WAR STORIES: From the homefront to the front lines
NorthCoastNOW
March 20, 2003. That’s the day the United States launched cruise missiles into Iraq — beginning a war that to date has seen 4,113 U.S. soldiers killed. As many as 93,000 Iraqi civilians also have died.
Here in Lorain County, we’ve seen our friends, our sisters, our brothers, and even our mothers and fathers travel halfway around the world to fight in what’s become an increasingly unpopular war here at home. But the soldiers who’ve been on the front lines say they’re fighting for freedom in a country that’s struggled to find its way after years of being led by a brutal dictator.
As is the way of war, not everyone comes home alive. In Lorain County, we’ve lost six soldiers, with one — a 21-year-old who followed in the footsteps of his older brothers and enlisted — being laid to rest just a week ago.
Thankfully, many others have returned, and we gave them a chance to share what the war was like for them.
— The Chronicle staff
Sgt. Joseph Brutout
ELYRIA — The mountain air was thin at 7,000 feet, making it hard to breathe as Sgt. Joseph Brutout waited through the night in a Humvee, hoping reinforcements would neutralize an insurgent ambush.
His convoy had been hit hard in the Afghani mountains, the 24-year-old Wellington native recalls.
A minesweeping tank was rocked by a blast from a roadside explosive and then two American soldiers were shot — one through the hand and the other in the neck.
Both lived, but Brutout said that night was the longest of his life.
“We stayed in the Humvee and didn’t get out. Every so often, we’d switch gunners. It was scary,” he said. “We had air cover, so we knew help was coming. But I didn’t know if we’d make it.”
Brutout was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 with the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps out of Fort Bragg. He was in the 37th Engineers Battalion, patrolling convoy lines while military construction crews rebuilt gravel roads through the Afghani mountains until March 2007.
He said the danger was constant, but he only witnessed one American casualty when his first sergeant — a Pennsylvania man — was killed during a mortar shelling.
“We were all pretty close to him. He was a real good leader, the best anybody could ask for,” he said. “It was sad that it had to be him. He had a wife and three daughters at home.”
Afghanistan was Brutout’s second deployment.
He said he served from July 2003 to January 2004 in Iraq, but called his stay in Saddam Hussein’s personal barracks in Mossul “pretty boring actually. It was a lot of spiders and scorpions.”
Mortar attacks came almost nightly, but American troops were tucked away in the former dictator’s bomb shelters, he said.
Brutout, now honorably discharged and living in Elyria, said the enemy wasn’t the only thing that frightened him while on active duty.
“It’s hard being over there as a soldier,” he said. “You have to think about your safety and your buddies’ safety, but you could be tried for murder if you get scared and pull the trigger and hit an innocent person. You never know when you’re safe and when you’re not.”
He said it was even harder on his friends, who had to worry about missing the birth of their sons and daughters as well as missing their first steps.
Now, Brutout is engaged and hoping to start a family of his own. He said he is taking classes at Lorain County Community College to become a paramedic and hopes to be working by August.
“People will shake my hand and tell me I’m a hero. I don’t believe I’m a hero, but if it came down to it I’d do it again for this country,” he said.
— Jason Hawk
Sgt. 1st Class John Wallace
ELYRIA — As much as some soldiers would like life at home to come to a standstill as they endure blistering hot temperatures half a world away, they know that’s not how it works.
So, in an attempt to keep a snapshot of life back home alive, Sgt. 1st Class John Wallace brought with him the next best thing when he was deployed to Iraq in October 2006.
“I kept a picture of my family in my pocket the entire time,” Wallace said. “It kept the bond strong.”
Wallace, a member of the 192nd Quartermaster Company deployed from October 2006 until February 2008, used anything at his disposal to keep himself tethered to his life in Elyria while on assignment.
His laptop became his best friend, serving as his link to the life he left behind, he said. From it he sent and received numerous e-mails with family and friends and kept locals up-to-date through messages he conveyed to his sister, Julie Wallace, metro editor at The Chronicle-Telegram.
“I missed my family, friends and students the most,” said Wallace, an Elyria High School social studies teacher and coach of the girls’ basketball and volleyball teams and boys’ baseball team. “The kids took it pretty rough when I left. My last day in the building, there were lots of hugs, good luck pats on the back and crying. The kids made me a goodbye video that I really loved.”
Once Wallace’s boots hit the ground at Baghdad’s Victory Camp base, he said his 16-month tour — the second in his
18-year career as an Army reservist — passed quickly with the help of 14-hour days working as a non-commissioned officer in charge of providing rations to more than 110,000 troops and Iraqi civilians and prisoners.
His duties inside the wire didn’t feel much like war, a shocking contrast to his first tour in 2003 when his unit received 400 mortar attacks in three months. At that time, he heard the explosive boom of mortar shells with such frequency he soon became conditioned to the blasts.
The safety he felt the second time around, when the closest mortar shell fell 100 yards away, was a good sign the situation in the Middle East was getting better, he said.
“The first tour there was a lot of fighting, and a lot of the people we were fighting were not even Iraqis,” Wallace said. “They were Jordanian, Syrian and Iranian.
People saw it as an opportunity to attack America.
“But this time around, we saw women going to college and people buying things they couldn’t because of the embargo under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. When you see those things, you know we’re making progress.”
Although Wallace could see improvement from 2003 to 2006, he also foresees a third deployment before he retires in four years.
“I don’t think we’ll ever really leave it,” he said. “We’ll be there in some capacity at all times, maybe not patrolling the streets, but there’s no easy way to bounce back from the massive sectarian violence and religious conflict that has been embedded in the region for decades.”
In the meantime, Wallace said he will work on mastering the biggest change to his life: stability.
“The last 10 years of my life have been interesting,” he said. “Every time I get settled, I leave. Now, I want to stay still.”
To that extent, Wallace, who returned to EHS in October as an assistant principal, will start this school year back in the classroom.
“I’m nervous because it’s been two years since I’ve been in the classroom,” he said. “I’m ready to get back to teaching. Maybe I’ll get a kid who doesn’t really like social studies, but will listen to what I have to say because I’ve been there.”
— Lisa Roberson
Major Robert Atkinson
ELYRIA — Major Robert Atkinson gets a little misty-eyed when he talks about his 20 years in the Army Reserves, including two tours in Iraq.
“I owe everything to my country,” said Atkinson, 42, of Lorain. “There isn’t a better place in the world — it always feels special coming back.”
He has played a number of military roles over the years, including serving in the military police during operations in Honduras in 1987. In 1996, he served in Germany in supply in support of the operations in Bosnia.
In Iraq, he worked in psychological operations, where he strived to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.
Atkinson said he spent two tours in Iraq — from July 2004 to June 2005 and from February 2007 to April 2008.
His first tour involved working with the Sunni Muslims — who still had loyalty to Saddam Hussein — to convince them to vote in the pending elections and forsake violence.
“At the time, the Sunnis were working closely with al-Qaida,” Atkinson said.
The country was much more peaceful on his latest tour, he said.
“I think the Iraqis are finally understanding that al-Qaida is a threat, and they’re willing to work with each other,” he said.
Atkinson escaped injury both tours, although there were some close calls.
“Most of it is indirect fire,” he said. When dust is kicked up, “you know it’s getting close,” he said.
Atkinson returned this week from two weeks of training to take over command of the 350th Psychological Operations Company in Parma.
While he is overseas, Atkinson said his wife Helena holds down the fort. The couple have three children, Sophia, 17; Ceci, 4; and Mia, who turns 2 next month.
Atkinson also is an Elyria firefighter who spent Thursday manning Fire Station No. 1 while other firefighters fought a fierce fire at the former General Industries plant on Taylor Street.
While he was not on the fire scene, he sympathized with the firefighters who were.
A big fire really wears you out, he said. “You get tired — it’s a long day — your feet hurt a lot.”
— Cindy Leise
Sgt. Malcolm Mosely
ELYRIA — A big part of Sgt. Malcolm Mosely’s job in the stifling 140-degree heat of Iraq was winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.
Or — at least — to get a sufficient number to trust American GIs enough to offer up information about enemy troop movements and possible improvised explosive device attacks or rocket-propelled grenade ambushes.
A veteran of two tours of duty with the Army’s 362nd Psychological Operations Group, Mosely, 34, recalled the Oct. 12, 2003, roadside IED attack by insurgents that injured him like it was last week instead of five years ago.
“We were in a two-vehicle convoy using a GPS to mark spots where we thought the bad guys (Shiite insurgents) had come. We were near the same farm where they found Saddam … I was gripping the steering wheel thinking we shouldn’t go back in the same way we went out. That’s a real no-no.”
Just then Mosely, who grew up in the Pittsburgh area, felt himself “lifting off the gas pedal and coming back down in my seat … when we realized we got hit, I pushed the gas pedal. We had to get out of there. I didn’t know if we’d get small arms fire or another explosion.”
As he drove, he glanced down and saw blood covering his leg.
“I was also clenching my arm against my side and didn’t realize it,” Mosely said. “I was all red from the elbow down. I knew I was really jacked up.”
Despite 60 pounds of “battle rattle,” or protective body armor including a Kevlar vest, the attack — which included a rocket-propelled grenade hit — left him with shrapnel through his now-scarred left arm, a fractured leg bone and a broken foot.
As a result, he’s classified as 40 percent disabled.
After multiple surgeries, he eventually made his way home to the U.S. and Walter Reed, the Army’s well-known and recently embattled Washington, D.C. medical center.
“You ever need to humble someone, take them to Walter Reed,” said Mosely, whose own situation paled next to the amputees and burn victims he got to know there.
After months of rehab, the Purple Heart recipient returned to Iraq for a second tour of duty.
This time, he was armed with a new Psych Ops team and $3 million worth of weapons, navigation equipment, other classified gear and an up-armored Humvee.
He and his fellow Psych Ops members used interpreters and speaker-equipped Humvees to offer protection and other help to locals, including providing inoculations against outbreaks of smallpox and other serious illnesses.
“We were the mediators between the military and civilian populace. It wasn’t all driven by military might. A lot of stuff we did was goodwill,” he said.
The goodwill came back around when an Iraqi turned in an insurgent believed to be responsible for the attack on Mosely’s convoy a week after it happened.
An accounting graduate from Clarion University in Pennsylvania, Mosely is between jobs right now. His wife, Rebecca, who he met in college, works as an assistant dean of student life at Oberlin College.
Mosely said one of the toughest things to adjust to upon returning home is the anger and frustration with the war that most don’t fully understand.
“There are not always two clear sides to things. There’s a lot of gray to this war,” he said.
Mosely said there’s good reason to question the wisdom of invading Iraq, but it would be disastrous to pull out now.
“Now that we’re in, we have to be there,” he said. “That country would implode on itself if we leave. There is a power play about who controls what.”
— Steve Fogarty
2nd Lt. Amanda Nelson
AVON LAKE — Despite spending 15 months in a combat zone, 2nd Lt. Amanda Nelson doesn’t have a lot of war stories.
There wasn’t much action at the large fuel and supply depot she was stationed at during her tour in Iraq, said the 2005 Vermilion High School graduate, who now lives in Avon Lake.
“We did the same job every day,” said Nelson, who returned to the U.S. in February.
For the 21-year-old Nelson, who was deployed to Iraq in November 2006, just five months after completing her training, that job was serving as a supply technician for the mechanics on the base.
When Nelson signed up for the U.S. Army Reserves, she did so to get money to pay for college — she’s earning a bachelor’s degree in business from Kent State University’s satellite campus program and plans to get a master’s degree in financial engineering.
Because she plans to remain in the reserves for the next 20 years, she expects to be deployed with the 192nd Quartermaster Company again to either Iraq or Afghanistan.
“It’s my job,” she said. “It’s what I signed up for.”
Nelson wouldn’t disclose the location of the base she was stationed for security reasons, but she said she didn’t get much chance to see beyond the base’s borders.
But just because Nelson wasn’t in the thick of the fighting doesn’t mean her tour of duty was a picnic.
“It was hard,” she confessed. “You get homesick when you’re away for so long.”
And even though Nelson had a two-week leave to return home last summer, it was still a hard adjustment for her and her fellow soldiers when they did come home.
“You come home thinking everything’s going to be the same and it’s not,” she said.
It was harder on her fellow soldiers who had families waiting for them than on her, she said, because she’s single.
In addition to going to school, Nelson also has a civilian job with working as a supply technician at a motor pool in Northfield.
— Brad Dicken
1st Sgt. Joal Laird
WELLINGTON — Three tours of duty in the Middle East and 31 years in the military has a way of teaching even the most disciplined soldier a few lessons on life.
When it’s your job to travel to the other side of the world to secure freedom for others, you learn how to appreciate the good things and be better for it when you return home, said 1st Sgt. Joal Laird of Wellington.
Just five months removed from his last deployment in Iraq, Laird, 50, said that was one of many lessons he counted on during his
13 months in the desert.
He said remembering that is what kept him sane as he and his unit, the 192nd Quartermaster Company, worked to supply petroleum and water at a base that served up to 90,000 soldiers, all the while knowing that outside the gate the threat of mortar shell and improvised explosive attacks linger around every corner.
Making sense out of the chaos is hard when daily life inside the safe zone means walking a quarter mile to get dinner and leaving your living quarters to go outside and use the bathroom or take a shower.
“You could be over there concentrating on all the bad or you can do your job by thinking about the good and return home a better husband and father,” Laird said. “You go through a very hard time while you are over there, but you have to think about what life was like before you left. Not a lot of people have the opportunity to leave their life for a year and come back a better person.”
Personal growth during a time of war is not hard, but Laird, who saw his first deployment in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm and returned to Iraq in 2003 for his first tour in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said he was able to do it because he truly believed in the mission.
“It’s hard to relate to something like that because nothing you see on television can touch the reality,” Laird said. “No one talks about the good things we do. My unit was directly involved in supplying gifts to the Iraqi children of detainees. People see it when our missiles accidentally blow up civilian homes, but no one is there to see us give construction packs to the Iraqi people to help reconstruct their homes and businesses.”
His memories of deployment are not full of hostile standoffs with those who questioned his presence in their country. Instead, Laird said the men he encountered along the roads and in small villages never once expressed resentment toward the troops.
“They didn’t because they knew seeing us meant there was change on the horizon,” he said. “I don’t think you can go over there with a clear conscious unless you believe in what we are doing. It won’t happen overnight, but we will and must finish the job we started.”
Laird said shouldering such a heavy burden would have been impossible if not for the support of his wife, Yvonne, and two sons, Patrick and Jeremy. Being away from them was the hardest part, but knowing they understood his service made the time pass, Laird said.
Laird said he joined the Army in 1977 because a then-sagging economy left few options for recent high school graduates. Now, he boasts a stronger conviction for his military service after three decades of service.
So, as families across the area celebrate the Independence Day holiday today with their families, Laird said he will do the same, but with the knowledge that someday the same will hold true for those in Iraq.
“Memorial Day is a special day for me because it’s about reflecting and honoring the sacrifice numerous soldiers have made for this country and the Fourth of July is very important because it’s a celebration of what they have earned us,” he said.
— Lisa Roberson
Staff Sgt. John Gantz
LYRIA — Staff Sgt. John Gantz’s deployment to Iraq came so quickly, he barely had enough time to pack, let alone get married.
Gantz learned in early February 2003 that he had become an “involuntary transfer,” and was being shipped to a U.S. Army reservists group in Indiana to complete their Iraq-bound unit.
The then 22-year-old caught a plane that same day for a soldier readiness program in Minnesota and learned he had a week before he would leave for more training, and subsequently head to Iraq.
“I called up Tomeka and said I’d be home for five days and then I was leaving,” he said. “Within those days, we got married.”
A soldier’s sacrifice comes in many forms.
For Gantz, he left behind his brand new wife during what would have been their first year together to serve his country.
“The military is not just a job for me, it’s something I take a lot of pride in,” he said. “If I don’t do it, then who else is going to?”
He returned home, but again was deployed to Iraq from November 2006 to April 2008 with his own reserve unit — the 192nd Quartermaster Company out of Milan.
In his first five years of marriage, Gantz has been gone 31 months. But he said daily telephone calls helped bridge the gap.
After his return home this past April, Gantz said he managed to pick up where he left off — but there was some catching up to do.
“When you’re overseas, you take a break out of your civilian life,” he said. “Everybody here keeps on moving, but wherever you leave off, that’s where you are when you return.”
Simple things like work around a house can seem like ominous tasks, he said, when they’ve been put on the back burner for a couple years.
Now a service department technician at Jack Matia Honda in Elyria, Gantz said he and his wife remain happily married and are looking forward to doing something unusual — spending the Fourth of July holiday together at their home in Lorain.
“When I see the American flags and the fireworks, it reminds me of our past and why we are in the military,” he said. “It makes me feel proud to realize that people before me have served like I have.”
— Stephen Szucs
1st Lt. Steve Moore
COLUMBIA TWP. — The hardest part of being in Iraq wasn’t the heat.
Nor was it the mortar shelling, the explosives hidden in the garbage along the dusty Baghdad roads or the 120-degree heat, said 30-year-old Army 1st Lt. Steve Moore.
“There’s never been anything harder than having to spend a year without your family, especially your newborn and 2-year-old son,” Moore said.
Moore, of Columbia Township, was in Iraq from May 2005 to May 2006, serving as an assistant battalion operations officer.
“We were the guys that if anything were to happen, we’d call in air support from the attack helicopters. We’d call in medivacs and request additional units,” he said.
Moore was in charge of a technical operations center for combat engineers, running missions looking for improvised explosive devices. In a year, his unit found between 200 and 300 IEDs, and he saw 27 fellow soldiers killed.
He said that first American casualty he saw taught him that the dangers of war were very real.
“Every time after that, it hurt more. It pulled into focus what we were doing, but we got frustrated and angry seeing funeral ceremonies,” he said.
Moore was stationed at Camp Striker, next to Baghdad International Airport. The camp was constantly the focus of enemy mortar fire, and his unit typical got escort duty with a “buffalo,” a tank like a bus sitting high off the ground.
The heavily armored buffalo would rove up and down roads and — when it uncovered an IED — it could probe it with a robotic arm. He said it was the safest vehicle to ride in.
“That fear doesn’t ever go away. You never get used to it,” Moore said. “We were under stress, duress and heat. Sometimes nothing happened, and sometimes the IEDs would blow up before you felt them.”
Life in Iraq was pretty single-minded, he said. There was little access to news, and while there was plenty of criticism at home, soldiers tended to keep their mouths closed about their views on the war, he said.
“When you’re over there, it doesn’t matter what your political views might be. It’s only about the guy next to you,” Moore said.
He said soldiers were doing a lot of good in Iraq that never made the news: building schools, water treatment plans and electrical stations. He said his division did millions of dollars of public works projects and treated many Iraqis who needed medical attention they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
In fact, he said, the main grumbling he heard from fellow soldiers wasn’t about whether the war was founded or ethical. They were from soldiers who just wanted to go home to their loved ones.
— Jason Hawk
Sgt. Jerius Casey
ELYRIA — July 4 in Iraq will probably be like just about any other day, Army Sgt. Jerius Casey said.
Maybe he will have a barbecue, but it won’t be like the food back home, he said in a phone call this week from Iraq.
“Everybody wants to get home to eat home-cooked meals,” he said. “I like the macaroni and cheese, ham, greens and banana pudding my aunties make.”
Casey, 25, supervises a crew of foreign contract workers — mostly from India and Nepal — on a base in Baghdad near the airport.
This is his second tour in Iraq — he was sent back again in May 2007.
But he said his earlier tour, from January to December 2005, was marked by far more danger from mortar fire, he said.
The earlier stint in Iraq also was personally painful because his 4-month-old daughter, Anastacia Marie, died of heat stroke while he was gone.
“You kind of blame yourself for not being there,” he said.
Casey, a 2002 graduate of Elyria High School who was married between deployments, said he’s considering an Army career. If he stays in the Army for 20 years, he’ll qualify for retirement. He’ll still be young enough when he gets out to open a restaurant, he said.
Casey said being in the Army made him grow up quickly. He overcame a fear of heights and developed a strong work ethic.
— Cindy Leise
Cpl. Shawn Dennis
ELYRIA — When Shawn Dennis ran into trouble while working on a 7-ton vehicle in Iraq, he did what any good Marine would do: He turned to a buddy and made sure the job was done right.
But in this case, that buddy was almost halfway across the world.
Dennis, 30, a corporal in the Marine Reserves, called up his boss back home — Lewis Dunlap of Dunlap’s Garage.
Dunlap looked up the specifications for a fuel injector on the C-12 CAT and relayed the information to Dennis, and he was back in business.
Dennis, who enlisted in July 2002, said he saw real progress in the Al Anbar province, where Sunni hot spots of Hit and Fallujah have cooled down.
His battalion got hit by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, four times in one day in his first deployment from January 2004 to November 2004. He was a gunner on his vehicle, and he said his life was on the line three times — during two near-misses by IEDs and one near-miss by small arms fire.
He said security was much better for his second deployment from May 2007 to May 2008. His battalion was on the road every day but got hit by IEDs just two times.
He slept in a big, air-conditioned tent his first deployment. The second time around, he and 11 other soldiers settled into air-conditioned rooms designed to house eight soldiers.
Dennis, the father of Trenton, 4, Mikenzie, 2, and Alyssa, 8 months, missed Alyssa’s birth, but his master sergeant made sure he had access to a phone so he could call his wife Jennifer while she was in labor.
Dennis said he feels good about the mission in Iraq, saying the Iraqis “are helping the coalition forces a lot more and working together a lot more … they’re turning in insurgents.”
“We ought to get the job done,” he said.
— Cindy Leise
Cedric Cross
ELYRIA — Cedric Cross said the year he spent in Iraq taught him to appreciate his country more.
But Cross, 27, has mixed feelings about the mission in Iraq.
“Wasn’t the purpose of the war weapons of mass destruction?” Cross asked. “I was there 12 months and never saw any.”
What he did see was crushing poverty.
“Little kids are basically naked in the dead of winter,” he said. “They would rub their bellies like they were saying, ‘We’re hungry, we’re hungry’ and there was nothing we could do for them.’’
Cross, who grew up in Elyria but now lives in Columbus, served in Iraq from November 2003 to November 2004. He left the Army on Feb. 28, 2005, with the rank of E-4. He only signed up for three years but got “stop-lossed” — forced to serve extra time — for another 10 months, he said.
Cross, who said he’ll leave the debate about the Iraq war to the politicians, said he’s proud of a job well done with Alpha 137 Field Artillery, which won an award for its accuracy in hitting targets.
“I still talk to a few of my buddies,” Cross said. “They say the war is the same, but the living conditions of the soldiers are better.”
During his tour, Cross escaped injury when an improvised explosive devise exploded near his truck.
“It was just ‘Boom!’ and all this debris and shrapnel came across the windshield,” he said.
The staff sergeant in his unit was injured, but Cross didn’t have a scratch.
“I was the one who was hanging up out of the truck with a 50-caliber and it missed me,” he said. “We never stopped – we kept going.”
Cross is the son of Sgt. Ronald Cross of the Elyria post of the Ohio Highway Patrol and Dede Cross. He has two brothers and a sister, none of whom are contemplating military service, the younger Cross said.
— Cindy Leise
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Filed by NorthCoastNOW July 5th, 2008 in Local and State.
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