[Peace-discuss] coming home

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

Returning From Iraq War Not So Simple for Soldiers
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

 
ORT STEWART, Ga., Sept. 9 — Susan W. Wilder paced the auditorium here like a 
motivational speaker and asked the new veterans of the war in Iraq what 
pleased them most now that they were, at last, home.

The soldiers arrayed neatly before her — the first sergeant saw to that — 
answered as they had months ago when, in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq and 
later in the swelter of Baghdad, they had let their thoughts drift achingly toward 
home.

"Beer," several shouted cheerfully. "Sex," others answered. It was hard to 
say, amid the laughter, which they had missed most.

The joking subsided, though, as Mrs. Wilder, herself a soldier's wife, asked 
what bothered them most now that they were home.

"Less tolerant of stupid people," Staff Sgt. Matthew E. Jordan of the First 
Brigade, Third Infantry Division, said bitterly. "Stupid people doing stupid 
things." 

There was a murmur of assent. 

For the soldiers of the First Brigade, accompanied by this reporter during 
their surge into Baghdad in the messy aftermath in June and again now that they 
have returned, coming home has been a far more complicated, even conflicted, 
experience than it seemed it would be back in Iraq when they thought of little 
else.

They have returned to wives and girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends, and to 
new babies born while they were overseas. They have returned to families who 
lived in fear of the news and could not stop following it. They have returned 
to face emotions they expected and others they did not. 

Sergeant Jordan, whose scouts fought in some of the First Brigade's fiercest 
clashes, seethed with anger at the lurid curiosity of those who would never 
know what he now knew. 

"The first thing he asked me was, `Did you kill anyone?' " he said after the 
gathering in the auditorium, referring to someone he asked not be identified. 
"Then it was, `How did it feel?' What kind of stupid thing is that to ask?" 

The trajectory of the Third Infantry Division's experience has closely 
followed that of the nation and of the war itself: fear and uncertainty at the 
outset in March, relief and jubilation at the swift victory in April, then fear and 
uncertainty again as the troops remained in Baghdad in the chaotic, deadly 
aftermath. 

In the summer, morale plummeted as the division's departure was ordered, then 
postponed, ordered and postponed again. It became an issue with 
reverberations from Baghdad to Georgia to Washington. Soldiers, including some who spoke to 
The New York Times, were admonished for voicing their frustrations publicly, 
and told not to talk again. 

Now they are home, but homecoming is not simple and frustrations remain. Cpl. 
Keith D. Dries went out with friends in Savannah and discovered, as he put 
it, "I can't stand crowds." Capt. James R. Lockridge, an easy-mannered combat 
engineer, said he found it hard to communicate with his wife. 

Some, like Sgt. Mark N. Redmond, returned with debilitating injuries — 
cracked vertebras, in his case, from a blast in the battle for Kifl, a village on 
the Euphrates River. Still others — as many as 5 percent of the division, 
officials here said — have sought counseling for symptoms of combat stress or other 
problems with readjustment. 

There is a lot of pain to digest. The division has planted a row of eastern 
redbud trees along one side of the parade field at Fort Stewart — one for each 
of those who did not return home. The trees will bloom each spring, when most 
of the soldiers died. 

The division lost 38 soldiers; 4 more from other units that fought with the 
division also died. The First Brigade lost 19, the last of them, Sgt. Michael 
T. Crockett, on July 14, when guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade into 
his Humvee on the road from the airport outside Baghdad. 

"It's not easy," Staff Sgt. Jennifer M. Raichle, an intelligence analyst, 
said as she drank beer with two other soldiers in her house in Hinesville the 
other night. "We have no patience for anybody." 

Her parents, from Enterprise, Ala., redecorated her house in Hinesville and 
planted a "Welcome Home" sign in her yard, but she postponed a trip home now 
that the troops have been given leave. 

"Don't get me wrong," she said. "I love my family to death and I appreciate 
what they've done, but you just need time to be away from people." 

The Army knows that. Having trained the soldiers to fight, it is now 
undertaking its greatest effort ever to ease their return to "civilian" life. 

Even before they left Iraq, the division's soldiers had been screened for 
symptoms of combat stress, and those with signs of it were referred to the 
division's psychologists for further evaluation. They have also been required to 
attend sessions like one the other day in which they were encouraged to air their 
feelings after months of keeping them in check. 

The images were jarring. Bess K. Stone, who works for Fort Stewart's Army 
Community Service, an organization that provides assistance to soldiers and their 
families during deployments, led hundreds of battle-wearied soldiers of the 
brigade's Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry, through a similar discussion last 
week on the difference between the sheer physical gratification of sexual 
relations, and more complex emotional intimacy. 

"Your expectations and your spouse's expectations regarding your sexual 
relations are different," she told them. "They are going to want to re-establish 
intimate relations." 

Soldiers, being soldiers, irreverently call them the "don't beat your wife" 
briefings, but the sessions are the sobering outgrowth of a wave of murders and 
suicides last year involving soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., after their return 
from the war in Afghanistan. There were four murders and three suicides, all 
involving special operations forces who had been in Afghanistan. 

Mrs. Wilder, the local director of Army Community Service, said the purpose 
was to reassure soldiers that the strains they were experiencing — from paying 
bills to re-establishing relationships with spouses and children — are not 
unusual. Wives attended similar sessions here before the soldiers returned. 

For the soldiers of the Third Infantry Division, the Army has also set up a 
24-hour hot line, like one established at Fort Bragg, that soldiers can call 
when they feel overwhelmed. 

Certainly, the welcome to the soldiers can seem overwhelming. All around Fort 
Stewart and in Hinesville, Pembroke and other small cities in the piney woods 
near the post there are flags, yellow ribbons and banners welcoming the 
division's troops. 

President Bush is expected here on Friday. Sgt. Kenneth N. Bortz, an 
infantryman with the Second Battalion, received a key to his hometown, St. Mary's, Ga. 
The local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America sent a delegation to 
greet each group of returning soldiers, the last of whom arrived on Thursday 
night last week. 

"One of the things our organization pledged when it was formed 25 years ago 
was that no generation of soldiers would be abandoned by the previous 
generation, as we were," Wayne Watkins, one of the Vietnam veterans, said as he waited 
for one of the last flights. 

The First Brigade's soldiers — the last of the division's 18,000 troops to 
return — spent the last week attending briefings and awards ceremonies, 
undergoing medical tests and preparing for leave, which began for most on Friday. 

Even though it is over for them, the war remains vivid, the news still close. 
"There are three things you experienced in Iraq that will be with you 
forever," Lt. Col. Gary P. Mauck, a reservist who has served as the Fort Stewart 
chaplain during the war, told the soldiers at each of the counseling sessions. 
"The sights, the sounds and the smells." 

The United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that was destroyed by a car bomb 
was just down the road from the First Brigade camp near Olympic Stadium. The 
police academy attacked last week was across the street. 

"We left right in time," Capt. Darrin E. Theriault, commander of Headquarters 
Company, told the brigade commander, Col. William F. Grimsley, two days after 
the latest attack. Colonel Grimsley said it was difficult to follow the news 
from Iraq. "It's still too close," he said. 

For all the questions that have been raised about the president's rationale 
for the war and the Pentagon's strategy for winning it, most of the brigade's 
troops said they felt a sense of purpose and of mission, though as Captain 
Lockridge put it, it is "a mission still being accomplished." 

What lasting effects the war had on the First Brigade's soldiers — on 
re-enlistment rates, which have slumped, on broken bodies and on battered psyches — 
remains to be seen. 

Sergeant Bortz said fighting in Iraq made him rethink a career in the Army. 

"I feel good for what I did, but out there, that's when you really think 
about what you want," he said on Friday. "And in Baghdad, I knew the Army wasn't 
for me."

Sgt. Jamie A. Betancourt, also in the Second Battalion, plans to get out when 
his enlistment is up in May for a simple reason. "There's nowhere else I can 
go in the Army," he said, "that's not going back over there."

Others have no choice.

In June, when the brigade's soldiers were living in steaming squalor at the 
Iraqi Interior Ministry, known among troops as Hotel Hell, Staff Sgt. Ray B. 
Robinson complained about staying on in Baghdad without a clear purpose. 

The brigade had turned over its responsibilities for security but remained in 
reserve, still vulnerable to attacks, but not aggressively pursuing the 
attackers. 

He compared the situation to the carnival game of shooting ducks. "I was the 
duck," he said. 

On July 8, his squad had been assigned to patrol Route 8, the highway to and 
from the airport west of Baghdad. He spotted an orange-and-white taxi across 
the highway and two Iraqis walking away from it. He lurched his Humvee to the 
left, drove onto the median strip and ran over a mine. 

The force of the blast blew him through the windshield. "Fox said I was 
dead," he said of initial television reports, but — he woke in the mine's crater, 
both his feet shattered, his legs torn by shrapnel, his face and arm scorched, 
his left eardrum broken. 

He has endured two operations and faces more. The doctors saved his feet, but 
he is not likely to walk normally again. After 16 years in the Army and the 
National Guard, his career is over. 

Sitting in a hospital bed installed in his house on a neat cul-de-sac here at 
Fort Stewart, with his wife and three children coming in and out, he remains 
strikingly unembittered. "The disappointment is over," he said. "I've just got 
to deal with what I got."

For Sergeant Robinson's unit, Company A of the Second Battalion, Seventh 
Infantry, the war exacted a heavy toll. Five of the unit's soldiers died, four of 
them in a taxi bombing on the highway into Najaf on March 29.

"We can't lose," he said. "We can't lose this. It'll all have been a waste. 
We've got five trees out there. If we pull out now, I got blown up for 
nothing."