The extraordinary story of Israeli troops who cracked under the pressure during the Yom Kippur War

One summer evening in 2013 I met with my close friend H. The 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War loomed on the horizon. Naturally, our conversation turned to the war, which H. took part in while serving as a lieutenant in a reconnaissance unit of the Armored Corps.

He was in his late 20s at that point, but had already encountered the horrors of war: As an even younger officer in the Israel Defense Forces, he had fought in the Six-Day War, which had scarred his soul.

In 1973 he served in Sinai, with two armored personnel carriers under his command; he sat in one next to the driver, overseeing the combat operations. His crews were assigned various missions, of which the most dangerous was to charge Egyptian infantry troops and engage them in battle. “The soldiers’ coordination, cooperation and professionalism were critical to the success of these attack missions,” he told me. “You are constantly in existential danger. You know that you’re alive now and that in another five minutes you could die.”

Due to the nature of his role, H. was mostly attuned to what was going on outside. But at the same time he also took note of what was going on within the combat compartment inside the APC.

“The fighting was hard and went on day and night. The company paid a very steep price: About half of the 40 combat troops and most of the officers were hit,” H. said. “And there were soldiers who cracked.”

“‘Cracked’? What do you mean?” I asked.

“Soldiers under my command who cracked lay down on the floor of the APC,” H. said.

“A soldier would actually lay down?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“But for how long?”

“A day at a time, sometimes longer.”

“A day? You’re at war, right?” I asked in amazement.

“Yes. We went on executing all our missions, including those involving combat, and the soldier lay on the APC floor.”

“You let him lie there?”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

“The soldier recovered and rejoined the fighting. But then another soldier lay down. He also lay on the APC floor for something like a day, got up and rejoined the fighting. It was extremely difficult for everyone. There was also a third soldier who lay down. Lay there more than a day and a half. He showed no signs of being about to get up, and I thought that it was impossible for him to go on lying there like that. It could have a bad influence. I went over to him and said: You can’t go on lying there. You have to decide: Either you join us again or you’re evacuated to the Home Front Command.”

“What did he do?”

“He got up and joined us again.”

That’s an incredible story, I thought. To let a soldier lie on the floor of the APC for so many hours. I wondered how H., as a commander, had coped with the questions that certainly cropped up along the way. How do you allow the presence of weakness and fear without possibly infecting others with the terror of death? That’s something that obviously mustn’t be allowed to happen. How do you allow non-functioning? What will the other soldiers think? What kind of message does it send them? It’s liable to erode your authority as an officer; it’s behavior contrary to the values of proper functioning, making a sacrifice and displaying courage.

When I met up with H., I was working on a lecture on the subject of containment in psychoanalytic therapy. Thus, while he was sharing his war experiences, my ears were attuned not only to the grim story, which as usual he related simply, openly and with modesty, but also to the intriguing connection that developed within me to the concept of “containment” that I was dealing with.

Of course, H. had to cope with the eyes of the soldiers and the more junior officers under his command, which looked to him. He certainly had to digest, to contain – to hold in the threatening feelings that must have existed within him. He allowed them to exist. At the same time, I thought to myself that when H. set a limit for the third soldier, he was also executing an act of containment. Here was an example of how containment can be manifested as the setting of a clear boundary, and not only by unlimited absorption of a particular behavior, as the concept is sometimes perceived.

I shared my thoughts with H., told him about the lecture I was working on and asked him if he would allow me to tell his story. He agreed, but in our next meeting he said he had begun to worry that what he had told me was the fruit of his imagination. After all, four decades had passed. He went to see Y., the noncom who had been in charge of the internal compartment of the vehicle, and asked him whether anything like that had actually happened. “Of course it happened,” Y. replied. “And you know what? The other soldiers didn’t even ridicule the ones who lay on the floor of the APC.”

The term “containment” is heard increasingly today, both in professional psychotherapeutic discourse and in everyday speech. We encounter the idea (or challenge) of containment as parents of young children and adolescents, and also as parents of adults. We refer to the concept also within the context of managerial and leadership frameworks, such as those involving team leaders and managers of departments and organizations. The ability to contain is a requisite – or it’s important that it becomes one – for executives, commanders and leaders at the highest levels in the diplomatic, security and political spheres.

What, then, is containment? The term originated in the realms of the military and statesmanship, and was used in the sense of limiting the ability of a hostile force – military or ideological – to attack, advance and spread. In these contexts containment is defined as “restraint, an ability to absorb violence and refrain from escalation.” Another interesting use of the term appears in the context of nuclear reactors. The term there, “contai nment building,” refers to “a system that is intended to prevent the random release of radioactive materials from a nuclear reactor.”

That seems to me a very suitable metaphor for containment in the mental and psychological context, reflecting the ability to forge an experiential connection between us and the everyday challenge of containing parenthood, relations with partners and various managerial positions. The fact is that powerful feelings often arise within us about the Other that are difficult to hold in. At such times we may experience a “centrifugal force” inside us which aspires to expel them. In certain cases, we try to avoid leaking “radioactive substances” that will not only betray the existence of the tempest within us, but are also liable to harm the people we hold dear.

In psychoanalytic theory the term “containment” was developed and conceptualized by Wilfred Bion, an English psychoanalyst who was an outstanding tank officer in World War I. Bion worked with patients both individually and in groups, and thus developed a theory relating both to group dynamics and the mental dynamics of the individual and his interaction with the Other.

According to Bion’s theory, containment is expressed as the ability to hold within us a threatening emotional element that stirs anxiety and shame, when our actual impulse is to be rid of it and project it outward in the direction of the Other. But holding it inside ourselves cannot last indefinitely. Inner work is needed – digesting and transforming this mental element – so that the powerful urge to be rid of it will cease. When that happens, the element in question becomes part of the reservoir of our feelings and thoughts, and can serve us in the very situations in the here-and-now that generate such potent emotions within us.

As such, containment means carrying within us a threatening emotional element – but also digesting and processing it. According to Bion, to be able to process the uncomfortable element so that it does not exert pressure on us to get rid of it, we need, despite the internal tension we experience, to be in a state of holding on and of reverie, which enables us to take in and process the emotional experience.

Being also a theoretician of groups, Bion made reference to containment in that context. He describes a situation in which an individual belonging to a group or other sort of entity who is perceived to be a threat – on account of his opinions, ideas, behavior or deviancy – creates an internal dilemma, not necessarily at a conscious level, on the part of the group and in particular the person managing it: that is, whether to let the individual remain part of the collective (inclusion) or to remove him from it (exclusion). In this sense, the individual creates a threatening emotional element within us. His continued inclusion in the group might represent the processing of that element, namely its containment, whereas removing him might involve ejection of the threatening element, namely its non-containment.

I don’t think that H. grasped what sort of processes took place within him to enable him to act as he did. His underlings, and in particular he as their superior officer, coped with the tension between inclusion and exclusion: whether to leave the soldier who lay down on the floor of the APC among them, or to evacuate him quickly. Such tension at the group level is the equivalent of the inner dilemma – which is not necessarily conscious – involving whether the soldiers would hold in within themselves the difficult feelings they had related to fighting, and above all the fear of death, or to project those feelings externally.

A projection of what the soldier represented could have taken the form of evacuating him from the APC. But it might have been expressed in ridicule as well. The expression of ridicule can be a product of anxiety, of difficulty in understanding and accepting certain behavior at a critical juncture. A crewman who cracks embodies in his behavior the fear of death and other disturbing feelings that arise in combat, which his comrades-in-arms probably felt within themselves as well. Had those others ridiculed him, it would be as if they were saying that the same anxiety-producing feelings didn’t affect them. But as Y. attested in his comments, “There was not even ridicule there.”

I have no doubt that H.’s spirit is what enabled his troops to recognize, without the need for words, the immense mental pressure they were under: The feeling that he trusted them and was himself dealing inwardly with the situation enabled them not to expel from themselves what the successive crew members laying on the floor of the APC represented.

During the fighting, H.’s men were considered very capable and were therefore assigned the most difficult missions – and carried them all out. What is no less important is that all the soldiers in question, eight in number, survived that fierce war, which makes H. happy. He says it happened because all of them functioned well.

I tell him that it might also be due his containment ability. He had showed that when he allowed the soldier who cracked to remain with his fellow soldiers and not to be reviled and ostracized, and thereby helped the group contain the attendant emotional implications. And also by not allowing such conduct to continue when he felt that it was endangering the troops’ functioning. The boundary that H. set in one case did not stem from internal pressure to distance himself from what the soldier represented, but from internal processing that led him to take the action of setting a boundary after which the soldier functioned and fought once again.

I thought then about the scars and traumas that many Israeli soldiers still carry from that war, which in certain cases they’ve recognized only recently. I thought about those three soldiers who lay on the floor of the APC and were contained by the rest of the crew and its commander. I thought that there was a good chance that the event, had it been managed differently, might have left within them an open, painful, shameful wound. I want to believe that the containment contributed to their ability to digest the horrors and the experiences of the war less traumatically. When I told H. that this might have been such an important contribution on his part to those under his command – tears started to flow from his eyes.

H. is unable to reconstruct in detail what happened during those hours, but one can assume that amid the tumult of the war he possessed a reflective ability – whose existence sounds almost absurd under such conditions – and that within it an emotional process occurred that led him to act as he did.

Those incidents and thoughts became a subject of conversation between us in the months that followed. From time to time H. updated me about another conversation or correspondence he had had, ahead of the meeting of his company to mark the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. After that event, at which H. spoke, he received an email from one of his soldiers. With the soldier’s permission, I will quote part of what he wrote, in the format in which it was written (emphasis in bold is mine):

“I liked hearing your truth from the viewpoint of the person exposed in the turret.

I stood, I sat, I lay for an entire war behind you.

Today I understand what went on within you during the battles. But then in the days that were not easy for us, your quiet. Your clear line of thought, your military command ability.

Your modesty made us feel confident in your ability and so in our ability as a crew.

Luckily for us we also had excellent soldiers, each and every one.

You projected confidence and that was projected on us; we felt safe with you and with each other. And the fact is that we are here to talk about it.”

The writer of those lines was one of those who lay on the floor of the APC. When I read about the quiet, the clear line of thought and the modesty he attributed to his commander, I imagine it as an external description of H.’s mental capacity to encounter the threatening aspects of the psyche, to somehow abide them, hold them in and reflect on them, even in such an extreme situation as war – and to transform them into elements contained both by his psyche and that of his soldiers. It’s possible, I think, that this ability contributed to the ability of the soldiers who lay on the floor to collect themselves and continue to fight. The letter writer’s moving ability to describe this with such candor, and to express in his own words the difficulty that existed, together with the abilities, the achievements and the feeling of worth – is testimony to the fact that H.’s containment ability, and under his inspiration that of the rest of the troops as well, also contributed to preventing or reducing traumatic mental harm.

Dr. Avi Nutkevitch is a clinical psychologist and a training analyst in the Israel Psychoanalytic Society; a full version of this article (in Hebrew) was published at www.hebpsy.net