The Ranger Online

Issue date: 4/4/08 Section: Opinion

Jason B. Hogan [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: Jason B. Hogan 4th Battalion, 1st Field Artillery prepares deployment in support of a quick reactionary force team responding to a bomb threat July 2003 in the Al-Mansour Baghdad residential district.

Media Credit: Jason B. Hogan 4th Battalion, 1st Field Artillery, Headquarters platoon conducts a regular patrol October 2003 of an Al-Mansour residential street in Baghdad.

Media Credit: Jason B. Hogan Site of bombed-out Four-head Palace July 2003 in central Baghdad after its acquisition by 4th Battalion, 1st Field Artillery.

Running through the perils of Iraq and Afghanistan can change the perspective of anyone.

The only question was if I die, what am I dying for? Was it really for the benefit of my country and its people or for one administration?

Ask 500 soldiers and you'll get 500 different answers.

The more things change, the more they stay the same is a recurring theme that has become essential to me.

There is a misconception that members of military service are self-made heroes. If that is true, I had no place being in the Middle East; but sometime between April 2003 and March 2004, all of that changed for me.

The funny thing to me when I reminisce with other veterans are the inner conflicts that seem to be so apparent to us all.

You tell yourself that you will not allow military service to become your life. But it becomes a pervasive entity that takes on a life of its own. You might call it a deviant behavior and an unorthodox way of inducing self-infliction to your own psyche.

A regular practice for a lot of soldiers is making peace with themselves and arriving at the fact that their lives might very well end in the near future; not a personal death warrant, just preparing for the worst.

I learned the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr intimately during my time in the desert, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference."

Everyone who has the gumption to sign the dotted line and join the military must find it in themselves to be relegated to a destiny not of their choosing. But it is that individual's sole responsibility to commit themselves; there is no such thing as being without a choice.

Attempt to send some soldiers in the U.S. Army to the Middle Eastern theater and they choose to go AWOL (absent without leave), cause themselves personal injury or whatever method to keep themselves out of harm's way.

Those kind of people tend to leave a sour taste in my mouth. People can never truly understand the absolute definition of honor and integrity. Their reactions are different in moments of conflict, strife and confusion; confusion of self and the reality of a bleak and undetermined situation. Conflict flows in every corner of the world leaving no one safe.

A personal moment of conflict occurred when I was stop lossed in January 2004. It ensures the units' stability during a time of conflict, guaranteeing they sustain a proper number of soldiers. My final date to leave the Iraq theater was changed to March 15.

Joe Frank Palomo, an Afghanistan war veteran, had different experiences overseas, comparing our preconceptions prior to war.

The son of a Vietnam war veteran, he was not led by false interpretations or illusions of grand war stories leading him in an obligatory direction; Joe saved his judgment and personal views until he lived the life for himself.

"I really didn't know what it was about, so I joined," Palomo said. "I had to find out for myself."

It was all about conviction while not soliciting the beliefs of others.

And that is where we find commonality, part of the disenchanted bunch, in the sense that outside forces had little to no bearing on our decisions.

Palomo said following in his father's footsteps was never his intent.

"It inspired me to join, a little bit, but not real heavy," Palomo said. "I just had to see for myself."

But you can never generalize members of the military forces and presume readiness is the key root to their psyches. Prior to placement in the Afghanistan theater, Joe was the beneficiary of a new roommate freshly picked from a crop of graduating basic trainees.

"I remember them telling us, 'We're leaving tomorrow,'" Palomo said. "My new roommate was freaking out. He said, 'Joe, I don't know what I'm doing here.'"

"I said, 'Dude, remember your training, you're part of the Infantry.' And then he said, 'What if I get shot at?' Where I said, 'So what? Shoot back.'"

Joe remembered lighting a Newport cigarette and passing it to his roommate. It was the first time his roommate had ever smoked. Finding the impersonal and expressionless behaviors between future lifetime friends is like sharing a cigarette with a battle buddy. It multiplies the emotions of camaraderie.

Geographic regions and mission objectives separated Joe and me.

In Baghdad, Iraq, I was a member of a field artillery unit armed primarily with machinery of any large-caliber, crew-operated, mounted firearm designed for easy movement in the field, especially for troop fire support.

Truthfully, a field artillery unit's function is the protection of ground forces in a combat zone; we did not see much of that because we were the ground forces, so essentially, we protected ourselves.

In Khalat, a city in Afghanistan, the mission was search-and-destroy for Joe.

Adversely, where in Baghdad, troop movement went hand in hand with vehicles and convoys, mountainous Afghanistan offered no such means of support.

In an infantry unit, Joe was sent on missions for days in mountain ranges, in and out of villages he describes as the Third World. Kabul was the most modern city with electricity and parts of it maintained indoor plumbing. Every other place they went was on foot.

My area of responsibility revolved around a military area dubbed the Green Zone where we controlled a palace area known as Four-head Palace because of four dominating copper figures carved in the likeness of Saddam Hussein on the four corners.

When we arrived there, about mid-June, the conditions were condemnable. The major military forces that traipsed through the area in the early campaign left it in disarray. Its ghastly conditions revolved around everything from the remnants of heavy combat, a 2-ton bomb that was dropped through the roof of the palace and became unexploded ordinance as it never detonated after hitting the ground floor, to human-fecal matter left behind in buildings we occupied for housing; the conditions were deplorable, but we made it home.

After three months of occupying the area, we had been afforded the materials to construct our own basketball court, volleyball and horseshoe pits.

Afghanistan was riddled with some of the same factors. There was no running water; all the villages had wells or used an irrigation method pulling water from a valley within the mountains.

The infantry's intent in Afghanistan was QRF (quick reactionary force) or seek-and-destroy missions; they were primarily on standby.

One specific mission Joe recalled was in Bagrain. Word came that a high-value target was hidden in a mountain area using his cell phone which was used to find his location. A j-dam bomb, a 1,100 pound, satellite-guided bomb, was dropped into the area prior to the unit entering on foot.

It was more than 40 miles to the destroyed zone by ruck march, a forced troop march carrying gear and armaments which can weigh in excess of 100 pounds. The term used to describe the region of the country is the "skin area" on the Afghanistan- Pakistan border. Joe said his unit was told the last time a military force had been through that zone was Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.; not even the Russians went through on their campaigns in 1979.

The mission was staged in conjunction with the U.S. Navy Seals, Army Rangers and other government agencies. They had to be resupplied twice with food and ammunition, but, when Joe's unit got there, they were already two days late and the villagers near the mountain region had buried the bodies.

From Fallujah to Basra and the Moshapan Valley, what remained apparent was how many ways there are to die in war. The people change but the stories, that's what lingers on and melds camaraderie into a lifetime friendship.

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