thedrifter
02-10-07, 09:03 AM
Three Cleveland-area families describe what it’s like to have loved ones serving in Iraq
BY: JENNIFER DADDARIO Staff Reporter
Two sons, one worry
Every three or four days, Medina resident Robert Cohen speaks with his middle son Ryan, a U.S. Marine now completing a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq. Immediately after speaking to Ryan, a lance corporal, he starts to worry and cannot sleep for two or three days. The sleepless nights coincide with daytime in Iraq when Ryan, 19, is out on missions, driving a tank, “getting shot at, right in harm’s way.”
Cohen is no stranger to these sleepless nights. His oldest son, Aaron, 21, also was in Iraq for seven months, ultimately injuring both knees from repeatedly kicking in doors looking for insurgents. Aaron, also a lance corporal, was medevaced out of Iraq in the middle of a firefight because he could not move. He eventually had two surgeries on his legs in Kuwait before returning home in mid-July.
“It was pretty scary,” Cohen recalls. “But I was relieved when I heard he was hurt and coming home as a result.”
After Aaron returned from Iraq and Ryan was on leave from boot camp in December, the brothers were home together for a brief reunion. Serendipitously, they were just in time for their younger brother Jacob’s bar mitzvah at Temple Israel in Akron. As Jacob stood at the bima and read from the Torah, his two brothers, dressed in their Marine blue uniforms, stood on either side of him, just the way he wanted it.
After his three weeks at home, Ryan was called to active duty. Cohen cannot share what his son is doing in Iraq, except that he is in Fallujah, driving a TRACK assault vehicle. The tank holds 15 to 20 troops and advances to the front lines. Already, Cohen says softly, “he has had two near-death experiences while driving.”
Aaron, who wore a yarmulke until his head was shaved for the Marines, “never sounded like himself” while he was in Iraq, his father recalls. There was one 4 a.m. phone call in particular that stuck with him. When he asked Aaron how he was doing, Aaron’s response was, “Dad, I’m tired of getting shot at.”
After returning home, Aaron shared some stories, but Cohen explains his son will always answer some questions the same way. When speaking to 7th and 8th graders at a Jewish day school in the Akron area, some students asked Aaron if he had killed anybody. He told them that he “did some very bad things to some very bad people.”
When asked their opinions about the war, both Aaron and Ryan respond in the exact same way: They say, simply, “We serve at the discretion of our commander-in-chief.”
Cohen is more open about his own views on the war. “I think initially the president made some very good decisions with some very bad information,” he says. Then he pauses and adds, “I wish we could find an immediate, graceful exit.”
The brothers, who both signed up for the Marines while in high school, face chances of returning to Iraq. Aaron, who is now at Ohio State University taking classes, joined the military for six years in the Reserves. In the future, he hopes to join the JAG (Judge Advocate General) corps and be a military attorney.
Ryan enlisted for four years in the Marines to serve his country without making it a career, his father says.
Being a Jewish Marine is a “rare breed,” Aaron told this CJN reporter. In an e-mail from Iraq, Ryan shares that in his company of 200, he is the only Jewish soldier. “I have met maybe five to ten practicing Jews,” he adds.
Being Jewish and in the battle zone gave Aaron perspective on not just one kind of hatred, but two, he says. “It’s one thing to be fighting someone who hates your nation. But it’s another for a group of people to not only hate the nation you’re in, but also very much dislike what you stand for in your religious views.”
Aaron saw this hatred “very keenly from Iraqis and insurgents.” When their unit was traveling through a small Iraqi town, for example, the first question the Iraqis asked was if anyone was Jewish.
Ryan has seen hateful pictures on the side of an old building. “There is a very intense painting of an Iraqi burning an Israeli flag and breaking an Orthodox Jew’s back over his knee,” he says.
Even though he was in and out of his camp on missions, Ryan was able to light candles on Chanukah seven out of the eight nights, his father shares. Ryan also wears a Star of David on his dog tags because “it brings me comfort.”
Instead of avoiding news about the war, Robert Cohen says he is “addicted,” constantly reading the papers or listening to the TV. “When I hear the word Fallujah, I am at attention. But when I hear second battalion, I drop everything.” He usually hears important news from the soldiers’ families networks he belongs to.
The boys’ mother, Gloria Cohen, concedes that having two sons in the Marines and serving in Iraq is “terribly stressful.” During her first son’s deployment, she didn’t know what to expect. She was aware that he had an extremely dangerous job and admits she “didn’t handle it very well.” She found comfort in the different support networks for each of her son’s companies.
Keeping up-to-date with the information supplied by the support networks also helps ease the pain of Ryan being in combat. “I understand what is going on better now, and am a little less afraid for Ryan.”
To keep her mind off the Iraq situation, she works long hours three days a week as a private nurse. She also focuses on her 14-year-old son Jacob, who “is so close with and misses his brother so much.”
It’s hard not to worry, Robert Cohen admits. “The hardest thing is when I allow myself to think what it would be like if I saw a Marine in full dress blues at my front door.”
He goes to synagogue twice a week to pray that Ryan “comes back alive,” and he tries to keep himself busy. Still, he says, “If you don’t have a child in combat, there is nothing I can say to help you understand.”
There are moments, he adds, when his mind just starts to go places, and he begins to cry. A particularly emotional experience was meeting the father of a soldier who pulled Aaron out of a firefight. A week later, that soldier was killed in combat.
Cohen told the soldier’s father, whom he had never met before, “A week before your son died, he saved my son’s life. “The two of us,” he said, “stood in public, hugging and crying.”
Staying Connected
Anne Hach, whose husband Tom has been in Baghdad since May, says although he is far from her and their young children, she knows she is “fortunate.” The Shaker Heights resident and member of The Temple-Tifereth Israel speaks to her husband, a commander in the Navy, “no fewer then four times a day.” Being in Baghdad, Tom is “as safe as you can be in a country at war,” Hach says. He also has a non-combat role.
The most important thing, she says, is keeping her two youngsters, Grove, 8, and Clara, 6, connected with their father. Both children have their own e-mail accounts, and every Saturday they meet their dad online to play games together. They also e-mail their dad pictures and send him packages with items like homemade cookies.
Hach adds that she and her children talk about Tom often.
“We’re proud of him,” Grove says. Clara adds that she misses her Dad, but likes to talk to him on the phone even though sometimes it’s “noisy when the helicopter goes past.”
Grove’s second-grade class at Boulevard elementary has sent his dad letters and a special flag they made for him in honor of Constitution day.
Hach and her children don’t ever listen to or watch the news about Iraq, she says. When mention of Iraq or the war does slip out, “we talk about how it’s important to help other people and how Dad is helping other people.”
As director of the Key Entrepreneur Development Center at Corporate College, Hach keeps a busy schedule. In addition, she says, “I just consciously don’t think about (the war). I can’t start that worrying, because I would be consumed by it.”
She credits family and friends for being supportive of her and her children. “We are incredibly lucky. Everyone is so thoughtful and generous with their time,” she says, teary-eyed. “How do you get by without a community like this?”
Grove’s teacher at Boulevard elementary, Stephanie Eagleton, is a perfect example, she explains. “She has done such a wonderful job engaging the class with Tom and keeping him connected with Grove’s school work.” A “very special” example was sending Grove’s report card to his dad in Baghdad because he could not be there for parent-teacher conferences.
Anne Hach’s mother, Edith Hirsch, also plays a large role. “I simply could not do this without my mom,” she says.
Her mom provides help with everything, Hach explains, from “being an extra set of hands when I’ve got one who has to be in one direction and one in another, to picking the kids up at the JCC and doing back-to-school shopping or errands.”
The Hach family had a special reunion/family vacation in December. Anne, Grove and Clara met Tom in London, where they spent 17 days together in England and Germany. “Everybody was so excited to see him,” Hach relates. “It was a great trip, a really terrific trip.”
Tom Hach is scheduled to leave Baghdad in the middle of June and return to Cleveland a week to ten days later. “I feel like now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” his wife says.
Unexpected journey
Beachwood resident Scott Mulligan was in Iraq for a year, but he admits he had a “much different time” than a combat soldier because he was a military defense attorney. Mulligan was in the active duty reserves from 1998 to 2001, and he had five years of obligatory commitment.
In his fifth year of the commitment, he was deployed to Iraq. “We had no idea when he got that phone call,” says his wife, Dara Holop. “It came totally out of left field.”
Mulligan left for Iraq in October of 2005. He returned home in July of 2006.
As an attorney, Mulligan visited crime scenes and worked with U.S. military clients on cases ranging from detainee abuse, sexual assault, alleged rapes and battery, to petty theft and trafficking in opium. He traveled from city to city by either a black hawk helicopter or military convoy vehicles.
Mulligan was “incredibly fortunate” to always have an office wherever his travels took him and e-mail access. He also was able to call his wife and their two children, Eli, 4, and Noah, 7, nearly every day.
No matter how often they were able to speak, “I still wasn’t there,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking to talk to your kids and not be able to see them or hug them.”
Because they were lucky enough to speak so often, Holop says she worried most when she didn’t hear from her husband or when she knew he was traveling.
Being without her husband for such a long period of time was “difficult and very strange. Overnight I became a single parent,” she says. “It was like living in a surreal world.”
Their respective families, who live in Florida, were wonderful, as much as they could be from far away, Holop explains. Her husband was deployed by himself and not with a group of attorneys or in a troop. “On my end, I didn’t have any kind of group of people to relate to,” she adds.
Without that group, Holop, a member of Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, turned to the people closest to her. “Without my friends and family, there was no way,” she says. “They were my support, my rock through the whole thing, and they continue to be.”
Friends in the area became like family and were “wonderful.” Her babysitter “became a constant in the kids’ lives and mine,” she says. Without her babysitter, she adds, the family wouldn’t have been able to do as many things. “I didn’t have to say no to things with work, and I could do things on my own.”
Holop, the music teacher and special programs director at Suburban Temple-Kol Ami, says the synagogue made her family feel very special. “They were such amazing support for me.” Some of the music classes made seder plates and cards with Holop’s son and then sent them to his Dad.
After Mulligan returned home, he faced a difficult adjustment period, because his wife had been doing everything herself for so long. “When you get back, you kind of step back into your life, but it’s not really yours anymore,” he admits. “It takes a while.”
It was an adjustment for the whole family, Holop concurs. “It took us a while to get back in the groove” of having both parents home.
Mulligan’s commitment to the military is over, and he has submitted his resignation papers. Now, the wait begins to see if the resignation is accepted, he says.
After he returned to Cleveland, Mulligan says he didn’t watch the news for four months. “I was just so glad to be home, that’s where I wanted to focus my attention and try to make up all that lost time with my kids.”
Jdaddario@cjn.org
Ellie
BY: JENNIFER DADDARIO Staff Reporter
Two sons, one worry
Every three or four days, Medina resident Robert Cohen speaks with his middle son Ryan, a U.S. Marine now completing a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq. Immediately after speaking to Ryan, a lance corporal, he starts to worry and cannot sleep for two or three days. The sleepless nights coincide with daytime in Iraq when Ryan, 19, is out on missions, driving a tank, “getting shot at, right in harm’s way.”
Cohen is no stranger to these sleepless nights. His oldest son, Aaron, 21, also was in Iraq for seven months, ultimately injuring both knees from repeatedly kicking in doors looking for insurgents. Aaron, also a lance corporal, was medevaced out of Iraq in the middle of a firefight because he could not move. He eventually had two surgeries on his legs in Kuwait before returning home in mid-July.
“It was pretty scary,” Cohen recalls. “But I was relieved when I heard he was hurt and coming home as a result.”
After Aaron returned from Iraq and Ryan was on leave from boot camp in December, the brothers were home together for a brief reunion. Serendipitously, they were just in time for their younger brother Jacob’s bar mitzvah at Temple Israel in Akron. As Jacob stood at the bima and read from the Torah, his two brothers, dressed in their Marine blue uniforms, stood on either side of him, just the way he wanted it.
After his three weeks at home, Ryan was called to active duty. Cohen cannot share what his son is doing in Iraq, except that he is in Fallujah, driving a TRACK assault vehicle. The tank holds 15 to 20 troops and advances to the front lines. Already, Cohen says softly, “he has had two near-death experiences while driving.”
Aaron, who wore a yarmulke until his head was shaved for the Marines, “never sounded like himself” while he was in Iraq, his father recalls. There was one 4 a.m. phone call in particular that stuck with him. When he asked Aaron how he was doing, Aaron’s response was, “Dad, I’m tired of getting shot at.”
After returning home, Aaron shared some stories, but Cohen explains his son will always answer some questions the same way. When speaking to 7th and 8th graders at a Jewish day school in the Akron area, some students asked Aaron if he had killed anybody. He told them that he “did some very bad things to some very bad people.”
When asked their opinions about the war, both Aaron and Ryan respond in the exact same way: They say, simply, “We serve at the discretion of our commander-in-chief.”
Cohen is more open about his own views on the war. “I think initially the president made some very good decisions with some very bad information,” he says. Then he pauses and adds, “I wish we could find an immediate, graceful exit.”
The brothers, who both signed up for the Marines while in high school, face chances of returning to Iraq. Aaron, who is now at Ohio State University taking classes, joined the military for six years in the Reserves. In the future, he hopes to join the JAG (Judge Advocate General) corps and be a military attorney.
Ryan enlisted for four years in the Marines to serve his country without making it a career, his father says.
Being a Jewish Marine is a “rare breed,” Aaron told this CJN reporter. In an e-mail from Iraq, Ryan shares that in his company of 200, he is the only Jewish soldier. “I have met maybe five to ten practicing Jews,” he adds.
Being Jewish and in the battle zone gave Aaron perspective on not just one kind of hatred, but two, he says. “It’s one thing to be fighting someone who hates your nation. But it’s another for a group of people to not only hate the nation you’re in, but also very much dislike what you stand for in your religious views.”
Aaron saw this hatred “very keenly from Iraqis and insurgents.” When their unit was traveling through a small Iraqi town, for example, the first question the Iraqis asked was if anyone was Jewish.
Ryan has seen hateful pictures on the side of an old building. “There is a very intense painting of an Iraqi burning an Israeli flag and breaking an Orthodox Jew’s back over his knee,” he says.
Even though he was in and out of his camp on missions, Ryan was able to light candles on Chanukah seven out of the eight nights, his father shares. Ryan also wears a Star of David on his dog tags because “it brings me comfort.”
Instead of avoiding news about the war, Robert Cohen says he is “addicted,” constantly reading the papers or listening to the TV. “When I hear the word Fallujah, I am at attention. But when I hear second battalion, I drop everything.” He usually hears important news from the soldiers’ families networks he belongs to.
The boys’ mother, Gloria Cohen, concedes that having two sons in the Marines and serving in Iraq is “terribly stressful.” During her first son’s deployment, she didn’t know what to expect. She was aware that he had an extremely dangerous job and admits she “didn’t handle it very well.” She found comfort in the different support networks for each of her son’s companies.
Keeping up-to-date with the information supplied by the support networks also helps ease the pain of Ryan being in combat. “I understand what is going on better now, and am a little less afraid for Ryan.”
To keep her mind off the Iraq situation, she works long hours three days a week as a private nurse. She also focuses on her 14-year-old son Jacob, who “is so close with and misses his brother so much.”
It’s hard not to worry, Robert Cohen admits. “The hardest thing is when I allow myself to think what it would be like if I saw a Marine in full dress blues at my front door.”
He goes to synagogue twice a week to pray that Ryan “comes back alive,” and he tries to keep himself busy. Still, he says, “If you don’t have a child in combat, there is nothing I can say to help you understand.”
There are moments, he adds, when his mind just starts to go places, and he begins to cry. A particularly emotional experience was meeting the father of a soldier who pulled Aaron out of a firefight. A week later, that soldier was killed in combat.
Cohen told the soldier’s father, whom he had never met before, “A week before your son died, he saved my son’s life. “The two of us,” he said, “stood in public, hugging and crying.”
Staying Connected
Anne Hach, whose husband Tom has been in Baghdad since May, says although he is far from her and their young children, she knows she is “fortunate.” The Shaker Heights resident and member of The Temple-Tifereth Israel speaks to her husband, a commander in the Navy, “no fewer then four times a day.” Being in Baghdad, Tom is “as safe as you can be in a country at war,” Hach says. He also has a non-combat role.
The most important thing, she says, is keeping her two youngsters, Grove, 8, and Clara, 6, connected with their father. Both children have their own e-mail accounts, and every Saturday they meet their dad online to play games together. They also e-mail their dad pictures and send him packages with items like homemade cookies.
Hach adds that she and her children talk about Tom often.
“We’re proud of him,” Grove says. Clara adds that she misses her Dad, but likes to talk to him on the phone even though sometimes it’s “noisy when the helicopter goes past.”
Grove’s second-grade class at Boulevard elementary has sent his dad letters and a special flag they made for him in honor of Constitution day.
Hach and her children don’t ever listen to or watch the news about Iraq, she says. When mention of Iraq or the war does slip out, “we talk about how it’s important to help other people and how Dad is helping other people.”
As director of the Key Entrepreneur Development Center at Corporate College, Hach keeps a busy schedule. In addition, she says, “I just consciously don’t think about (the war). I can’t start that worrying, because I would be consumed by it.”
She credits family and friends for being supportive of her and her children. “We are incredibly lucky. Everyone is so thoughtful and generous with their time,” she says, teary-eyed. “How do you get by without a community like this?”
Grove’s teacher at Boulevard elementary, Stephanie Eagleton, is a perfect example, she explains. “She has done such a wonderful job engaging the class with Tom and keeping him connected with Grove’s school work.” A “very special” example was sending Grove’s report card to his dad in Baghdad because he could not be there for parent-teacher conferences.
Anne Hach’s mother, Edith Hirsch, also plays a large role. “I simply could not do this without my mom,” she says.
Her mom provides help with everything, Hach explains, from “being an extra set of hands when I’ve got one who has to be in one direction and one in another, to picking the kids up at the JCC and doing back-to-school shopping or errands.”
The Hach family had a special reunion/family vacation in December. Anne, Grove and Clara met Tom in London, where they spent 17 days together in England and Germany. “Everybody was so excited to see him,” Hach relates. “It was a great trip, a really terrific trip.”
Tom Hach is scheduled to leave Baghdad in the middle of June and return to Cleveland a week to ten days later. “I feel like now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” his wife says.
Unexpected journey
Beachwood resident Scott Mulligan was in Iraq for a year, but he admits he had a “much different time” than a combat soldier because he was a military defense attorney. Mulligan was in the active duty reserves from 1998 to 2001, and he had five years of obligatory commitment.
In his fifth year of the commitment, he was deployed to Iraq. “We had no idea when he got that phone call,” says his wife, Dara Holop. “It came totally out of left field.”
Mulligan left for Iraq in October of 2005. He returned home in July of 2006.
As an attorney, Mulligan visited crime scenes and worked with U.S. military clients on cases ranging from detainee abuse, sexual assault, alleged rapes and battery, to petty theft and trafficking in opium. He traveled from city to city by either a black hawk helicopter or military convoy vehicles.
Mulligan was “incredibly fortunate” to always have an office wherever his travels took him and e-mail access. He also was able to call his wife and their two children, Eli, 4, and Noah, 7, nearly every day.
No matter how often they were able to speak, “I still wasn’t there,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking to talk to your kids and not be able to see them or hug them.”
Because they were lucky enough to speak so often, Holop says she worried most when she didn’t hear from her husband or when she knew he was traveling.
Being without her husband for such a long period of time was “difficult and very strange. Overnight I became a single parent,” she says. “It was like living in a surreal world.”
Their respective families, who live in Florida, were wonderful, as much as they could be from far away, Holop explains. Her husband was deployed by himself and not with a group of attorneys or in a troop. “On my end, I didn’t have any kind of group of people to relate to,” she adds.
Without that group, Holop, a member of Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, turned to the people closest to her. “Without my friends and family, there was no way,” she says. “They were my support, my rock through the whole thing, and they continue to be.”
Friends in the area became like family and were “wonderful.” Her babysitter “became a constant in the kids’ lives and mine,” she says. Without her babysitter, she adds, the family wouldn’t have been able to do as many things. “I didn’t have to say no to things with work, and I could do things on my own.”
Holop, the music teacher and special programs director at Suburban Temple-Kol Ami, says the synagogue made her family feel very special. “They were such amazing support for me.” Some of the music classes made seder plates and cards with Holop’s son and then sent them to his Dad.
After Mulligan returned home, he faced a difficult adjustment period, because his wife had been doing everything herself for so long. “When you get back, you kind of step back into your life, but it’s not really yours anymore,” he admits. “It takes a while.”
It was an adjustment for the whole family, Holop concurs. “It took us a while to get back in the groove” of having both parents home.
Mulligan’s commitment to the military is over, and he has submitted his resignation papers. Now, the wait begins to see if the resignation is accepted, he says.
After he returned to Cleveland, Mulligan says he didn’t watch the news for four months. “I was just so glad to be home, that’s where I wanted to focus my attention and try to make up all that lost time with my kids.”
Jdaddario@cjn.org
Ellie