We Remember

[thedrifter]

May 29, 2005
WE REMEMBER


By TOM ROEDER THE GAZETTE

THEIR COMRADES say they won’t remember them for their politics or patriotism. Not even a free Iraq provides an adequate epitaph for the 60 men from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team who’ve laid down their lives, said wounded soldiers recovering at Fort Carson. Instead, survivors say the legacy of the fallen is vested in soldiers who make it back alive.

“The way I look at it, these guys died so I could come home,” said Sgt. John Pope, who took shrapnel in his legs after a bomb exploded in February.

Pope and scores of other wounded soldiers from the brigade live in barracks at Fort Carson. The men say it was easier being in combat, because they didn’t have time to dwell on lost friends.

“It digs into you,” said Pfc. Aaron Meier, who lost one of his best friends, Staff Sgt. Kyle Eggers, during a guerrilla bombing.

Tragedy has shadowed the 3,700 soldiers of the 2nd Brigade since they went to Iraq from bases in South Korea in August. A halfdozen a month have died.

In September, the brigade was reassigned to Fort Carson and will come to the post when their yearlong tour is over in August.

Fort Carson has lost 114 soldiers in Iraq since the war began in 2003. In recent weeks, five soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and two from the 43rd Area Support Group have died.

Soldiers who served with the 2nd Brigade in Ramadi, Iraq, say the tears come in waves at Fort Carson, but there’s little time for crying for those still in Iraq.

“When you roll out of the gate (on a mission), all you think about is you and your crew,” Pope said.

2nd Brigade soldiers have died at the hands of a mostly unseen enemy. Remote-controlled bombs and hit-andrun ambushes are the hallmark of an insurgency that ebbs after major U.S. offensives, only to re-emerge.

‘LIKE LOSING A BROTHER’

Because its members spent a year together in South Korea before going to Iraq, the 2nd Brigade is one of the Army’s most close-knit units. Korea is a hardship duty post where soldiers cannot take their families.

That bond was strengthened when the unit went to war, soldiers said.

Brigade Commander Col. Gary Patton said he won’t let his troops dwell on their losses.

“In some cases, we have designed missions, just to put the unit out of the gate and back in the fight, so as to keep the men focused on the mission, and not on the loss,” he wrote in an e-mail from Iraq.

At Fort Carson, Pfc. Ismael Solario is haunted by the death of his friend, Pvt. Jeungjin N. Kim, who died in an ambush.

Kim volunteered to ride shotgun on a mission, taking Solario’s place and giving his friend a much-needed day off.

“Next thing you know, I was sleeping and they woke me up, and they told me that Kim got hit,” Solario said.

That’s where the guilt comes in: Kim didn’t go out on the orders of a colonel or general, he went out for a buddy.

“I owe him a lot for that,” Solario said.

Kim was married and had an infant son.

Solario, who took a bullet in the face a month after Kim’s death, said he deals with the pain by keeping busy and reading psalms from the Bible.

Patton said the brigade does everything it can to help soldiers deal with tragedy.

Teams of counselors work with platoons that have been attacked. Chaplains pray with soldiers, and men are allowed to cry.

“It is hard to accept that every loss represents a fatherless child somewhere, a new widow, an empty home,” Patton wrote. “Every loss is like losing a brother, regardless of the closeness of your personal relationship.”

WHAT THEY’RE FIGHTING FOR

After a May 18 memorial service at Fort Carson for six soldiers from the brigade, Spc. William Quick summed up his emotions for his best friend, Spc. Randy Stevens.

“It’s going to be a rough day,” he said.

Quick, who suffered shrapnel wounds to his face in November and nearly lost an eye, said Stevens saved his life by carrying him to a Humvee and driving him to an aid station.

Quick feels guilty that he wasn’t there for Stevens, who was killed by mortar fire from an unseen enemy April 16.

“There won’t be a day when I don’t miss him,” Quick said.

A few yards away at Soldiers Memorial Chapel, Stevens’ parents held pictures of their fallen son.

“He was a hero,” David Stevens said of his son. “He believed in what he was doing.”

Francisco Martinez was there mourning the loss of his son, Frank, a specialist who kept an Internet diary of his life in the Army.

Before he died, Frank Martinez wrote about what he was fighting for:

“I will serve myself, my family, my friends, and my loved ones. . . . Every man on the line is fighting for what is right — themselves and their families.”

His father said he has been astounded by the outpouring of good will since Frank was killed. He said it shows every life in Iraq is important.

“Each one of the lives is such a special loss for all of us.”

Patton said the war has taught him lessons about pride and patriotism and how precious life can be.

“I try to get out and see soldiers and Marines on the battlefield every single day,” he wrote. “I want to spend more time talking to them, putting a few more shakes in a handshake, and a bit longer conversation in passing, with more time spent thanking them and rewarding them for their service, not knowing if today may be their or my last day of duty.”

In the barracks at Fort Carson, the wounded soldiers say heroic words are often misdirected to men who come home with mere scars.

“Anybody that goes over there, if they make it back, they did something great,” said Pfc. Ben Gajewski, who is recovering from shrapnel wounds he suffered Nov. 6. “If they don’t make it back, they are heroes.”

More 2nd Brigade soldiers will probably meet Gajewski’s definition of heroism before the unit comes to Fort Carson in August.

Patton concluded his e-mail abruptly.

“Our camp has just been hit with two rockets, and I have casualties and counterfires to tend to.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or

troeder@gazette.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.

James Vesely / Times editorial page editor

Taps heard from a quiet man, for quiet veterans

When Uncle Jim died last winter, a quiet man showed up at the cemetery on Bainbridge Island and sounded taps at just the right moment in the ceremony.

He stayed distant from the mourning relatives, on a little slope toward the conifers, and when offered a small token for his gift of that stark melody, he declined. "He was a veteran," the bugler said, and nodded toward the grave.

The veteran in the small family gathering — just me — thought that taps becomes more poignant when it is sounded for just one instead of the many. No tune has quite the same ability to knife into the past with such remorseless truth. It is a song of evening tide, but also of ending. Jim was buried with medals across his chest and his unit flag from World War II folded around him. It was odd, in a way, because he used to joke that he served in uniform for six years "and hated every minute of it." He walked into Germany, and later, walked into Tokyo and hardly ever said a word about it.

On Mercer Island this Memorial Day, there will be a commemoration and plaque dedicated to all veterans. A display of the wool blouses worn 60 years ago, in 1944-45, has the distant feel of looking at uniforms from the Civil War — we are now three full generations away from World War II, the equivalent of those veterans of the 1864 campaigns meeting in 1924.

By default, many of tomorrow's ceremonies focus on World War II instead of current veterans. We create more new veterans every year, but nostalgia is a powerful tide and it keeps reminding us of our fathers and grandfathers, veterans of the greatest crusade of the 20th century.

The ceremonies held tomorrow, at the large cemeteries and in the small parks and triangles of grass near a veteran's grave, are all about evening tide. Each simple ceremony will be repeated a thousand times, mostly in the small towns of our country and less so in the big cities.

I have learned that I like the quiet veterans best. They go about their jobs and their duty, they become civilians again or they stand silently at gravesites and don't say too much about it.

This weekend, we are always reminded of their work. The U.S. Navy Cruiser Sailors Association (www.navycruisers.org) sent me its information that 4,000 members are sending laptop computers (in Arabic software) to schools in Iraq.

This is subliminally a Navy town and certainly a Navy region, so I assume there are lots of former cruiser sailors and Marines around. They should know their work is being recognized.

There are hundreds more associations and groups like them. They carry, indelibly, definitions of who they are today by their past.

I have written before of the gap between soldier and civilian and how it harms democracy. If we don't know anyone other than Grandpa who served aboard a cruiser or stood in formation at day's end, or if we reject their representatives from civilian society, we are the worse for it.

People get frothy about everything these days. I do remember a more civil time, when Memorial Day was a day out of time, and everyone understood without a second thought that taps would be played that evening.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Promise kept, home at last
Posted: May 28, 2005

Saint Mary's Ridge - An off-the-cuff remark made by one North Carolina man to another about an unfulfilled promise has led to a Memorial Day story that this tiny Wisconsin town will never forget.

And it set in motion the return of the body of native son William Anthony Kroll to Wisconsin last week, to a grave on the edge of the church cemetery, Kroll's fifth and presumably final resting place since he was killed 62 years ago fighting in World War II.

His sacrifice, while never forgotten, has found new appreciation here.

"It's just poetic to think that his mother's wishes are finally fulfilled that he be buried by a Catholic priest right here at St. Mary's Ridge," said Father Eric Berns, pastor of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church, which stands atop the ridge that gave this western Wisconsin place its name.

The North Carolina men are Dudley McGough and Ed Caram. They're more acquaintances than friends. Caram had purchased a piece of land from McGough in Jacksonville, N.C.

When they talked a few months ago, McGough somehow got around to telling Caram that he and a fellow Marine had promised each other that if either was killed in the war, the other would contact that man's family back home. Now 82 years old, McGough was feeling anxious about this vow he had failed to keep.

"I always thought about the boy," McGough said, and he felt guilty that he had somehow survived the fierce battle when so many had not.

Caram, a freelance writer and war history buff, pressed him for details. McGough said he had been forced to throw off his knapsack when he wound up in deep water during battle. Lost was the slip of paper with the name and address of the other soldier's mother.

All he remembered is that the man's name was Pfc. William Kroll, and he was from Wisconsin.

Caram did some research and traced Kroll to the Cashton and St. Mary's Ridge area of Monroe County. He contacted Ormand Mack, the church's development director, and they began discussing how the promise might be honored so many years later.

William Kroll had a brother, Erwin, who still lives on the farm where they grew up. You can see it from the church. Despite the fact that he's a lifelong bachelor, Erwin had purchased two cemetery plots behind the church, although he never really talked about having his brother's remains moved there.

Caram got Mack and others thinking about doing exactly that. Since 1947, William Kroll has been buried at the Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis.

Before that, his body was in a mausoleum at a military base in Hawaii for a short time. Before that, he was buried in a cemetery on Tarawa, the tiny Pacific island where he was killed on Nov. 22, 1943. And before he was laid to rest there, he had been buried with other soldiers temporarily in a ditch on Tarawa immediately after the battle that ended his life.

Yes, the officials at Fort Snelling said, the body could be disinterred and brought to Wisconsin. So the steel casket - a little rusty and dented by the backhoe but otherwise in excellent condition - was unearthed Tuesday and driven to St. Mary's Ridge on Thursday morning for a funeral and burial.

McGough did not come to Wisconsin for the ceremony. His wife is ill, and he was uncomfortable about making the trip. He saw so much death in the war and has tried to put it behind him. "I don't think I could have handled the funeral," he told me when I reached him by telephone.

So he told his story on a videotape made by Caram, who came to Wisconsin last week and showed the video in the church basement to about 100 people gathered there, nearly all of them well past retirement age.

McGough, Kroll and other soldiers took cover behind coconut logs when they hit Tarawa. These Marines, in the words of a military report I saw, were "a highly vulnerable target for devastating Japanese fire." Kroll was to McGough's right, about three feet away, when they obeyed the order to advance. "I can see it as plain as if it happened yesterday," McGough told me.

"Bill never got to fire a shot. I seen him stumble and fall after he had taken three or four steps," he said. Kroll had been hit at least twice in the chest. "I could see that he was gone," he said.

The Marines captured that island, but in 72 hours of fighting, more than 3,300 Americans were killed or injured. The name Tarawa is not well known by most people, but it's one of the bloodiest battles the Marines ever fought. More than 4,500 Japanese died trying to defend the island and its airstrip.

McGough was in two more battles after that. He returned to the United States and retired from the Marine Corps in 1972.

"I just couldn't put it out of my mind," he said about the promise to contact Kroll's family. "I didn't know how to find them. It always bothered me. I knew he was buried on the island."

Erwin Kroll and a surviving sister, Marie Williams, were on hand for Thursday's ceremony. They watched Berns sprinkle holy water on the casket, which had William Kroll's dog tags hanging from one of its handles. American Legion and VFW members stood at attention and accompanied the fallen soldier to the sunny gravesite, where riflemen fired three shots as a salute, buglers sounded taps, and Marines folded the flag draping the coffin.

Children from the parish's St. Mary's Ridge School, the same school Kroll attended as a boy, sang patriotic songs. The Torkelson Funeral Home donated its services. A local woodworker, Bob Geier, used a photograph to make a white cross identical to the one that marked Kroll's grave on Tarawa.

Erwin Kroll, 81, bought two new headstones. His brother's stone lists William's Marine battalion, regiment and division and says he was killed fighting in the war. Erwin's stone says "Brother of William" and on the back it states: "Spent entire life on Kroll family farm."

William Kroll's nephew, Norbert Ottersen, also was present. He lived in Milwaukee as a child but spent time during the Great Depression living on the Kroll farm. "William was eight years older than me. He was my hero and like my big brother," he said.

William Kroll, who was one of 11 children, lived with Ottersen's family on Milwaukee's south side for a while and found work as an auto mechanic. Kroll would let Ottersen tag along when he went out on dates with a young woman he was seeing at the time. He recalls her name as Florence Jacobs.

On June 15, 1942, Kroll went with some buddies to an enlistment office in Milwaukee and joined the Marines. He was 20 years old and a lanky 6 feet 2 inches tall. He handed Ottersen a wristwatch as he boarded a troop train and stepped off Wisconsin soil for the last time.

Among the photos and other mementos on display at the church was a May 1943 letter from Kroll to a niece, Romona, who had just made her First Communion. "Well, just be a good girl and offer up all the prayers you can for our fighting men and soon this bad war will be over," he wrote.

It took a month to get word back home that Kroll had been killed. Ottersen recalls that the announcement was read aloud at the church at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Weeping spread through the congregation.

"We are in their debt more than a lifetime of Memorial Days could ever repay," retired Army Col. Carl Bargabos told the crowd at last week's service.

A promise kept 62 years later is still a promise kept, the way Ormand Mack, the church development director, sees it.

"This is all happening because of Dudley coming forward," said Mack, who served in the Korean War. "We're veterans, and we just want to help. This is what Memorial Day is about."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

It's no holiday in Iraq
By Jake Rigdon
Wausau Daily Herald
jrigdon@wdhprint.com

You won't see U.S. soldiers in Iraq setting off fireworks or holding barbecues this Memorial Day.

For most, Monday will be like any other day. Skin-blistering heat. Insurgent attacks. And lots of work.

"The holidays are just another workday for most soldiers," Army Lt. Col. Steven Boylan said in an interview from Baghdad. "As much as we try to give our troops some downtime, most still work seven days a week."

Temperatures in Wausau are expected to hover close to 70 degrees with partly cloudy skies. Temperatures in Baghdad likely will be about 40 degrees higher. It was 107 degrees in Baghdad on Thursday, and temperatures are only rising. Boylan remembers a day last year when the temperature topped 135 degrees.

The searing heat and insurgency make for a miserable time in Iraq. Since a new Iraqi government was announced April 28, more than 600 people there have died in attacks.

"We know that a modern-day insurgency has its ebbs and flows," said Boylan, whose wife and three children live in Wausau. "We know that there will be spikes or increases in the (insurgents') operations as they try to counter what the Iraqi and coalition forces are doing."

Soldiers here say their thoughts constantly turn to their comrades in Iraq. Army Staff Sgt. Jeff Beever, 42, recently returned from Iraq, and Marine Corps Sgt. Anthony Farisa, 30, expects to be deployed there within a year.

Beever said he feels like he's cheating by relaxing. Beever was stationed in Iraq for 13 months until returning to the United States on Feb. 5. Last Memorial Day, he was recovering a Humvee in Iraq that had been damaged by an improvised explosive device. This Memorial Day, he'll be in Merrill to visit the grave of his grandfather who died in World War II.

"Basically, we worked 24-7 in Iraq," he said. "We really didn't have time off. We called it, 'being wrapped around an axle,' because you're always, always busy."

Farisa, who works at the Wausau Marine Corps recruiting office, said he has several friends serving in Iraq. His duty in Wausau ends in five months. He's not sure where he'll be stationed after that, but his unit could be called to Iraq any time.

"Every day is difficult," he said. "I tell people that I joined the Marines to serve my country, and I'm proud to (enlist) new soldiers into the U.S. Marines.

"But I want to be with my friends, serving my country, in Iraq."

Training the new Iraqi security force is taking longer than many had hoped. Progress is being made - more than 165,000 Iraqi military soldiers and police have been trained - but the slow pace is keeping U.S. forces away from home. That means more missed holidays, birthdays and anniversaries.

"Unfortunately, the holidays here are fleeting," Boylan said. "Soldiers may take a moment to themselves to think about home, about anniversaries and about loved ones.

"Holidays like Memorial Day will all come and go - and I would say most of our soldiers are thinking about home during those times - but the soldiers are focused on what they're doing here. They have to be. Lives depend on it."

Boylan will turn 43 on June 5. What will he be doing that day?

"Working," he said.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Sense of loss, war's toll overshadow family's joy
The Bradenton Herald
May 29, 2005

It was early Friday morning, and a car salesman was placing little American flags on each auto in the lot on Cortez Road.

Memorial Day weekend is here, I thought as I waited for the light.

Later, I thought of other images and activities we commonly associate with the traditional start of summer. Graduation parties, neighborhood barbecues and family getaways to the Keys.

Yet all that, as any combat veteran will tell you, is not what Memorial Day is about.

It is about remembering those who gave their lives in defense of this country.

There are many on that honored list from Manatee County, and the names of young men such as Christopher Cobb, Scott Dougherty, Paul Mardis and Justin Schmidt have been added to it.

They made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq.

All were killed in 2004, and their loss is felt as much a year later on this Memorial Day.

Thank God, none of Manatee County's sons or daughters serving in Iraq in 2005 have suffered a similar fate.

But we can't ignore the terrible dangers and awful consequences they face.

We see it in the news every day.

More Marines killed in a firefight with insurgents.

More soldiers die when their Humvee hits a mine.

Sometimes we can become inured to all of it.

Then it takes something like what Ed and Michelle Hoss witnessed to bring it home.

The Bradenton couple were returning from Connecticut on Monday morning. They'd been at Avon Old School for a Sunday awards ceremony where their teenage son, Andy, was an honoree.

Still exultant as they headed for their departure gate at Hartford's Bradley International Airport, the Hosses - and other travelers - were stopped by a poignant scene unfolding outside on the tarmac.

A line of six or seven vehicles, some with flags, some with security lights flashing, slowly approached a commercial jet.

One of the vehicles was a black hearse, which backed up to the jet as an honor guard of seven Marines and a sailor appeared in formation. They reverently took a casket from the hearse and walked it to the conveyor belt, saluting as it slowly disappeared into the jet's belly.

The Hosses were profoundly moved by what they saw.

I'm sure the other witnesses were as well.

"I consider myself a pretty strong person, but I could not look at my wife as she said, 'Another mother and father have lost a child,' " said Hoss, who spent 33 years in law enforcement. "We were both crying. It hit us extremely hard."

Four days had passed, but the image lost none of its impact for Hoss.

"It makes a tremendous difference when you experience it up close, rather than seeing it on TV," he said Friday. "It sure made us think and appreciate our two children and the sacrifices our servicemen and women are making for us."

Words to take to heart on Memorial Day.

Ellie