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thedrifter
04-24-04, 03:53 PM
Marine home from Afghan war




By Corydon Ireland
Staff writer


(April 6, 2004) — Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Barrett Schenk is back home from Afghanistan early, but it took a 40-foot-fall to do it.
Just after midnight on March 13, his squad was on patrol in mountainous terrain when he skidded on loose rocks or stones, slid fast and tumbled into the darkness.

”I lost my footing,” said the 20-year-old, who arrived home Friday on a 30-day leave. “Then the ground disappeared.”

To Schenk, a ruggedly built hockey player, Afghanistan was a place to do his duty, and maybe get a little payback for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

He was a freshman at the State University College at Canton that morning when a stroll through the cafeteria brought him a televised serving of terror.

”OK, I’m just going to leave now” was Schenk’s first thought, he said. But he waited until June before joining the Marine Corps. “I wanted to be part of something,” said Schenk.

There are 2,000 Marines in Afghanistan and soon to be 2,000 more. They’re joined by 13,000 Army soldiers. The forces are bringing in humanitarian aide, and bringing vengeance to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Still, to some observers, Afghanistan is not getting enough attention from U.S. policymakers.

”I really do think it’s a forgotten war, and it’s very troubling,” said terrorism expert Karla Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the State University College at Geneseo.

She said there are too few troops there and the countryside outside the neat boundaries of Kabul is destabilized. Taliban are regaining power, warlords resist centralized government and the drug trade, once the chief way to finance terror, is getting stronger.

Schenk went to Afghanistan in November with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. By early March, Marine convoys and helicopter missions included the rugged Tagab Valley east of Kabul.

Four months into his six-month tour, Schenk met his match on a rocky slope.

His last combat patrol had started out from a valley walled on all sides by mountains. He was cinched up in body armor and carrying a rifle.

”Everybody slips and slides down the mountains, but they catch themselves,” he said of foot patrols in the high country. After falling off into air and blackness, Schenk hit hard, felt instantly woozy, he said, and “managed to scream a few things” before fainting.

Schenk fell the equivalent of four stories, hitting a shelf of rock on his right side. He injured his right cheek, jaw, elbow, hip and knee and underwent two surgeries to repair a torn artery in his groin. Doctors used staples to suture 50 inches of incisions from his sternum to mid-thigh.

His father, Craig Schenk, 44, of Greece, heard from his son by phone about eight hours later. Doctors in a Bagram field hospital had just drained a massive hematoma from Barrett’s abdomen. In Rochester, it was 5 a.m. on a Sunday.

”I had a mishap,” Craig Schenk recalls his son saying in a groggy voice. “I fell off a mountain.”

The elder Schenk, who sells cutting tools and abrasives, won’t easily forget that call. “It took a few years off my life,” he said of having a child wounded in a war zone. “You never want to get that call. But at least I heard his voice.”

After three weeks of medical care in Afghanistan, Germany and Maryland, Schenk — 25 pounds lighter than when he left — walked gingerly into Nick Tahou’s on Lyell Avenue on Sunday, where he had lunch with friends.

”He is one of those guys you don’t want to lose,” said friend Brian Burley, 20, of Greece. “He’s always there for people.”

Brian Kurtenbach, 20, tried not to think about his friend’s war. “There are so many dangers he could be getting into.”

It was Schenk’s first trip to Nick Tahou’s since he left for Afghanistan.

In central Asia, he ate field rations, power bars and hot meals under tent flaps at Bagram Air Base, and slept on fold-out cots or under the stars.

Thousands of miles and 81/2 time zones away from Rochester, Schenk had sorely missed the famous Garbage Plate, a pile of meat, macaroni salad, beans, mustard and hot sauce. He also missed paved roads, hockey on television and sleeping in a real bed. There’s no mortar fire in Greece, either.

Schenk’s mother, Ann Nutter, 44, a hospice nurse in Rochester, got calls from him every two weeks, sometimes from a satellite phone in the field.

”What’s all that banging noise in the background?” she asked him one morning, sitting at home on East Avenue. “That’s mortar fire, Mom,” he replied. “But we’re shooting at them.”

Mortars were so routine, said Schenk, that he illustrated his reaction by leaning back and making a snoring noise.

Schenk has more than two years of duty left. At home on leave, he spends his time surfing hockey sites on the Internet, watching movies and catching up with family, including his father’s fiance, Nancy Wojewodka; her two daughters, Cory, 17, and Jaysa, 23; and his own sister, Liana Schenk, 18.

He wears an Ace bandage wrapped around the bad knee, and keeps a cane at home for the bad days. He doesn’t require an arm cast for the hairline break. And it hurts to laugh.

But coming home from the Afghanistan war as a Marine has its own benefits, said Schenk, who plans to be a landscape architect: “For the most part, people say thank you.”

CIRELAND@DemocratandChronicle.com


http://www.rochesterdandc.com/news/0406MK3RAPG_news.shtml


Ellie