After the homecoming

[thedrifter]

After the homecoming


Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Over several months in 2008, Stars and Stripes reporters and photographers traveled to Iraq, Kuwait and Fort Drum, N.Y., chronicling the lives of the “Triple Deuce” — the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division — both soldiers and their families.

As with most deployed units, there was triumph and tragedy. The unit presided over a calming of their area in northern Iraq, but it endured a horrific truck bomb attack that took the life of one of their own and badly wounded others.

Soldiers in the field pressed on.

When they came home, life was not the same. Children had grown and changed. To their babies, they were strangers. Wives had learned to manage with-out them, even while they yearned for their return.

Today and for the next four days, Stripes will tell the story of men sent to war and the people who supported them from thousands of miles away — the longing, the sorrow, the joy of reuniting and the apprehension at what lay ahead.

Stripes’ Nancy Montgomery will continue to follow the men of Triple Deuce and their families as they adjust to a life informed by war.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Coming Home: An outsider in your own life <br />
After the ceremonies and celebrations, troops returning from war face an entirely new battle: Living at home <br />
<br />
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes...

[thedrifter]

A moment that changed everything


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Friday, February 20, 2009

In the video, you can just barely make it out through the haze. It was a small blue truck, sitting outside Patrol Base Bushmaster for a half-hour or more.

Another vehicle pulled up, and a passenger inside the truck slid out, got into the second car and drove away.

Just then, 1st Sgt. Rick Haddad ordered Staff Sgt. Tyler Pickett to open the gate to let some Iraqis leave. The blue truck started to move and then sped up as it neared the gate.

Everybody knew what was going to happen.

"By the time anybody saw it, all they had time to do was run," said Sgt. David Johnson, who took a break from a law career to see combat. Johnson was a key player in the unit and has watched the video numerous times.

The truck, carrying a 2,000-pound ammonium nitrate bomb, hit the gate and exploded. It was June 8, at 1:51 p.m.

The bomb killed Pickett, a husband and father of two, who was supposed to be home on leave. It ripped open Haddad’s left side and left the three-time Bronze Star recipient permanently disabled. It wounded nearly 20 other soldiers of Company B — nearly a third of those on the base — including one young Ranger who wasn’t even evacuated at first; he shook constantly and has never returned to the unit.

"As it blasted, it blew off all the doors of our [containerized housing units], pretty much destroyed everything," said 1st Lt. Justin Burgess. "It was so loud, everybody’s hearing was [screwed] up. There was dust everywhere you could see.

"We see the MRAP on fire, a 20-foot crater in the ground, and Pickett is. … We didn’t know it was Pickett. We had to get his ID card out. … There was blood everywhere."

The bombing maimed the Iraqis about to leave the base — one turned up months later minus an eye and with a gruesome wound to his throat. The bomber was blown to pieces, which the soldiers kept finding around the base for weeks.

It changed everything.

"The whole mentality then, and the whole relationship, was changed. You’d be a fool to trust them again," Johnson said.

The VBIED, as the Army calls vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, came after a year of the company’s counterinsurgency efforts. There had been innumerable "chai ops," meetings with tribal leaders and local councils over tea. There had been projects and foot patrols and a reconciliation process that brought in insurgents and gave them a paycheck for manning checkpoints. As a result, there had been by one count an 80 percent reduction in roadside bombs.

"We had remodeled the school," Lee said. "The day before we had a soccer game with the locals."

The bombing put an end to all that.

"It was never the same. It was very hard. The guys would be very standoffish with the locals," Lee said. "It’s so hard for the guys to get past an event like that."

"We still did whatever we were told to do," Johnson said. "If they told us to do a backpack handout, we did it because we were ordered to do it. But the mentality was different."

It was never determined who had planned and carried out the bombing. But the reconciled Sunni "Sons of Iraq," who worked at a checkpoint by the gate, were implicated.

"It had to have been reconcilee-aided," Lee said.

Afterward, Lee went to the local tribal leaders in the former Sunni stronghold, who denied involvement.

"They said, ‘Hey, this is an attack on us, too.’ "

The unit never knew if further investigations happened. Despite all the law-enforcement types working in Iraq — former FBI agents, military investigators and the like — apparently no one was sent to track down those responsible, Johnson said.

"Lieutenant Holmes and I seemed like the only ones interested," he said. "I have no investigating experience. We did a dozen interviews. We couldn’t separate fact from fiction. We never found out who it was."

But force-protection deficits soon became apparent. Barriers were not in place, Johnson said. There was no guard tower, no one to shoot the driver.

"It was a big tactical error," he said.

Afterward, the base was a disaster, he said. Computers didn’t work, communications were difficult. Everybody felt terrible. But people came through.

"I remember the cooks. By 1700, they had chow ready to go," Johnson said. "For us, that was a morale booster."

In the first few nights after the bombing, Lee ordered that mortars be fired every half-hour for five hours as a show of force. It was not a popular decision.

"Large explosions, all night long," Johnson said. "You couldn’t sleep, and if you did fall asleep you woke up with the thought it had happened all over again."

Many soldiers had trouble sleeping at the base even after the mortars stopped.

"I couldn’t sleep there," Sgt. Chris Bartell said. "I really had some issues. Everything would get on my nerves. As soon as I’d get off the patrol base, I’d be all right."

"The fear never went away. I always walked a little faster as I passed the front gate," Johnson said. "After the VBIED went off, everybody was rocked. You think, ‘I could be dead tomorrow.’ "

The base was rebuilt, renamed for Pickett, and on Sept. 4 it was turned over to the Iraqi army.

"It’s been an honor serving with you," Lee told the Iraqis. "We have sacrificed much so that the people of the Rashaad Valley and al-Noor village can live in peace. I have complete faith that you will carry on our mission here with distinction."

Haddad is no sentimentalist.

"Being blown up does not make you a hero," he said.

But he also said that the horror-filled moments of the bombing were followed by the most valiant ones of the deployment.

His medic saved his life. Then, because poor visibility meant no helicopters, two patrols raced the wounded in MRAPs to FOB Warrior, usually a 30-minute trip. They did it in 15 minutes.

Not all the wounded left the base that day.

One sergeant whose head was bleeding, quite a lot, Johnson said, just refused to go so that he could help others.

"All the training, it was worth it for that one moment," Haddad said. "That’s the take-away. They did great when it counted."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Master sergeant and his wife adjust to new roles and the effects of the bombing <br />
‘Your whole life changes’ <br />
<br />
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes <br />
Mideast edition, Friday, February 20, 2009 <br />
...

[thedrifter]

The Lees: Ships passing in the night


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, February 21, 2009

Capt. Matt Lee and his wife got 20 minutes together in the splendor of the Kuwait desert. He was on his way out of Iraq after a 14-month tour. She was on her way in for a year.

It was 3 a.m. Capt. Kacie Lee was asleep, on a cot in a Quonset hut full of other people at Camp Buehring. Matt had gotten a ride from Camp Virginia. He tapped her on the shoulder. She opened her eyes.

"Emotions all over the place," Lee said. "Saying hello. Saying goodbye. Kind of speechless."

They kissed. They talked for a few minutes. They went outside looking for a little privacy. There wasn’t any. And then he had to go.

That’s how it’s been ever since they’ve been a couple. A year deployed separately to Iraq. A year in South Korea on separate, unaccompanied tours, seeing each other on weekends. A year — living together — at Fort Drum, N.Y. His deployment with the Triple Deuce. Two weeks in Belize during his R&R. Her latest deployment.

The Army has long touted the importance of family life and support for its soldiers. But for some two-soldier couples like the Lees, the past few years have changed the concept of marriage — from a life together to a very long, long-distance relationship.

"I guess when you look at it like that, we haven’t lived together much," Lee said. On the upside, he said, "We’re always newlyweds. It’s always very exciting."

Except when it’s not.

Lee left the welcome-home ceremony at Fort Drum and went directly to bed in his chilly, empty house.

"I slept through two alarms, 10 phone calls and numerous rings of the doorbell," he said.

The phone? That was his parents, wondering why he wasn’t there to pick them up at the Syracuse airport. When he failed to answer the phone, they rented a car and drove to Watertown. That was them at the door, too.

When he finally woke up, he turned on his computer and sent five e-mails to his wife. In e-mail No. 5, he tried to persuade her to pierce her ears, so he could buy her earrings. All the rest had to do with how much he missed her.

Matt had requested to be able to stay in Iraq longer to be with his wife or at least stay at Fort Drum. The Army said no to both.

"So, yeah, I guess I’m a bit angry right now," Matt said in an e-mail. "I’m not going to lie. It’s tough right now and very lonely. … We have a lot of ‘down time’ giving me almost too much time to think."

But he’s made no decisions about his military future. That’s partly because, Matt said, decisions made during times of heightened emotions may not be the best ones.

A year ago, both he and Kacie took the $35,000 the Army was offering to retain captains, and they are obligated for another two years.

According to a report from the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., that made them part of the 68 percent of captains who stayed in because of the incentives program. The Army had expected to retain 80 percent, the March report said.

The Lees would have stayed in anyway, Matt said. They have put their time apart into perspective.

"This is only temporary, and there are those a lot worse off than us, and make no mistake — this is the path we chose," Matt wrote.

"As far as our relationship, it always seems to strengthen when we’re apart. I’m very lucky, as Kacie has always been extremely loyal to me. I know other soldiers have ‘hit on her’ in the past and will during her deployment now, but I know I don’t have anything to worry about.

"She’s one of the strongest-willed people I know. I don’t ever worry about us breaking up. I don’t see anything coming up we can’t work through," Matt said.

This spring, Matt is to go to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. He expects to be busy in the next few months packing their things and selling the house. When Kacie finishes her deployment, she’ll join him at Fort Irwin, and they’ll go from there.

"We’ve talked about kids and will most likely have one when she gets out to [Fort Irwin]," Matt said. "But neither of us are dead set on getting out quite yet."

But soon.

"It’s a coin toss who will get out, but I imagine after our time at NTC is done (especially if we have a child at that point), one of us will be getting out," he said.

Matt sometimes thinks about the first sergeant on his first Iraq deployment, who was deciding whether to retire or attend the Sergeants Major Academy. He chose retirement.

The first sergeant and his wife moved into a new house in the woods of Arkansas, next to a fishing pond.

"I’d never seen him — or anyone — so happy," Matt said.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

The Bartells: Hardship and heartache


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, February 21, 2009

Lynn Bartell is an Army brat, practiced in the separations and loneliness the military doles out to wives and daughters — and equally in the ethos that you just don’t complain about it.

Her father was Special Forces, gone a lot and not a soft touch. "My dad was very much, ‘Suck it up, buttercup.’

"I don’t say that to any of the wives," said Lynn, who served as leader of Company B’s Family Readiness Group. "It’s not nice."

Lynn is; she exudes a sort of gentleness and calm, and what also looks like sorrow.

Some six months before her husband, Chris, deployed to Iraq for 14 months, the Bartells’ son Jacob — an unusually chatty, chubby-cheeked 7-year-old — was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It’s an inherited, fatal muscle-wasting disease that only afflicts boys. There is no cure.

The couple, married for eight years, learned the devastating news after Jacob’s first school physical. Life went on.

Chris, a 32-year-old former Marine turned Army sergeant, went off to Iraq.

Lynn sucked it up.

"How do you do it when your husband’s deployed? You just do it," Lynn said. "You don’t say, ‘Pity me, pity me.’ You can do that all day. It doesn’t change anything."

The Bartells’ resilience in the face of the usual hardships for families in an Army constantly at war would be notable on its own. But they must struggle in the midst of all those hardships with a personal tragedy that would shake any family’s foundations, no matter how settled.

Chris, from a Nevada desert town, said being a soldier is what he’s wanted since he was 5 years old. The Marine Corps took him around the world, he said, but provided fewer advancement opportunities than the Army. But his deployment with the Triple Deuce, he said, was notable mostly for its tedium.

"It was a whole lot of driving around," he said. "You go to this spot, check out some people, get back in the truck and drive around some more. A lot of frigging hanging out, walking around. Don’t get me wrong: Some serious bad stuff happened out there. But I expected it to be a lot worse."

He said he thought about his family: his wife, Jacob and Steel, his nephew, whom the couple adopted at 14 months when the state of Nevada was about to take custody of him, along with four siblings, because of neglect.

But Chris didn’t worry. "I know she’s calm and capable," he said. "She’s proven it over and over again. So I don’t have to be distracted. And there was nothing I can do about it then."

Lynn said she married Chris with her eyes wide open.

"I married him knowing I’d be a single mom some of the time," she said.

His deployment was expected and accepted.

But Lynn worried. "Every time someone knocks on the door — your heart — you ask, ‘Do I really want to answer the door?’ "

The suicide truck bombing in June at what is now Patrol Base Pickett that killed one soldier and wounded many more provided her worst moments.

"When they called, they just said there had been an incident at the base. They didn’t start off with, ‘Your husband is fine.’ … I couldn’t breathe for a moment. Then you feel guilty for feeling relieved."

The bombing had a tremendous effect on soldiers like Chris, who were doing their two-week rotation at the patrol base. Afterward, he said, "I couldn’t sleep there. Everything would get on my nerves. I really had some issues. Then as soon as I came off the patrol base, I’d be all right."

Home for less than a week, Chris said the only difference he recognized in himself was that maybe his sleep was still not back to normal.

"Ironically, he’s a little more easygoing," Lynn said.

"Nothing really bothers me," he said. "I’m just happy to be here."

The two had made a pact that he would slowly resume his place in the household, refraining from making changes or decisions for two weeks. That was working, they said. Chris was chafing just slightly at what he termed Lynn’s "over-momism."

"If I wanted a mom, I could probably move back into the house," he said.

The two have made an effort not to coddle Jacob, although they watch him closely.

"If he falls down on his scooter, I say, ‘Get back up,’ " Lynn said. "It’s harder for me to let him be than it is for [Chris] to let him be."

Jacob takes a steroid the Bartells get from Britain to help control his symptoms. It has fewer side effects than prednisone — less weight gain, fewer rages — but is still classified by the FDA as experimental. Tricare won’t pay for it. It costs the Bartells $162 for a 40-day supply.

Lynn has become an expert on Duchenne, and on deflecting the pity that overcomes people when they see Jacob and hear about his disease.

"People would say, ‘Oh, that’s so sad,’ " she said. "But you should learn more about it. It’s one in 3,500 boys. We didn’t know the warning signs."

The muscle wasting begins in the legs and pelvis, then progresses to the shoulders and neck, followed by the arms and finally the respiratory muscles. Boys with Duchenne, the most common form of muscular dystrophy, usually tire more easily and have less overall strength than other boys.

Jacob’s disease is expected to put him in a wheelchair by the time he’s about 13. His life expectancy is anywhere between his teens and 30s, but the Bartells are hoping for a cure.

Duchenne is inherited from a gene mutation from the mother, from the tiniest snippet of missing DNA in a gene. Lynn explains that if the DNA were a sentence, Jacob is missing the "d" in the sentence "The dog ran."

"It’s just that tiny, tiny letter, and it makes no sense," Lynn said. "I felt really guilty. I thought, ‘He’s going to hate me. I gave my child a disease that’s going to kill him.’ "

Chris has tried to reassure her.

"So there’s something wrong with your gene. That’s not who you are," he told her. "You didn’t purposely inject him with something. Come on."

"I think I was the one with the harder time with it," she said. Looking at her husband, she said, "I got really lucky."

He’s a career soldier. In May, the family will move to Fort Bliss in Texas; Lynn expects her husband will deploy just after they arrive.

"It’s not going to be fun, but it is what it is," she said. "What can you do?"

Ellie

[thedrifter]

The Holmeses: Independence discovered


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, February 21, 2009

While you were gone:

She went to a bar for the first time.

She bought you a puppy.

She made new friends, threw a party, bought a car, worked as a substitute teacher.

She missed you terribly.

Stephanie Holmes, 21, made a list of things she did while her new husband, 1st Lt. Chris Holmes, was serving his first deployment in Iraq. The list — and the changes in her over the past 15 months it represents — amazes even her.

"I was so painfully shy," she said. "I was so dependent on Chris."

She rarely spoke to strangers, she said, and nearly everyone was a stranger when Chris went to Iraq. She was alone in the house they had just bought, surrounded by boxes and wondering how she’d get though.

"There were a couple of nights at the beginning, I’d just bawl," she said. "You feel so alone."

There’s little trace of shyness apparent in Stephanie now. She’s candid, open, even ebullient. It feels good, she said, but it made her a little apprehensive about Chris’ return.

"Things have changed. I’ve changed, and he’s changed," Stephanie said. "I’m worried about how he’s going to react to my changes."

To be young, newly wed and separated: The two hadn’t yet settled into roles of husband and wife when Chris went to war for 14 months. Stephanie was still in the process of becoming Stephanie. Chris was a frat boy and a much appreciated cut-up in his unit. He was known to get naked, smear himself with lotion, then chase around his company commander. He was also learning that life could be deadly serious. So, they both wondered, what would it be like when he came home?

Neither of the Holmeses, both from working-class backgrounds, was familiar with military life and combat deployments before Chris was commissioned after ROTC. His father had been in the Navy but was retired by the time Chris was born.

Neither is convinced it’s the life for them, and they both chafe at what seems to them the military’s one-size-fits-all approach and its bureaucratic and often unapologetic bumbling, such as someone’s putting Chris on staff duty when he was supposed to be coming to his own wedding.

"They expect so much out of the people," Stephanie said of the Army hierarchy, "but they really don’t come through for them."

Interviewed in Iraq in July, Chris was also dealing with disillusionment.

"When I first joined, yes, I was going to make the Army a career," he said. "But after being in it for a while, just the strict rules and regulations, and how everything in the Army seems to be catered toward the moron … the Iraq mission, you know, the higher up chain-of-command, stuff like that has soured me."

Stephanie said sometimes on the phone they talk about some of the things he’s missed while being deployed: her 21st birthday, Christmas together and an annual World War II re-enactment they both participate in.

"‘It’s not worth it.’ That’s something he says a lot," she said.

Stephanie finds Fort Drum oppressive, with its car searches at the gate and the monotony of its buildings, and she worries she might drive unknowingly into a forbidden area and be arrested or something.

She never took to the Family Readiness Group. The women in that, she said, seemed not to understand that she worked, as a substitute teacher, and seemed more interested in having her bake things or asking her to babysit.

"I took my name off the phone list about a week after Chris left," she said.

She did bake, though, making cookies for her husband and 14 of his soldiers and packing them in separate little bundles, one for each. She stayed busy, set up the house, trained the two new dogs, taught classes as a substitute, and she thought about her husband all the time.

"I haven’t been to church much. But I pray every night," she said. "I pray for him to come home safe and sound and soon. Because I’m afraid if I just pray for soon, he’ll come home in a box."

Stephanie said she made it through because, when forced to, she made friends and grew more independent. Most important, there’s Brad, her husband’s former roommate, who’s like a brother to her now and has been her Mr. Fix-It; and Tracey, whose husband is also deployed with the Triple Deuce. The two women spend a lot of time together at the local Panera Bread sandwich shop, not exactly commiserating.

"We don’t even talk about how much we miss them," Stephanie said. "There’s a mutual understanding."

They also visit a local gay bar decorated with Tiffany-style lamps. They like it because it’s "classy," Stephanie said, and because they don’t have to worry about being hit on.

At the beginning of the deployment, Stephanie said she would ask Chris if it was OK if she went out at night. It was.

"Now it’s like, ‘Where are you at? I hear music!’" she said.

She longs for his return. He longs for his return. Yet they expect some difficulties, she said. "I said, ‘I’m excited for you to come home but I’m nervous.’ He said, ‘I’m so glad you said that. … I feel the same way.’

"I said, ‘I know your voice, I know what you look like. But I feel like I don’t know you.’ He’s gone through a lot over there and he just puts it away and puts it away and puts it away."

The couple comes from the same small town in Pennsylvania and always knew each other. They started dating in high school, after Stephanie got her braces off and started wearing contacts. Chris, who is two years older, didn’t recognize her, she said, but he did think she was, as he put it later, "cute as hell."

"I got my first kiss from Chris," she said.

Stephanie likes order — she vacuums every morning when she gets up, even before having coffee. She was a straight-A student and is from a conservative family who taught her to budget and save. Her parents washed her mouth out with soap once, she recalled, when she uttered a curse word. Until recently, she frowned on alcohol use.

Chris was "kind of the bad boy, the class clown," she said. He’s edgier than she is, known in his unit for his ironic sense of humor. Both agree he’s more relaxed, more impulsive than she is, sometimes a spendthrift and often a slob.

But he wasn’t so relaxed when he was home on leave, he said. He was more irritable, talked louder, cursed more, drove faster and, he knew, got upset at times.

"I mean, I never really yelled at her or anything like that," he said. "But she could tell when I dealt with other people, it was like, ‘******* it, why can’t you figure this out?’ "

She remembers an awkward moment during his leave — she had just baked a pie — when the two just sat there silently.

"Are you going to say anything?" she finally asked.

"I don’t know what to say," he replied.

But those awkward moments paled next to the intensity of their reunion at the Syracuse, N.Y., airport.

"As soon as we touched, it was this overwhelming feeling — of everything we’d been through, how long and how hard and how heavy — it overcame me like a wave," she said. "We almost collapsed."

Stephanie trained to be a veterinary technician. But she has come to believe that family life is more important than anything. Veterinary hospital hours are not compatible with the flexibility she needs to be available to spend time with Chris.

"If you’re a substitute teacher, you can take the whole month off," she said.

She had hoped to get pregnant while Chris was home on leave. She still wants a baby.

Stephanie said if Chris changes his mind and decides the Army is a good career after all, she’ll be fine with that. The Army offers some good things: job security, regular promotions and pay raises, medical care.

"I’m actually scared about his getting out," she said. "But whatever, it will work out.

"We want it to go back to the way it was, but deep down we know it will never be the same. Experiences change

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Coming Home: An outsider in your own life <br />
After the ceremonies and celebrations, troops returning from war face an entirely new battle: Living at home <br />
<br />
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes...

[thedrifter]

Coming home: A family broken by war <br />
<br />
<br />
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes <br />
Mideast edition, Sunday, February 22, 2009 <br />
<br />
Spc. William Medlin is cooking himself some bacon and eggs in his...

[thedrifter]

Coming home: For the first time, they’re one big family


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, February 22, 2009

She was marrying the father of her baby, the nicest man she had ever met, who was promising to honor her and keep her. And she was terrified.

Marcetia Brown had seen generations of women struggle with the men in their lives. Her own romantic history, with one marriage behind her, had included, she said, infidelity, heartbreak and violence.

"Men change after marriage," she said. "It’s like a joke in my family. I guess I believed a man could never love a woman."

So she had resisted Spc. Thomas "T.J." Brown, tried to focus on her two children from her previous marriage at age 19, and more than once tried to break it off.

"I said, ‘I’m damaged goods,’ " she recalled. " ‘I can’t be your friend anymore.’ "

He didn’t want to let her go.

"He said he thought that I was the person he’d been praying for," she said. "He said, ‘Don’t you have faith in God?’ "

They married in July 2007, just before he deployed with the Triple Deuce, when he insisted that "he didn’t want to go over there without being married," Marcetia said.

She’d agreed. Because T.J. was Marcetia’s hero, just as she was, for him, heaven-sent.

"He was the only person in my life who could ever calm me down," said Marcetia, a thoughtful, attractive 30-year-old. "He’s the only person I’ve ever been able to depend on. The way he looks at stuff — I want to be like him."

The new family exemplifies the hope — and the challenges — of many military families struggling with the loneliness and separation of deployments, followed by the adjustments and compromises of learning to live together when the deployment ends and the soldier returns.

Although the Browns have known each other for years, through two deployments and many ups and downs, living together will be something new for them.

"The truth is we’ve never lived under the same roof for more than a couple of months," Marcetia said just before her husband returned.

Under the roof of the family’s sparsely furnished apartment 20 minutes from Fort Drum are Malik, 3, whom Marcetia had with T.J. after getting pregnant during his R&R the first time he deployed to Iraq; Justin, 7, and Jasmine, 11.

Brown, now a sergeant, also has a child from a previous relationship, who lives with his ex-girlfriend.

Jasmine, more serious and mature than most girls her age, said she misses her father, who’s in the Air Force and whom she and Justin visit a few times a year. And she said she worried about her new stepfather’s return.

"I prefer him not here, because I have a little more freedom," she said.

But she had also noticed an upside to T.J. being around.

"I have a little less responsibility when he’s here," she said. "Mom is a little more laid back when he’s here."

The couple kept in close contact during the deployment.

They e-mailed, he phoned — he even bought a cell phone so he could call her almost every day. Sometimes they got on the Internet and the phone at the same time.

"We’d look at different sites — AAFES, Target, Wal-Mart, Sears — we’d look at furniture and we’d fantasize. We can’t afford it, but it’s still fun."

But sometimes the phone calls were not so fun. Marcetia missed him terribly, she said. She cried at night. She felt so alone — married but still a single parent — and that she had far too much to do. But instead of feeling sad, she got mad.

"Every time he called, I had an attitude," she said. "I was really nasty.

"He said, ‘Listen: You’re stronger than this. Why are you acting like this?’" Marcetia said. "It was just what I needed to snap out of it."

During T.J.’s 14-month deployment with the Triple Deuce, the newlyweds talked often about him coming home, the joy of it — and how to manage their differences.

"We want to do better this time," Marcetia said.

Marcetia is a licensed practical nurse who last worked in a nursing home on Long Island, where her mother lives and where she and the children lived until shortly before T.J. returned from deployment.

She’s interested in self-improvement. She took a finance class, she said, to better manage the household, and she hopes to return to school to become a registered nurse. She has also read up on post-deployment issues, which helps, but does not solve, problems.

Since T.J.’s return, parenting issues have caused the most conflict, she said.

"He’s too harsh. He expected them to be little porcelain dolls," she said.

So she suggested they both attend a weekly parenting class.

Now the boys are feeling more comfortable with T.J., she said. But Jasmine is not.

"I feel like it’s best to keep them separated," Marcetia said. "We took family pictures and she was about to break out in tears."

It’s been a cold, snowy winter. But the family didn’t leave Watertown during the unit’s block leave because money has been so tight. Their truck broke down recently and had to be towed.

And T.J. hasn’t been immune from what are common post-deployment reactions.

"If we go to, say, Wal-Mart, he can’t tolerate it for a long period. He gets anxious," Marcetia said. "He still doesn’t sleep through the night. He used to get up and put on the TV, and that would wake me up."

And although before T.J. returned, Marcetia had talked about how much he helped around the house, that hasn’t quite panned out.

"He helps out when he feels like it," she said. "He goes and chitchats with his friends."

Those things don’t bother her, she said. But she was still amazed at the "serious, throw-the-rings, I-want-a-divorce fight" they had recently, and what it was about.

Marcetia supported Barack Obama for president. Her husband did not.

"He accused me of wanting to vote for him just because he’s black," said Marcetia.

T.J. was of the opinion that Obama would not be a friend to the military, his wife said, a position she said she found both wrong and strange, because it turned out that her husband had neglected to register to vote.

The argument continued on its downward spiral.

"He accused me of wanting to leave him for Barack Obama," Marcetia said.

Marcetia pointed out that many, many women would leave their husbands for Barack Obama, if only they could.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Coming home: 'The smartest guy in Company B'

By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, February 23, 2009

The smartest guy in Company B? He’s not even a staff sergeant.

Sgt. David Johnson of Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., who started college at 16 and passed the Washington state bar shortly before enlisting, was universally acknowledged as the brains of Bravo.

Johnson, according to most people in his unit, was the man most responsible for whatever good Company B did in its corner of Kirkuk province.

In some ways, he was just another soldier in the Army’s five-year-plus effort to stabilize Iraq. He suffered like the others, laughed hard at their sophomoric, obscene and often hilarious jokes, did as he was ordered.

But in other ways, he was far from the average Joe.

His perceptions were more acute, his judgments more critical. And his future, free from the military, couldn’t arrive soon enough.

Johnson went everywhere with the company commander — did all the "chai ops," the meetings, the tea drinking. He wrote the reports to higher headquarters. He kept the records, he took the phone calls, he devised the reconciliation plan with the area’s Sunni extremists, he handled the multimillion-dollar payouts.

A sergeant.

He did all that despite opposing the Iraq war, from its start, through his enlistment, while he was there twice, and now as he prepares to get out. He did it even though the Army stop-lossed him for more than a year — through a second Iraq deployment — and prevented him from returning home to a secure, lucrative life.

Johnson, 29, can explain what seems like his contradictions.

"It was difficult for me to go through life, every day saying, ‘The country is at war. There’s a bunch of 18-year-olds serving and dying, while I’m here living it up in Spokane,’ " Johnson said. "At a time of war, it’s important to serve, regardless of your political beliefs."

And there was also a personal sort of quest.

"I wanted to be on the line," he said. "I wanted a soldier experience."

His first deployment was to Baghdad; he’d served and he thought he was done. Instead, Johnson was notified that the only place he was going was back to Iraq. A month later, he deployed with the Triple Deuce.

He wasn’t happy. He did some legal research.

"The way the recent case law reads," he said, "the Army can do whatever it wants."

More than 10,000 soldiers are now being kept in the Army on stop loss, what’s been called a backdoor draft. That’s almost 10 percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq, Johnson noted.

He’s never heard of anyone being stop-lossed twice.

He’ll join the family business, a commercial roofing company in Spokane, Wash., started by his father and in recent years a very prosperous venture. His twin brother, Jack, cleared a half-million dollars there last year, Johnson said, while he toiled in the Iraq heat, dust, roadside bombs and one suicide truck bombing for $2,600 a month.

"It’s cost me a lot financially," he said. "But who’s to say? Money’s not the biggest thing in the world."

Johnson was also known in the unit as being the only soldier offered the hand in marriage of a top insurgent’s daughter.

It happened this way: After initiating the reconciliation process to persuade Sunni insurgents to stop attacking American soldiers, Johnson reached out to the No. 4 crime boss in the region, a man named Salim Khalil Awad.

"He was on the run, constantly on the run," Johnson said, "and it was likely he was going to die. We were going to catch him."

Johnson put out the word that if Awad came in to talk — about stopping his terrorist activities in return for life, stability and a paycheck from the Americans — he wouldn’t be arrested.

Awad came in.

"We don’t arrest him," Johnson said. "The next thing we know, we have 20 more begging to come in."

Before long, he said, roadside bombs were down 80 percent. And Awad had offered Johnson his daughter.

"Who knows if he was serious," Johnson said.

Johnson declined. He is single; the soldier experience did in his two-year relationship with a nurse.

"When I got back I saw her once and that was it," he said. "We had just grown apart."

Johnson has always backed the war in Afghanistan and had hoped to be deployed there. "But you don’t get to choose," he said.

The smartest man in Company B believes that the amount of good Americans have done in Iraq, despite all the billions of dollars spent and the thousands of American lives given, is modest, at best.

"With the reduction in IEDs, we may have saved some lives," he said. "But I don’t think the Americans did a service. Five million displaced refugees, 100,000 dead Iraqis, a million injured. … In the end, I think we will have done a disservice to our national security."

The war has changed him, he said.

"Coming to grips with your own mortality, you think, ‘I could be dead tomorrow.’ You think a lot about the suicide bombing and how the hell someone could do that."

Working with men like Awad, even befriending them.

"I know Salim cut people’s heads off. I was having conversations with him and eating with him," Johnson said.

He said he’s learned that "people are always going to be loyal to themselves first and their families. They’re not going to switch over."

After he gets home and gets settled in as general counsel with the family roofing company, Johnson said, he also hopes to start a small law practice.

And with the soldier experience under his belt, the smartest man in Company B plans to become a war protester.

"War is not close to what it’s cracked up to be in movies, at all," he said. "All we were there were the victims of crime."

Yet he wouldn’t trade his experiences there.

"The friendships I’ve made — you can’t beat that. There aren’t many lawyers with a Bronze Star," he said.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Coming home: When home is as scary as war


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, February 23, 2009

Happy families stay at the Fort Drum Inn. Unhappy ones do, too. Pfc. Phil Vance’s wife almost took her own life in one of the rooms just days after he got orders to deploy. Their baby boy was asleep on the bed.

They’d been arguing, as they often did. She wanted to drive to Rhode Island for a family visit. He had agreed until he saw how far it was. The discord escalated. She threw the laptop against the wall, he said.

Still, the baby slept.

She went into the bathroom and came out with a scalpel in her hand, one he said she used for cosmetics, and asked: "Is this what you want?"

Then she drew the scalpel across her throat.

She cut through her carotid artery and jugular vein and would have bled to death if Vance had chosen another military occupation.

But the 24-year-old former construction worker from Arizona had recently become a medic.

As she collapsed, he pressed a towel to her throat and tried to stop the bleeding.

"I straddled her and put all my weight on her esophagus," he said.

He managed to call 911 and then yelled through the motel door when help arrived that he was trying to save his wife, even if it might look like he was trying to strangle her.

"I was surprised the cops didn’t shoot me," he said.

She lived. He started divorce proceedings. He wanted custody of Quenton, the baby, and she didn’t fight that. And although his command told him he didn’t have to deploy, he went.

"I thought it was the right thing to do," he said.

He called his father and stepmother, despite having a strained relationship, to ask if they would take the baby.

In their 40s, their children finally grown and gone, they were planning to travel and have some fun.

"We were looking forward to that. We certainly didn’t see this coming," said Jay Vance, a former minister who lives in Columbia, Mo. "But when things happen, you make adjustments."

So does the heart. The elder Vances love Quenton, who will turn 3 in February. They would be "perfectly content" to keep him, Jay said.

Except for his gender, Phil is like thousands of single parents in the Army, who have only their own parents to turn to for help when it’s time to deploy. It’s not an easy thing to ask; it’s not an easy request to grant. And after the year is up and the soldier returns, it’s not always an easy thing to hand the baby back.

Phil says he’s determined to raise Quenton himself, just as he’s determined to make the Army a career, despite the future deployments and absences from home that would require.

"I’m not going to get out. No way. This is a defining thing in my life," he said. "I guess I’m a bit of an idealist. Somebody has to do what we’re doing."

How will he make it all work?

"I have no idea."

A few days after his return from Iraq, he said his parents would soon be bringing Quenton to Watertown.

"I’m sure my mom will stay a little while," he said. "But after that, it will just be me and him."

"It probably scares me more than combat or bombs."

He and his father had talked about it while Phil was in Iraq; the fact that Phil says he wants to step up to his responsibilities is good, Jay said. But he worries.

"Phil expresses he wants to be a father to his son. … But realistically in his situation that remains to be seen," his father said. "Our position is that if Phil says that’s what he wants to do, we can only exert so much pressure. Mentally, we’re prepared as much as we can be for one way or the other. It’s one of those situations fraught with danger one way or another."

Phil says he knows how difficult it will be. One irony is that like his ex-wife has let her baby go, Phil’s mother had also left her three children for his father to raise.

"I remember that time," he said. "It was very hard."

His wife still calls, occasionally, asking about Quenton.

"In a lot of ways she was a very good mother," he said. "She can see him whenever she wants. … She has to stay within the county."

Phil said that day at the Fort Drum Inn was the most disturbing thing he has ever been through.

"Imagine a room like this," he said, sitting on the new leather sofa his deployment money bought, "covered in blood."

"I couldn’t sleep for, like, a week. I’m still dealing with it to some extent."

His combat deployment — including being hit by a roadside bomb and caring for injured soldiers — was nothing compared to that trauma. In fact, he said, his deployment probably saved him.

"It definitely distracted me," he said. "It was for the best that I went. If I’d stayed here, I’d probably be in very bad shape."

Ellie