Last Monday, 2-162 held its mobilization ceremony at the Lane County Fairgrounds. The governor spoke. Congressman Peter DeFazio spoke. So did the mayors of Eugene and Springfield and a number of other politicians who couldn’t be in attendance sent speeches through proxies. The press was there. The local news did stories. The speeches were played and replayed, as were a few interview sound bites with Guardsmen the TV crews had time to talk to before hustling off to the next story.
As I sat and listened to the speeches, and shot photos of my friends as they remained frozen at parade rest in the formation while everyone had their say, I could not help but to think how everything has sort of come full circle.
Four years ago, I saw 2-162 come home from Iraq. I was on the tarmac at McChord Air Force Base, thinking about writing a book about the battalion. Vince Jacques had arranged to get me up there, and I remember watching Vinni pace like a caged lion as he waited to see his platoon again. The last time he’d seen his men, they were carrying him to a MEDEVAC chopper somewhere west of Taji after his Humvee had been blown up by an IED.
The plane rolled up, and as the men started to debark, one after another gripped Sergeant Jacques in a fierce bear hug. I snapped photos with a little Olympus push-hear dummy, the closest thing to a real digital camera I owned at the time. A shadow crossed in front of me, which annoyed me since whoever was standing in front of me just blocked my shot of Sergeant Jacques’ reunion with his men.
I unstuck my eyeball from the viewfinder and found myself staring at Dawson Officer. Dawson had been one of my wife’s all time favorite students at Central High School—one of those kids who never held his tongue and made everyone laugh with his snarky, well-timed comments and hilarious one-liners. I think at times he tried to come off as a troublemaker, but he had too good of a heart. You could tell that the kid was going places in life, and that he was going to do it the right way. Such students are getting rarer these days, so when one comes along, teachers like my wife remember them. 
I didn’t realize the place he was going turned out to be Iraq. I also didn’t realize that when I went to McChord that spring morning to bear witness to Sergeant Jacques’ reunion, I would have one of my own. I hadn’t even known Dawson was in the Guard. He spent a year in Iraq and I was clueless. Absolutely clueless. Unashamed, I started to cry. I gave him the same sort of fierce bear hug I’d just seen a half dozen soldiers give to Vinni.
I felt deeply ashamed. Here, a son of my community had been in combat for a year, and I didn’t lift so much as a finger to support him. I screwed him over again a year later. I had intended to make Dawson and his platoon a major part of the Devil’s Sandbox. When I finished the manuscript, it was 190,000 words. I was contracted for 90,000 and Zenith wasn’t going to budge far off that since pages cost money. I hacked the book down to 120,000 words. The chapters about Dawson and his family sit in my file cabinet drawer, unread by most since they were among the things I had to cut. Someday, if I ever get a chance to write a second edition, all those scenes will go back into the book. 
It is difficult to overstate just how profound an effect that surprise reunion had on me. It convinced me that I needed to write the Devil’s Sandbox. It opened me to the realization that the War on Terror was reshaping my own community, along with everyone else’s across the country. Writing the Sandbox became my life’s work, and an achievement I will always cherish. I’ve written bigger books, and more successful ones. I’ve probably written better ones. But the Sandbox will always be the one that means the most to me. When I die, that’s the book I want on my grand kids’ shelves. If they want to know what their grandpa did with his life, that book represents the best of me.
At the Fairgrounds last Monday, I listened to those speeches and played those moments back in my head. I remember listening to Ryan Howell, Vinni, Spike Olsen, Shane and Brian Ward tell me four years ago about the mobilization ceremony in 2003. Vinni’s boy wouldn’t stop crying. Rhonda, his wife, was heartsick, tense and trying her best to put up a good and stoic front. Mandy Ferguson, now Mandy Olsen, well, I think Mandy was struggling to get a handle on how quickly reality, war and life had intruded on her college romance.
I looked around the Fairgrounds and read the same struggle in the faces of the families. The kids fiddled and wandered around, the enormity of the moment lost on them. The wives and girlfriends smiled and tried to be tough. It worked until you looked in their eyes. Nested there was the pain and stress of the unknown. Another year away. Another year in harm’s way.
No, this is not 2004 when the U.S. and Coalition forces were struggling to get a handle on the insurgency. In ’03, things were flaring up but nobody knew what to expect. The unknowns were legion. This time, the knowns are better defined, but that won’t make a year’s separation any easier for anyone.
This was the moment I think a lot of us were in denial about as well. When I first heard that the 41st Brigade would be sent to Iraq this spring, the news shocked me. How could it go out again? How many deployments can the organization absorb? How many good men and women have to risk their lives again and again until it is another state’s turn to bear the burden? Let nobody say Oregon hasn’t shouldered more than its fair share of this war. 
There were men in the formation who have been out two, three or even four times. I think of Stan Gray. Stan went out with Charlie Company, 2-162 during the 04-05 deployment. He deployed to New Orleans in ’05, and I remember meeting him out there at the Baptist Seminary. I snapped a photo of him and Sergeant Wilson on the morning Charlie Company had to clear the Saint Bernard Housing Projects—one of the most sweat-intensive and exhausting assignments the battalion received while in the Big Easy. He deployed to Afghanistan. Now, he’s going again.
Though I didn’t see him, I knew he was out in the formation with Alpha Company somewhere. Stan’s been a soldier since I was in junior high school. He isn’t the best soldier in the Guard, nor is he the worst. He’s one of the stalwarts, a man whose heart is all-Volunteer. He’ll go wherever he is needed, and he’ll do his job to the best of his ability.
Thinking of Stan made me think of that morning in New Orleans. I’d been out with the BC, LTC Hendrickson, and he rolled up to check on how Charlie Company was doing. Sergeant Adrian Wilson was in the street in front of the last block of projects to be cleared. I shot a photo of him barking orders. Little did I know how much trouble Adrian would cause me in the years to come. 
In May, 2007, when Brad, Aaron Allen and I went down to the Goshen state police range and served as opposition for Alpha Company, I may have given Adrian a hard time while being detained. Honestly, I can’t really remember how this started, but a sort of rivalry grew between us. How quickly could Sergeant Wilson pummel me into submission? What could I get away with before I got stomped? I’m pleased to report, after a few surprises, in the months to come, I couldn’t get away with anything. Adrian never treated me with kid gloves. He broke my glasses. He concussed me in October. Last May, while I tried to get out of the zip-cuffs his guys had put on me, he cracked one of my teeth and broke another. All of which, I totally deserved, by the way.
Along the way, Sergeant Wilson and I became friends. One night in February, 2008, he and I struck up a conversation in the stairwell of one of the starships. The conversation turned into one of those intense, life-changing moments for me. For the first time, I got to know him as a man, not as a hard-nosed NCO. For a moment, his guard was down and we talked for over an hour, leaning against the rail on the second floor as the rest of the company sawed wood.
I learned Adrian Wilson is a man of conscience and integrity. Motivated, intelligent and all too familiar with the personal and familial cost of an Iraq deployment, he was not going to be left behind this time. Now, tell me what requires more courage? Going into something that is an unknown, or going through something a second time, knowing full well what it does to you even if bullets and shrapnel never touch your body?
I have a new book that’s coming out soon, and quite frankly that conversation with Sgt. Wilson not only made it better, it gave me the reason to write it. 
I saw Adrian in the bathroom at the Fairgrounds. We didn’t have much time to talk, just barely enough to exchange our contact information. Things were so hectic, I didn’t get a chance really to say goodbye to him. I should have looked him in the eye and told him our friendship has made me a better writer, and a better human being. Wilson’s the kind of guy who elevates everyone around him, and even observing writers or OPFOR tackling dummies are not immune to that.
Over to my right, sitting in the front row, I saw Brianna Ward. She’s the Alpha Company family support coordinator, and the freaking rocket science brainiac-in-a-supermodel’s-body who has somehow tamed the savage beast that is Sergeant First Class Alan “Easy” Ezelle. As she watched the ceremony, her son sat behind her, playing with her hair. It was such a classic mother-son moment that I had to snap a photograph. 
I think I met Brianna for the first time when we had the book signing for the Devil’s Sandbox at the Eugene Barnes & Noble. Brianna spent part of the time working on her college homework, which interested my wife since it was very high level math. We found out she was doing some sort of quantum mechanics stuff or some such thing—way, way, way out of my league, and a serious stretch for my bride. Watching her son play with her hair, I recalled the dining outs, a summer barbeque with great people and great friends, a cold and miserable March afternoon at Goshen when Briana showed up with goodies for the soldiers.
And then there was the new BC. LTC Edwards stood before the battalion, saluted the Governor, received the state flag. He is a veteran of OIF II, when he served as the battalion’s operations officer. He’s a Ph.D with a keen mind that grasps so many details simultaneously that it blew me away in Idaho last summer. He can observe any operation, break it down into its component pieces and study each one to find how to make it more efficient or more effective. And he can do this all in a matter of seconds. 
As I watched him, I remembered how when I first showed up in Idaho last summer, I had made the very foolish mistake of not asking him if I could embed with the battalion ahead of time. The Alpha Company guys tried to stash me away in the company CP, but a very stern faced private tracked me down and said, “The BC wants to see you.” I walked over the TOC with him, fearing I’d be thrown out and sent home. I had always been intimidated by him, but as I sat down next to him that morning, I figured I’d be in for a serious ass-chewing. Instead, that conversation became the basis for my understanding of him. And I found him a hard man not to like.
Last October, during a convoy ambush lane at Camp Rilea, he assaulted through my ambush position, killed me and secured my corpse. In the AAR afterwards, I couldn’t help but point out how cool it was to get waxed by a battalion commander.
I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Colonel Edwards either.
To Be Continued.
