He fought for the chance to fight: A combat medic's story

Shlomo Demma could have sat out this war, but he didn’t want to. A combat medic in the paratroopers, he was injured in military service in 2014 and hadn’t been called up to reserve duty since then. His imploring letters and phone calls to the IDF to allow him to serve in Swords of Iron were refused.

Demma, 31, was born in Paris. He is the youngest of five children because his identical twin brother, Samuel, was born two minutes before him. When the twins were four, their parents moved the family to Israel, where the children grew up in Jerusalem. It was important for Shlomo to become a combat soldier when he graduated from high school. 

He became a combat medic in the paratroopers. In June, 2014, when three young Israelis were kidnapped, his unit took part in the operation to search for them. Going door to door in Hebron, Shlomo was injured and underwent surgery on his shoulder.

“Because of my previous injury in my compulsory service, I wasn’t called up after Oct. 7. Two of my brothers were serving – even my twin who had recovered from cancer. I couldn’t stand staying home while my country was in danger,” he said. “I drove the army crazy. I kept calling, sent e-mails from different addresses, talked to everyone I could. Didn’t anyone need a combat medic?”

At last, he received a positive answer from the tank corps infantry – the soldiers outside of the tanks. “I was thrilled. My mother was not.”

HIS NEW unit was fighting near Jabalya. On a mission, they encountered a squad of terrorists. They cleared out a Gaza house and took positions facing outward on all four sides.

“We were under heavy fire. A stone wall surrounded the house that the terrorists used as defense. My position was between the house and the exterior wall, shooting through a hole. An IED, an explosive device from a different house, hit from above, and the stone wall collapsed and fell on top of me.”

Everything went black.

He thought he was dead.

Then he heard shouting and shooting. “I’m alive,” he thought to himself.

Using his medic experience, he tried to figure out the toll of his injuries.

He could move his left hand, but when he looked at the upper arm he saw it was full of holes. He could see his muscles.

Joyfully, he could wiggle his toes.

His neck felt as if he were on fire.

His back was wet. He wondered if it was blood or the water he was carrying. He couldn’t lift his arms to reach it.

Shlomo heard his comrades yelling at him to put a tourniquet on his arms.

“I told them I couldn’t move, that they had to put on the tourniquet. They weren’t too good at it, so I, the wounded medic, talked them through it. I was afraid I’d lose my arm if they did it wrong. At last, they put tourniquets on my two arms and my right leg.”

As they carried him off on a stretcher, the pain was so bad he bit through his lips.

“I can remember the indescribable agony and the terrible smells of burning flesh and soldiers’ sweat as they carried me on the stretcher. I said to myself, ‘Shlomo, don’t complain. They’re trying to save your life.’”

He was driven in a Hummer to a helipad within the Gaza Strip.

There, his clothes were removed. “I was embarrassed because there were women soldiers there,” he said.

The extent of his injuries

THE DOCTOR on duty examined him. Shlomo the combat medic listened carefully as the doctor told him that he had a hole in his back and his lungs were collapsed.

He needed a tourniquet on his left leg, too. He needed a chest drain.

“I thought to myself: ‘I have four tourniquets on my limbs. I have a hole in my back and in my lungs. I’m troubled.’” Only he used a word that begins with “f” instead of “troubled.”

“I’ll either die or be an invalid. I asked the doctor if I would be an invalid for life. No, he said kindly. You’ll be a handsome guy.”

Shlomo asked for a painkiller. The medic on duty gave him a double dose.

He was classified as critically wounded as he was flown toward Israel.

While all this was happening, Shlomo’s twin, Samuel, home in Jerusalem on leave from fighting in the North, was suddenly overwhelmed with weariness. Never a napper, he had to lie down midday with a feeling of heaviness and exhaustion. He woke up to screaming and crying as his mother, siblings, nieces, and nephews had heard that his twin brother was wounded. “I knew I had to be the strong one and tell everyone I knew it would be all right.”

AT THE same time, 30 kilometers away from Shlomo’s fire fight, in the Gaza terror city of Khan Yunis, Dr. Yonatan Demma was operating on a wounded soldier. His commanding officer told Yonatan that he needed to leave his post and return to Hadassah Hospital, where he was desperately needed because of a very seriously wounded patient there. Dr. Demma said he couldn’t go, that there were soldiers who needed his care in Gaza. The officer insisted.

“When I retrieved my cellphone outside of Gaza, I saw the WhatsApp messages. I knew there was a seriously wounded patient being evacuated by helicopter from Gaza, but I didn’t know that the patient was my brother Shlomo,” Dr. Demma said.

When the surgeon told the family that Shlomo would survive, his twin Samuel collapsed in relief.

The whole family was around Shlomo when he woke up after seven hours of surgery.

“I saw my mother, who had begged me not to re-enlist, and told her I was sorry I caused her so much pain,” he said.

He went from intensive care to the surgery department in Hadassah Ein Kerem to rehabilitation, first in the old rehab department in Hadassah Mount Scopus, and then to the new Gandel Center.

“At first, I was helpless: I needed to be dressed and fed and taken to the bathroom. I hated it. I was badly wounded, but I was lucky. The explosion missed my brain, my spinal cord, and my carotid artery,” he explained.

He still goes to rehab three times a week, working particularly hard on his right hand. But he can walk and drive a car.

“I don’t regret going to fight. We have only one Israel. I am proud to fight for it,” he asserted.

I was with Shlomo and Samuel last week at the Hadassah Conference in Las Vegas, where they shared their story, f-word and all.

When everyone leapt to their feet for a standing ovation, it felt as if the whole sane world was applauding. 

The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.