By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
To see him walking down the street, you’d never know there was anything different about Guy Pries. It’s only when he sits down, and the cuff of his pants rides up a few inches, that you see the metallic blue tube where a leg should be. About seven years ago, when the former Israeli soldier was out with his combat unit, a camouflaged bomb blew up Pries’ Jeep — and took most of his legs with it.
Pries endured the physical trauma and recovery, including having to relearn to walk on his prosthetic legs. That was the easy part.
“It’s taken four or five years to understand the Post-Traumatic Stress [Disorder]” Pries says.
Injuries such as his own or paralysis, he says, “people can grab onto.” The Ministry of Defense can categorize a bullet wound, but getting inside a wounded soldier’s head, particularly long after he has sustained the injury, is much more difficult, says Pries.
“It’s hard to understand the consequence of this injury,” he says.
Pries says he found his own calling after his double amputation: He began to handpick injured soldiers at the hospital to help them better grasp the emotional problems they were experiencing.
Then he found an organization called Hope for Heroism — in Israel it’s known as Achim L’Chaim, Brothers for Life — which does exactly what he had been doing, only in a structured, supported environment.
Pries, along with 11 other injured Israeli soldiers, came to Seattle this past week to speak to synagogues and schools around the area about their experiences. They came to the area because Hope for Heroism is a program of the local family education organization LivingJudaism. Achim L’Chaim stands as its own entity in Israel.
Though only a couple of years old, Hope for Heroism has been able to sustain itself through support from local families — both monetarily and by providing home hospitality. The soldiers’ trip was underwritten by local developer Martin Selig and his wife, Catherine Mayer.
Though they may laugh and rib and tease each other, it has taken most of these men a lot of time to once again become comfortable in their own skins — even now, many of them are at ease mostly with the soldiers with whom they’ve had similar experiences.
“The connection we have with all the guys, it’s like the connection in the army,” says Yanav Leidner, a 28-year-old program manager with Hope for Heroism who took a bullet on a raid against a Palestinian who had been planning an attack on Jerusalem’s city center.
“Life after being injured is not the same,” he says. “Fear and despair are daily emotions.”
Leidner calls the organization a support group where these soldiers can share anything with each other, including “your darkest thoughts.” But the healing process doesn’t end with talking to one another.
“The main idea in the foundation is wounded soldiers help wounded soldiers,” Leidner says.
Rabbi Chaim Levine, the director of LivingJudaism and Hope for Heroism, says meeting these “new” soldiers, as they’re called, in their own element has been most effective.
“We work with them in their environment,” Levine says. “Some haven’t left their apartments in years.”
Then, once they’ve picked themselves up and can cope on their own, they become “old” soldiers and take on someone new to mentor, Leidner says.
“This is something that’s really helping us and making us stronger,” says Pries, who notes that many of these people become disconnected from family and friends after their injuries.
With the injuries some of these men have suffered, they are lucky to be alive. One soldier, on the ground and bleeding, had three grenades tossed at him — none exploded. Another, who had been off-duty at the time, received a half-dozen bullet wounds in his torso and legs when attempting to save two women who were being attacked at a bus stop.
Yet what Levine says he finds interesting is that none of these former soldiers would consider what he’s done to be heroic, despite the actual lives they have saved.
“All of us people involved feel unbelievably inspired by the selflessness of the soldiers who put themselves on the front line to protect Israel and the Jewish community,” he said.