Posted on Tue, Aug. 23, 2011
Julio Clavell, Jermaine Veasy, and John Redding - all rowhouse kids, all the nephews or grandsons of men who had served in the military - decided to join a local National Guard unit together upon graduation.
A bronze plaque at the school entrance made clear what enlisting in wartime could mean. It names the students who died in Vietnam, 66 of them, more than from any other U.S. high school.
As the trio entered basic training in summer 2003, President George W. Bush had already declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, and allied forces seemed to be mopping up in Afghanistan. But the fighting had only begun.
In their eight years as Guardsmen, Redding, Veasy, and Clavell have been deployed twice for combat duty in Iraq. And they expect another Middle East deployment next year.
The three are emblematic of the 1.65 million Americans - on active duty, in the Guard, or in the Army Reserve - who have enlisted since 9/11. Including personnel already in the military when the terrorists struck, 2.2 million service members have been deployed overseas at least once for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Edison grads' experience has been largely positive, although they've seen comrades get hurt, and deployments have repeatedly disrupted their home lives.
"There's been lots of bad moments," said Redding, still a college freshman at 26, "but then there are a lot of good moments."
Always in the same unit - now designated as Charlie Company of the 55th Brigade Special Troops Battalion - the three were sent to Beiji, Iraq, in 2004 and 2005.
In 2008 and 2009, they were part of the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a Pennsylvania-based unit that fought in and around Baghdad.
Next year, it appears, they're headed to Kuwait, which, at this point, sounds like easy duty. "Hot, dry, boring," Clavell said.
They consider themselves lucky. None has been wounded, and each says he has coped well with the physical and emotional demands. But they've already spent more time in a combat zone than many past American warriors.
A World War II soldier who landed in France on D-Day and fought until Germany surrendered endured 11 months in combat. The Edison draftees and volunteers who went to Vietnam were typically deployed for a year.
Veasy, Redding, and Clavell have already had almost two years of combat duty, and next year will be their third. "It's not the same," they insist. Indeed, wars are of different length and intensity. But as Veasy said: "We've been hit. We have done some things."
On the second weekend in May, Charlie Company had monthly training exercises at an old supply depot next to historic Fort Mifflin on the Delaware River.
Iraq duty had been exciting - hot and dangerous, but exciting. This, however, was Guard life at its most drab.
It had been raining for days, and the brown brick warehouses seemed to sink in the brown mud. Thundering jets taking off from the adjacent Philadelphia International Airport left brown streaks in the sky just overhead. It was dirty, humid, oily.
The 178 men under Capt. John Felts' command had done their physical training test - "Not good," he said with a sigh - and were beginning to prepare for deployment.
Felts, who has been deployed to Iraq himself, said the military over the last decade has asked a lot of the Guard's part-time soldiers.
Before Afghanistan, before Iraq, the Pennsylvania Guard had not been deployed to a combat zone in large numbers since World War II, not even in Vietnam.
But that has changed.
"There's a lot of guys that have graduated high school and want to go to college and have gone on deployment," Felts said as he stood at a warehouse door. "They come back, they have six months, they start to get their life underneath them, and then another deployment comes up.
"I think the story of the last 10 years," he said, "is that you have a very small segment of the population basically getting deployed over and over again. And it's really a testament to the patriotism of these guys."
Veasy, Clavell, and Redding said they never thought of themselves as patriotic. They were just near the end of high school and starting to think about what to do afterward.
cnn international news cnn news cnn world news daily local news
No comments:
Post a Comment