rimon intersection they told me there was an incident.
I had a very bad feeling.
I got home, and all the kids jumped on me, but I told Hadar that I was coming back because something happened.
On the way back, we realized that it was Leiter's HPC, and a force of Yhcha, of Yohai from Company A, came in to rescue him.
He reached it, but he was already rescued.
I had a lot of thoughts about what would have happened if.
Maybe if I was with them they wouldn't come in and get on a cargo.
I was very close to them, and I influenced the decision making.
These are thoughts that put you in a loop.
At the same time, I tried to reproduce Yossi Hershkovitz's melody that we sang together in Gaza, and I failed.
Those were very difficult moments, and I was alone in them.
It was only at Yossi's funeral that I remembered the tune, and I immediately recorded it.
I returned home again only after another month."
When he finally returned from the war after finishing his duty, he received a special welcome.
The first morning he got up to brush his teeth and went back to sleep.
Her son, who was on his way to school, woke him up: "Dad," he said with a sad look.
"Yes, sons", the father opened one eye to him.
"The red toothbrush is mine," explained the little one.
"I said to myself: That's it, I'm back home. Welcome back and it's good that you came, but there are rules in this house," Vach laughs.
I take him back to Turkey, and ask if he is offended by the anti-Semitism that was revealed there.
"I didn't expect otherwise. It's insulting on a personal level. I didn't go there as Golan, I went as a representative of the state. In the end, politicians have considerations that I don't get into."
And if there is another earthquake in Turkey?
"If they ask for assistance - we will come. Will we offer on our own initiative? That's already a question, certainly in wartime, when our resources are invested in victory. If Israel can currently contribute one thing in the war, it will do it first, and not travel anywhere in the world."
The places he traveled to as part of an IDF rescue mission are Haiti, the Philippines, Mexico, Honduras, Albania, Miami and as mentioned - Turkey. Half of them as a member of a delegation and half of them as a commander. To Gentiles, but everyday is the main thing.
This is an average of about 100 reserve days per year, but there is not a day when you are not dealing with the IDF, manpower, interviewing people. In the end, a commander is measured by the people he brings. I was blessed with a wonderful team. Smart and sensitive at levels that cannot be surpassed, and so is the AGM officer, the MAFs and all the personnel of the headquarters.
It's also countless training sessions, crawling through tunnels in buildings we found in Israel.
And this is the opportunity to thank the municipalities of Acre, Haifa and Kiryat Shmona, for allowing us to train with them.
"My main challenge was to take a unit that was completely disorganized, and adapt it to a European standard of order, organization and discipline, and on the other hand - to preserve its DNA, which is the ability to improvise.
"I think that the Israel Defense Forces exhausted all its abilities in the war to contribute to the victory, but the war flooded quite a few gaps.
I told Pinto that I am not transferring a perfect unit to him.
I am far from being a perfect commander, there is still a lot of work to do.
The rescue unit thought that you threw the spears into the shears means that from now on it's only going around with shears.
We realized that we were a unit that would also have to fight, and we weren't there until today.
I was privileged to be in one of the places that express the Israeli character at its best, a unit where the love of people leads it to distant regions."
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