Last night we had a four hour black out here. Kinda' funny considering the worst of the heat wave was over by then. But the power company found a way to keep us in the dark anyway.
With no internet access or TV I was looking for something to do. I happened upon an old New York Times magazine from May 28 and began reading by candlelight. Well, I began reading by daylight but as the blackout progressed I was forced to switch to candlelight. I read the following article and had to post it here because I think that sometimes the people who are actually paying the price for bush's lies are forgotten by those who support those lies.
Everyone talks about their sacrifice -- bush, cheney (is he still around?), rumsfeld, various legislators, bush supporters, etc., etc. -- but I doubt that many of the people who talk about it actually realize what their sacrifice is. Otherwise recruitment centers would be full of enlistees ready and willing to take on some of that sacrifice themselves instead of watching the same poor bastards being sent back over to Iraq again, and again, and again.
This story is about one man and his unit of The National Guard from Western Pennsylvania. Watching what is happening in Iraq today, over three years after bush's lies, cheney's insanity, and a bunch of neocons' dangerous and doomed ideas got us into the mess we're in in Iraq, I read stories like this and I hate the people who sent Americans over there even more -- if that is possible -- because, contrary to the beliefs of some members of this board and many confused Americans who confuse patriotism with blind allegiance, I love my country and only hate those people who would send its soldiers into harms way to face living hell for a LIE -- and all the while as they turn a nice profit.
You can believe the dogma, the bullsh!t, and the excuses all you want but face the reality of the consequences of bush's lies and then tell me that you don't hate that lying a$$hole too.
With all that said, to me the most unbelievable part of this entire story is the last sentence. I really can't understand it. Is it some sort of group hypnosis or psychoses? Or is it "duty, honor, country"? I hope it isn't because if it is it only makes it that much easier for people like bush to succeed in their failure at everyone else's expense.
Bringing It All Back Home
When you can't quite find your way home
Chuck Norris was among the more than 100,000 National Guardsmen sent to Iraq. He's having a hard time making it all the way back home.
By SCOTT ANDERSON
Published: May 28, 2006
With no internet access or TV I was looking for something to do. I happened upon an old New York Times magazine from May 28 and began reading by candlelight. Well, I began reading by daylight but as the blackout progressed I was forced to switch to candlelight. I read the following article and had to post it here because I think that sometimes the people who are actually paying the price for bush's lies are forgotten by those who support those lies.
Everyone talks about their sacrifice -- bush, cheney (is he still around?), rumsfeld, various legislators, bush supporters, etc., etc. -- but I doubt that many of the people who talk about it actually realize what their sacrifice is. Otherwise recruitment centers would be full of enlistees ready and willing to take on some of that sacrifice themselves instead of watching the same poor bastards being sent back over to Iraq again, and again, and again.
This story is about one man and his unit of The National Guard from Western Pennsylvania. Watching what is happening in Iraq today, over three years after bush's lies, cheney's insanity, and a bunch of neocons' dangerous and doomed ideas got us into the mess we're in in Iraq, I read stories like this and I hate the people who sent Americans over there even more -- if that is possible -- because, contrary to the beliefs of some members of this board and many confused Americans who confuse patriotism with blind allegiance, I love my country and only hate those people who would send its soldiers into harms way to face living hell for a LIE -- and all the while as they turn a nice profit.
You can believe the dogma, the bullsh!t, and the excuses all you want but face the reality of the consequences of bush's lies and then tell me that you don't hate that lying a$$hole too.
With all that said, to me the most unbelievable part of this entire story is the last sentence. I really can't understand it. Is it some sort of group hypnosis or psychoses? Or is it "duty, honor, country"? I hope it isn't because if it is it only makes it that much easier for people like bush to succeed in their failure at everyone else's expense.
Bringing It All Back Home
When you can't quite find your way home
Chuck Norris was among the more than 100,000 National Guardsmen sent to Iraq. He's having a hard time making it all the way back home.
By SCOTT ANDERSON
Published: May 28, 2006
The earliest arrivals had staked their claims by midmorning, setting lawn chairs beside the yellow ribbons and small American flags that lined the main path to the Butler armory. It was a gorgeous midautumn day last November, and Alpha Company was coming home. Throughout the afternoon, the crowd grew until it approached perhaps 400, and the atmosphere took on that of a particularly fervent Fourth of July celebration: many more American flags, homemade posters, bunches of heart-shaped helium balloons, young children darting over the lawn in miniature camouflage outfits or brown T-shirts bearing the insignia of the 112th Infantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard and the slogan ''My Hero, My Father.'' Periodically, a uniformed guardsman stepped from the armory building to give a progress report on the buses making the seven-hour drive from Fort Dix in New Jersey, the unit's demobilization center, and each new report was greeted with cheers, applause, another fluttering of flags and posters.
Shortly after 4 p.m., there at last came the sound of approaching fire engine sirens along Kriess Road. At the sight of the two chartered buses, flanked by police cars and firetrucks, the crowd erupted in an ebullient roar.
But as the men of Alpha Company alighted from the buses, the mood abruptly changed. Still clad in their desert khakis, a few appeared happy, a few managed stage smiles, but most couldn't muster even that. Rather, with tight-set lips and pensive eyes, they scanned the pressing-in crowd for their families, falling into wordless and deeply private embraces when they found them. Within moments, the soldiers' mood infected most everyone, and a kind of edgy solemnity settled over the lawn.
The official program of events called for the soldiers to assemble in the armory auditorium to hear a welcome-home speech by a dignitary -- some said a senior commander out of Pittsburgh; there were rumors that it might be a Congressman -- and after that, they would be free to mingle with family and friends over hot dogs and hamburgers. But it was all Alpha Company officers could do to gather the men hastily in the parking lot, where one of their own made remarks that lasted all of five minutes: he basically just wished them well and told them to stay in touch. No sooner had he finished than most of the reunited families began heading for their ribbon-bestrewn cars and pickup trucks. They moved away quickly and in tight huddles, like so many people hurrying for shelter before an approaching rain.
For their first few weeks home, most Alpha Company soldiers experienced what demobilization officers refer to as the honeymoon period. They were settling back in with their families and friends, returning to their normal lives; they just wanted to put Iraq behind them. Then, around Thanksgiving, many began to feel a shift. For some it was simple boredom, while others described it as a restlessness they couldn't shake, a vague unease. For Chuck Norris, it was worse: like waking up one morning and finding the whole world different, like being trapped in an elevator that won't stop dropping.
Butler County is a pretty rolling-hill landscape of forests and farms and fast-moving streams, its beauty marred only by a scattering of rusted-out industrial tracts. Located just north of Pittsburgh, it lies at the heart of the hard-luck country of western Pennsylvania, a region that has twice prospered -- the site of America's first major oil rush in the 1860's, followed by the boom in the steel industry -- and twice foundered. It is a place where family roots run deep, where churches vastly outnumber bars and where going off to war has long been a male tradition. In a small park at the center of the town of Butler, the county seat, a collection of stone memorials speaks to the disproportionate sacrifices this small county has made in America's various armed conflicts: 321 dead in World War II, 60 more in Vietnam. Even the name of the county and town honor a fallen soldier: Maj. Gen. Richard Butler, a Revolutionary War hero who was killed by Miami Indians at the battle of the Wabash in 1791.
Usually it has been Butler's youngest factory workers and farmhands who have been called to arms. But that changed in the winter of 2004, when the local detachment of the Pennsylvania National Guard -- Alpha Company, First Battalion, of the 112th Mechanized Infantry Regiment -- was ordered to Iraq, part of the largest battlefield deployment of the National Guard since World War II. Among the 200-odd men of Alpha Company (unlike some other National Guard units, they were all men) fully two-thirds were married, more than half had children and at least 50 were over the age of 30. Even within this demographic, Chuck Norris was something of an anomaly: at 37, the father of three was one of the ''old men'' of Alpha Company.
Norris, the son and grandson of steel-mill workers, had started out on a fairly typical path for a blue-collar kid from Butler. Right out of high school he did a two-year stint with the Army, then returned home to marry his girlfriend, Alecia. In his mid-20's, he went through a succession of low-paying odd jobs, barely scraping by as he and Alecia started a family; during one particularly arduous stretch, Norris was holding down three jobs and working 18 hours a day.
The chance to get off this treadmill came in an unlikely fashion when a friend dropped by one day and asked Norris to take a look at his broken-down television set. Norris fixed it without much difficulty; he had something of a knack for diagnosing and repairing malfunctioning electronics. ''This became my workshop right here,'' Norris told me when I visited him recently. He patted one corner of his kitchen counter. ''After I fixed that first one, word spread around, and before I knew it, TV's were coming in from all over.'' He is a husky, jovial man with a quick grin, and as he talked, he emphasized his words with broad gestures. ''I was stashing them in that closet there. The basement was full of them. They were just everywhere.''
When the overflow started spilling into the master bedroom, Alecia finally put her foot down and told Chuck he had to find a new place to work. In 1992, he took over a small building in downtown Butler; within a few years his business was so successful that he moved to larger quarters and found himself overseeing three employees. He and Alecia were able to enjoy a standard of living that would have been quite inconceivable just a few years before.
His decision to join the Pennsylvania National Guard happened in much the same casual, almost accidental manner. A couple of his buddies were in Alpha Company, and over regular gatherings at the American Legion hall in downtown Butler, they'd tell Norris of the good times to be had running around in the woods on weekend training exercises.
''So we were down there one night, maybe a bit into our beers,'' he recalled with a laugh, ''and they got around to giving me the speech, and I thought, Yeah, why not? It sounded like fun, a chance to get out of the house and hang with the guys every once in a while.'' In his kitchen, where we were speaking, he glanced toward the family room, where his two daughters, 14-year-old Nichole and 12-year-old Kaylee, were watching TV. ''I mean, I love my family to death,'' he said, ''but sometimes you need a break, you know?''
Like most National Guardsmen at the time, Norris imagined that if all the training and hiking and going on maneuvers ever culminated in Alpha Company's seeing ''action,'' it would be helping out with a natural disaster or, at most, perhaps a brief peacekeeping stint in Kosovo or Bosnia. Then, of course, came Sept. 11. In the scramble for trained soldiers, the Pentagon began reaching into the ranks of the National Guard, 444,000 strong, and what started as a trickle of call-ups for the invasion of Afghanistan became a torrent for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For months, rumors circulated through Butler that Alpha Company would soon be called, rumors that were finally confirmed in February 2004.
Yet when the initial call-up for Iraq came in, the soldiers of Alpha Company discovered that there was an unexpected twist. As a result of a recent merger with another National Guard garrison in Ford City, 22 miles down the road, the company was overstaffed, giving the military the luxury of cherry-picking some 130 men from the 200-man unit, depending on their specialties. Among those excluded from the roster was Sgt. Chuck Norris. ''That came as a real blow,'' he told me, ''because here all my buddies were going over, and I was supposed to stay home.''
When Norris heard the news, he went to meet up at the American Legion hall with his best friend in Alpha Company, Carl Morgain, a fellow sergeant, to discuss the situation. At first glance, the two seemed an unlikely pairing. Norris was gregarious and outspoken, while Morgain, an electronics technician for the T.W. Phillips Gas and Oil Company and the father of two, was an intense and deeply private man with a wry wit. Still, Norris had developed a bond with Morgain, who was two years older, in the time they had spent together in Alpha Company. ''A lot of what you do in the Guard is a real grind,'' Norris explained. ''Hiking, sweating, being eaten by bugs. But those experiences also have a way of bringing you close. And one thing Carl and I always talked about was that if it ever came to a deployment, at least we'd be going over there together.'' Except that in the call-up for Iraq, Morgain was on the roster and Norris wasn't.
By the time he met with Morgain at the American Legion, Norris was already working on an alternate plan. As a specialist in recovery operations -- the soldiers sent to retrieve broken-down or destroyed vehicles -- he figured he'd have a pretty easy time getting himself attached to another Pennsylvania National Guard unit that was going over; his main concern was getting into one that might be stationed at the same Iraqi base as Morgain and the rest of Alpha Company.
As they talked, though, Norris discovered that his friend was having second thoughts about going at all. On the one hand, the Iraq mission would fulfill Morgain's long ambition to serve his country in combat -- he had been in the Army as a young man, but that had been during peacetime. On the other, it would mean trading in his well-paying job at T.W. Phillips for active-duty wages, a huge loss of income just as he and his wife, Janice, were putting the finishing touches on an expansive new home outside Saxonburg. What's more, Morgain had an easy way out if he wanted to take it. A recent National Guard physical had turned up an old untreated hernia, which meant he was technically disqualified for active duty. While Morgain could lobby for a medical waiver in order to join the deployment, he was increasingly unsure that that was what he wanted to do.
At the American Legion hall, the two friends kept coming back to the same questions. ''There was a lot of us just sitting there,'' Norris recalled. '''So what are you gonna do?' 'I don't know, what are you gonna do?' 'I don't know.' About all we ended up deciding was, 'Well, if you go, I'll go, too.'''
Midway through his processing at the National Guard training center at Fort Indiantown Gap, Carl Morgain decided to take the medical discharge and stay home. Except that then Norris was offered a slot with the 103rd Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard, which was shipping out to Iraq the same time as the 112th and would almost certainly be stationed in the same area. He called Morgain with the good news.
''Well, if there was any question in Carl's mind, that completely sealed it,'' his wife, Janice, told me with a smile. ''There was just no way he was letting Chuck go over there by himself. I mean, every drill, every mission, they were always together. That's the kind of friendship they had, and it was a National Guard friendship. As soon as he got Chuck's call, Carl went to the induction people and demanded a waiver on the medical.''
In the end, then, the two ''old men'' of Alpha Company went to Iraq for the same essential reason men often go to war: because that's where their friends were going. In June 2004, Norris and Morgain were sent to Fort Bliss in Texas for desert-warfare training. After a brief return home that autumn, they were flown to Kuwait and then sent on to their base of operations in Iraq.
As it turned out, though, the two friends were not going to be together. Morgain and the rest of Alpha Company pulled into Forward Operations Base (F.O.B.) Omaha in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, while Norris and his recovery team continued 30 miles up the road to F.O.B. Summerall in Baiji.
''I didn't really know what to expect,'' Norris said. At first, he recalled, ''it all seemed kind of mellow. Nothing happened on our drive up from Kuwait, and from what I'd seen on the news about Iraq, I figured everything was pretty much under control.'' That assessment changed a few days after his arrival, when Norris and the rest of his eight-man recovery team were led into the back room of a maintenance shed on the base by the team they had come to replace. One veteran had a laptop on which he had stored images of the missions his unit had gone out on. ''You're going to see things out there no one should ever have to see,'' the departing team leader told the new arrivals. ''You need to tow a vehicle -- you'd better be prepared to reach through a man's intestines to put it in neutral.''
As the grisly images scrolled by on the laptop -- the aftermaths of car bombings and mortar attacks and roadside explosions -- Chuck Norris gradually realized that he had no idea what he was getting into.
At least initially, the corner of the Sunni Triangle in which the Pennsylvania National Guardsmen were stationed was relatively quiet -- in late 2004 and early 2005, the worst of the fighting was to the south and west. At F.O.B. Summerall, Norris and his recovery team spent much of their time helping the maintenance units catch up on long-overdue repairs and overhauls to the base's various vehicles. For Carl Morgain and the rest of Alpha Company, down in Tikrit, life also settled into something of a routine. From their base in one of Saddam Hussein's unfinished palaces, they would patrol their zone of responsibility, and while their missions changed constantly -- on any given day they might roll into Tikrit to conduct house-to-house raids, lay an ambush on a highway, act as convoy escorts or, everyone's most dreaded duty, throw down and stand post at a static checkpoint -- what didn't change was a sense that the insurgency in the region had crested and was now in decline. So much in decline, in fact, that when Norris left for home leave in April 2005, F.O.B. Summerall had yet to suffer a fatality during his four months there.
He returned to a deluge. ''It was VBED season,'' he said, using the military acronym for vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. ''It started as soon as I got back, and it never let up.'' The first attack Norris responded to that involved a Summerall fatality came on May 13, when an American Humvee was hit by a car bomb and burst into flames. Alongside the burning vehicle, Norris and his team found a dying American soldier; to get him clear, Norris had to wade into the flames and hook a towline to the front of the Humvee, an action that led to his nomination for a Bronze Star.
''He was just the first one,'' Norris said. ''After that, it seemed like the pictures were going up on the wall every time I turned around.'' At Summerall, portraits were hung of each dead soldier. ''By the time I left, there were 14 guys up there.''
The insurgency was taking a toll down in Tikrit as well. In late March 2005, Alpha Company suffered its first grave injury when a team investigating a roadside bombing was hit by a second bomb concealed nearby. One soldier from Butler County, Paul Statzer, bore the brunt of the blast, losing half his skull along with part of his frontal lobe and the left side of his face. Incredibly, he survived.
For Morgain, the steadily mounting number of attacks on Alpha Company began to harden his views on the war. As a Humvee gunner, he occupied the most dangerous position on the vehicle, but it was also the one that allowed the most face-to-face contact with ordinary Iraqi civilians, and this provided him with a unique window onto the baffling complexity of the place. At first, he enjoyed clowning with the children who would crowd around his Humvee, but as the months passed and tension mounted in the area, he recognized some of those same children among the ones now throwing bricks and pipes at him. On one occasion, he distributed shampoo to a group of grateful women in a village outside Tikrit; returning a few days later, he discovered that the women had been beaten by their husbands for accepting gifts from the Americans.
Norris, too, had come to understand that his presence was not appreciated, or worse. His officers, he told me, ''were always drumming into us: 'Hearts-and-minds, hearts-and-minds. We've got to win these people over.''' He gave a laugh. ''These people just wanted us dead.''
One peculiarity of the battlefield was that though separated by a mere 30 miles, Norris had very little interaction with his Alpha Company buddies down in Tikrit. While his recovery missions frequently took him to F.O.B. Omaha, it seemed that his closest friends were always out on patrol when he arrived. One person he never saw there, he said, was Carl Morgain.
''In fact, the only time I saw Carl through the whole deployment was when I was coming back from leave,'' he told me. ''I was at a base down-country, waiting to catch a ride up to Baiji, and I'll be damned, the guys pulled in and Carl was with them. Well, we hugged, of course, and talked for a few minutes, but then my ride came and I had to go.''
On the evening of May 22, 2005, Norris had to haul a destroyed vehicle to F.O.B. Omaha. As he headed toward the building where he knew Morgain was billeted, he was intercepted by an Alpha Company staff sergeant with a grim expression.
''He was the one who told me that Carl was dead,'' Norris said. ''It was like I'd been punched in the stomach, the hardest punch I'd ever taken. I just dropped to my knees and started to cry.''
Earlier that day, Morgain was standing guard in his Humvee turret while senior American officers met with local police officials in Khadasia, a suburb of Tikrit. If he even saw the suicide car-bomber who careered out of a side street and bore down on him, he had no time to react.
There are times when Chuck Norris is talking, especially about traumatic events, when he'll suddenly stop in midsentence, and his eyes, normally darting and lively, will lock into a distant stare. These frozen moments never last more than a few seconds, but when he resumes speaking, he usually avoids details and switches to safe generalities. Sometimes he will change topics altogether. What makes this more noticeable is Norris's striking candor the rest of the time. Within minutes of our first meeting in December, he began telling me of the difficulties he had been having in the six weeks he had been home.
At first, his problems had been fairly subtle, not much different from the reimmersion issues other Alpha Company soldiers were dealing with: a reluctance to be in crowded places, a heightened startle reflex, a tendency to watch the side of the road for anything unusual, as if even in rural western Pennsylvania a roadside bomb were still a possibility. Then, some three weeks after the homecoming, came the morning that Norris woke up to discover that everything had grown much worse.
''It was the weirdest damned thing,'' he told me. ''I didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't want to leave the house. I didn't want to do anything. I knew something was wrong, so I went up to the V.A. hospital.'' Doctors there quickly diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
While it is impossible to predict who on a battlefield will develop PTSD, it's hard to imagine a more likely candidate than Chuck Norris. In Iraq, he had not only been cut off from his Alpha Company comrades -- PTSD is common among ''lone wolf'' soldiers separated from their home units -- but his posting in Baiji had also placed him in a particularly violent corner of the Sunni Triangle, where he had performed one of the war's most gruesome tasks. Beyond its grisliness, recovery was also extremely dangerous; by 2005, Iraqi insurgents were increasingly employing the tactic of setting off a bomb to draw in American response teams and then detonating a second, or even third, more powerful bomb. In fact, Norris narrowly survived one such attack just a few weeks before he came home. While he was rigging two blasted-out dump trucks to be hauled away, another vehicle tripped a land mine about 20 feet from where he stood, knocking him to the ground and leaving him partly deaf in both ears.
''That's kind of a problem around here,'' he told me with a quick laugh, waving a hand around his television-repair shop, ''because when it comes to fixing TV's, you're always having to listen for weird sounds.''
For all his good humor, Norris seemed detached at that first meeting. He was able to describe hideous events he had witnessed in an easy, unaffected manner. Likewise, he seemed to regard PTSD rather like some exotic flu, as something he just had to confront and treat, and in a short while he'd be fine. Most curiously, he made no mention of his best friend in Alpha Company, Carl Morgain, let alone what happened to him.
I had met with Carl's widow, Janice, the previous afternoon. A friendly, high-energy woman of 40, she commented that she was surprised -- hurt, frankly -- by how few members of Alpha Company had contacted her in the six weeks since their homecoming. Norris didn't fall into this category, exactly -- they had run into each other once or twice and spoken a couple of times on the phone -- but to Janice's mind, their conversations had all been awkward, and she sensed that Chuck found it very hard to face her.
What made this even more baffling to Janice was that she had grown very close to Chuck's wife, Alecia, while Carl and Chuck were deployed in Iraq -- so much so that the two women founded an organization, called Support Operation Soldier (S.O.S.). Designed to be both a support group for Butler-area military wives and a central clearinghouse for the sending of care packages to the men in the field, S.O.S. quickly took on the trappings of a full-time job for both women.
''I suppose it was to fill a void while our husbands weren't home,'' Janice told me, ''so that we could feel like we were still with them in some way. But Alecia and I spent so much time together, we practically became like sisters. That has pretty much ended now that Chuck is home. I don't really understand why.''
When I mentioned Janice's name to Norris, he looked away, glancing quickly about his shop. ''Yeah, it's got to be tough for her,'' he said with a determined nod of his head. ''Real tough. But she's a strong lady. She'll be all right.''
The Veterans Affairs hospital in Butler is a large neo-Colonial affair of red brick and white trim set back among pleasant shade trees. Serving six counties in western Pennsylvania, it is the primary treatment center for local veterans suffering from either physical or psychological injuries as a result of their war service. In this latter category, David Virag, the hospital's public-affairs officer, says that doctors there have already treated dozens of Iraq veterans. In one respect, that is very good news, an indication of the sea change in the American military's attitude toward the problem in recent years. Where PTSD was once a virtually taboo subject, the American combat soldier is now so persistently urged, from call-up to demobilization, to seek counseling if feeling troubled that the message can at times almost border on overkill. In Alpha Company's case, within an hour of their return to American soil, demobilization officers formed them up in a Fort Dix auditorium to explain the discharge process and to give them a number to call if they were feeling ''lonely, sad or anxious.'' That message was repeated during the unit's brief stand-down ceremony in the Butler armory parking lot.
One result of this new attention to the problem is that more soldiers are seeking help sooner, as in Chuck Norris's case, rather than waiting until they hit a full-blown crisis. Nevertheless, recent studies conducted at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research indicate that 19 percent of soldiers who served in Iraq screened positive for a potential mental health disorder, including PTSD, compared with 11 percent for veterans of the war in Afghanistan. National Guard soldiers, one study found, were about 2 percentage points more likely to experience problems. Martin A. Sweeney, a behavioral-health social worker at the V.A. hospital in Butler and a Vietnam veteran, estimates that the rate for National Guardsmen returning from Iraq may ultimately surpass the 30 percent mark seen among Vietnam veterans.
''The way this war is, everyone is free game and there's no back-base,'' Sweeney explained. ''You have to be very aggressive, very vigilant, and you live that way day in and day out for a year, and when you come back here, you can't just turn that off. On top of that, the National Guard guys never really signed up for this. They'll all tell you they were proud to serve, that it was their duty, but the fact is, when they joined up, they thought they'd be dealing with floods and local disasters. They never thought they'd be part of the regular Army and put in the middle of a war zone.''
Compounding the problem is that, once home, National Guardsmen are largely left to their own devices. ''If you're a regular soldier,'' Sweeney continued, ''you come back to a base that has all kinds of support services available. But if you're National Guard, what do you do? You come into Fort Dix, you spend a week doing demob there, you come back to your armory and -- bingo -- you're back in the community with families that have no idea of what you've gone through. That's where I see the problems coming. When these guys get back here, they're essentially on their own.''
By mid-December, six weeks after their homecoming, the men of Alpha Company seemed to be confirming Sweeney's concerns. One of the first things Chuck Norris said to me was that perhaps the hardest part of being home was his inability to describe Iraq -- and along with that, of course, an inability to explain its effect on him -- to anyone who hadn't been there. ''Sure, you can tell them stories or whatever,'' he said, ''but unless they were there, they're not really going to get it.''
This same sentiment was echoed by every other member of Alpha Company I spoke with. One of them was a 33-year-old sergeant named Ron Radaker. ''It's just very hard, very stressful,'' he told me, sitting in a coffee shop near his factory workplace in East Butler. ''I mean, it's great being back with my wife, spending time with my kids, but in other ways. . . well, I guess I kind of miss it. I miss my fellow soldiers. I miss the camaraderie. And I don't mean to sound arrogant when I say this, but I miss the power. Over there, when we would do a patrol and have a car approach us and we fired warning shots, that's a thrill, that's power. Over there, everybody knew we were there. We were the king of the road, and they either respected or hated us for it. And now you're back here, and you ain't king of nothing. That's very hard to explain to anyone else, but it's why I try to avoid these situations that set me off -- like being in crowds or people doing stupid things on the road -- because when that happens, I get hyper, and I don't like being hyper here because there's nothing I can do about it.''
While Radaker was experiencing many of the symptoms of other men in the unit -- insomnia, mild claustrophobia, the occasional nightmare -- driving was, for him, a special challenge. He found he was constantly scanning the sides of roads and highways for things that didn't belong there. He became edgy if he had to follow behind a car -- or if one came too close alongside him at an intersection, or followed too closely behind. He had already had one bout of road rage, stopping in the middle of a country road and running back to curse out a driver who was tailgating him. He chuckled at the memory. ''I guess it's a good thing a cop wasn't around,'' he said. ''I just have to remember this isn't Iraq.''
The source of Radaker's problems behind the wheel seemed easy enough to trace and underscored Martin Sweeney's comments about the extended state of extreme vigilance the soldiers in Iraq had endured. Radaker had been a Humvee driver in Alpha Company and had taken the demands of that task very much to heart. ''I was the most experienced driver in our platoon,'' he explained to me, ''and I just thought it was my job to keep everybody in our patrol safe, to always be looking. They taught us, 'Watch the road, watch the road,' so when I was driving, I was always watching, not just the road, but what's on the left, what's on the right, watching up, watching down. I felt that was my job, my responsibility. It's not necessarily how they told me to do it, but that's what I felt I had to do. So it was just a tremendous amount of tension every time we went out the gate.''
If Radaker's self-appointed role as squad protector was the primary source of his current stress, it also pointed up something else working away at many members of Alpha Company: the abiding sense of responsibility this ''band of brothers'' felt for one another, the often utterly irrational guilt that took hold of them when something went wrong.
One soldier particularly afflicted with this was Lt. Benjamin Blue Smith. With his lean athletic frame and sharp features -- testament to his partial Ojibwa heritage -- Smith, 35, belied any image of the National Guardsman as an out-of-shape ''weekend warrior.'' Likewise, whether because of a naturally calm temperament or because it was inculcated by his officer training, he appeared to be having an easier time reacclimating to civilian life than a lot of other men in Alpha Company; in mid-December, his only complaint was boredom. He had signed up to take a full course load of Internet college classes toward getting a business degree, but they weren't starting until late January, and in the meantime, he had little to do except hang around the house and play with his two kids.
On one topic, however, Smith's aura of self-possession slipped away. Paul Statzer, the soldier who was so horrifically wounded in the March roadside bombing, had been in Smith's platoon, and what gnawed away at the lieutenant was that he hadn't been in Iraq when it happened. ''They really pushed everyone to take leave,'' Smith explained. ''It was pretty much mandatory, so I took my leave, and that's when Paul was hit. And the whole time I was home, I had this nagging feeling that something was going to happen while I was gone, and sure as hell.. . . I was at Pittsburgh airport, going back over, when I heard about Paul, and I was just like: 'Damn it, I knew it. I knew it.''' As he said this, Smith's eyes briefly took on a kind of struggling sadness. Then he emphatically shook his head. ''Not that it would have changed anything if I'd been there,'' he said. ''It's just that I wasn't.''
Perhaps Statzer was especially weighing on Smith's mind that December afternoon because the two men were about to see each other for the first time since the explosion. After spending most of the preceding eight months undergoing reconstructive surgery at Walter Reed hospital, Statzer was coming home on a 30-day leave for the holidays, and he had arranged that leave so as to attend the Alpha Company Christmas party, to be held at the Ford City armory on Dec. 18.
''It'll be good to see him,'' Smith told me, but with a tone of uncertainty in his voice. ''I really want to see him.''
As it happened, only about 10 or 12 of the Iraq veterans were waiting at the Ford City armory when the Statzer family car pulled up to the entrance at 2 p.m.; most of the returning soldiers, still struggling to settle back in with their families, hadn't felt up to a reunion just yet.
Statzer had recently been fitted with an artificial skull plate that masked the most devastating aspect of his injuries, but his physique was now a mere slip of his former champion powerlifter's frame; having lost an artery carrying blood to the brain, he was prone to seizures, and even moderate exercise was dangerous. As Statzer entered the auditorium with a broad grin, his comrades crowded around to greet him, to shake his hand and lightly pat him on the back. He had just spoken with Ben Smith at the front of the room when suddenly he began to crumple. Caught by his fellow soldiers, Statzer was laid out on the floor as he went into a grand mal seizure.
An ambulance arrived to rush him to a hospital nearby. A short time later word came back that Statzer was fine, that he had probably been overstimulated by seeing so many of his Alpha Company buddies again but that he was being kept at the hospital as a precaution. Still, an understandable gloom had been cast over the room. Smith, in particular, seemed troubled, but ever the officer, he struggled to put on a public face. Leaving his wife, Tami, and their two boys at the front of the hall, he took a place in the dispensing line at the buffet tables and began doling out food and chatting with those passing by.
Chuck Norris didn't attend the Ford City Christmas party, but two days later, he drove down to Saxonburg with his 16-year-old son, Chuckie, and dropped in on Janice Morgain. The visit wasn't entirely voluntary. Janice's 17-year-old son, Zack, was laid up with a knee injury from playing football, and she had been unable to retrieve her Christmas decorations from the attic. Alecia Norris had dispatched Chuck to take care of it.
''It was a very strange visit,'' Janice later recalled. ''Chuck wouldn't look me in the eye and seemed really uncomfortable being here, very edgy and nervous, like he just couldn't wait to get away. From the time they pulled up, got the things down from the attic and left, it couldn't have been more than 10 minutes.''
Just after Christmas, Chuck and Alecia went on a retreat with five other couples from the Baiji recovery team to a resort outside Pittsburgh called Seven Springs. For three days, the couples stayed in one large chalet, ski-tubing and going on sleigh rides in between long sessions of the men sitting around swapping war stories.
''That was really great,'' Norris said afterward. ''It was just so nice to see the guys again, and I think for the first time maybe Alecia and the other women started to understand a little bit of what we'd gone through over there.''
Only days after coming home from Seven Springs, however, Norris fell into a depression so severe that he was unable to work or leave the house for nearly a month.
Sitting at a cluttered desk in one corner of his repair shop in early February, Norris gave a sheepish laugh and shook his head. ''Man, you should have seen me last week,'' he said. ''Not a pretty sight. When your own kids start calling you a lazy bum, you know you've got a problem.''
In fact, I had been trying to get in touch with Norris for several days. He hadn't returned any of my calls until just the previous afternoon, when he telephoned to suggest that we meet up at the repair shop in the morning. He arrived with Alecia and Chuckie. We had planned for a quick chat -- it was a Saturday, and Norris had promised to take his son out for a driving lesson -- but instead our conversation lasted more than two hours. It began with a chronicle of the hellish month Norris had just endured.
''I didn't answer the phone, I didn't go to the door, I didn't even want to see my kids,'' he said. ''I just lay on the couch rolled up in an orange caftan. It got so bad my father started coming over every day and forcing me to get up. He would just walk me around the neighborhood to get some fresh air.''
A few days before, Norris decided that his crash was caused by a new antidepressant the V.A. had put him on, and he had quit cold turkey. Almost instantly, he told me, he felt much better.
''Thank God I quit that stuff,'' he said. ''I feel like I've got my life back again.''
Although he certainly looked well and seemed in high spirits, it appeared that his depression had given way to a mood that tilted toward the other end of the spectrum. In the middle of recounting one harrowing experience he had in Baiji, he abruptly told me that he was thinking of trying to go back over to Iraq.
''What do you think?'' he asked.
In fact, a number of Alpha Company guardsmen had told me of their desire to return to Iraq -- some out of boredom with civilian life, others for more prosaic motives. Ron Radaker, for example, had actually done far better financially in Iraq than in his civilian life, where he was pulling down $10.30 an hour as a steel melter in his factory job in East Butler; now that he was home, the bills were mounting and the creditors were calling.
Money wasn't Norris's motivation, though. ''I'm thinking that if I go back, it might really help me put this PTSD stuff in perspective, let me get past it,'' he explained. I glanced at Alecia. She bore a vaguely worried expression, but beyond that, I couldn't gauge her stand on this idea. As diplomatically as possible -- because Norris seemed rather enthused -- I replied that from my own experience reporting in war zones and interviewing soldiers, repeated exposure to terror tended to make stress-related problems worse, not better. Norris nodded thoughtfully at this, as if it were a possibility he hadn't really considered.
On the following Saturday, Alpha Company held a reunion dinner at the Days Inn in Butler. In contrast to the poorly attended Christmas party, and despite reports that their corner of Pennsylvania might soon be hit by a fierce snowstorm working its way up the East Coast, some 300 people -- soldiers and wives, children and friends -- packed into the ballroom. The chief organizer of the event, as with so many Alpha Company events in the past, was Janice Morgain.
Paul Statzer was there, escorted by his parents and looking much stronger. All evening, friends came by his table to say hello, to comment on how well he looked, and Statzer beamed throughout, finally enjoying the reunion he had been denied in December. Chuck Norris was in a very good mood, too. Along with Alecia and his parents, he had invited a buddy of his from the Baiji recovery team, James Blackburn, to the reunion. Despite the impending snowstorm, Blackburn and his wife had driven up from Pittsburgh to be with the Norrises in Butler that night.
At about 6:30, the ballroom fell silent as Janice Morgain took to the lectern to thank everyone for attending and to say that she wanted ''to welcome home all the soldiers of Alpha Company.'' It was not lost on the crowd that one soldier from the company had not come home, and around the ballroom a number of women began to cry quietly. Afterward, Alecia Norris stood up to thank Janice for organizing the event, and then she and the half-dozen other women who had been the nucleus of Support Operation Soldier presented Janice with a portrait of her husband surrounded by his medals.
Janice's 17-year-old son, Zack, came to the lectern next. After Carl's death, Zack got a tattoo in his stepfather's memory on his left arm and decided to follow him into the military; at the time of the party, he was waiting to learn if he had won an appointment to West Point. Preternaturally mature -- he seemed like a 30-year-old man up there -- he, too, thanked everyone for coming, before reminding them that this wasn't a memorial for his stepfather but a celebration of the safe return of the rest of the company. When he led the room in a silent prayer, many of the men began quietly crying as well.
As the evening wore on, though, the gathering increasingly became the celebration it was meant to be, laughter and whoops of surprise rising over the dance music as comrades were reunited or shared old stories. When the D.J. finally quit and the lights went up in the ballroom, the stalwarts moved down the hall to Frisco's, the hotel bar. Among them was Janice Morgain. For the party, she had chosen a black velvet dress and a new hairstyle that made her look considerably younger, and for some time she moved about the dimly lighted room, briefly joining one table after another.
Chuck Norris and his friend from the Baiji recovery team, James Blackburn, had already spent a considerable portion of the evening in Frisco's. Part of the reason came down to simple practicality -- smoking wasn't permitted in the ballroom, and both men were smokers -- but it also reflected yet another element of estrangement in Norris's life. By being separated from the rest of Alpha Company in Iraq, he had had a fundamentally different experience from theirs, and as much as he enjoyed seeing his hometown buddies -- all evening, he was his old back-slapping, bear-hugging jovial self -- it was with Blackburn, whom he had met in Iraq, that he felt he had the most in common.
As night turned to early morning, the groupings around Frisco's became more intimate, best friends from the battlefield settling down with one another at the tables or along the bar. The laughter increased but so, too, did the awkward pauses, moments when remembrances suddenly took a bad turn. Sitting with Blackburn, Norris was recounting the story of a nighttime recovery mission, a tale that, by the expression on his face, appeared headed for a funny conclusion. But then he remembered the little fires burning here and there across the highway. ''I never knew bodies could burn on their own like that,'' Norris said. ''It must be from the fat and the oils.''
When I next saw Norris in his repair shop, it was mid-April. I recognized some of the same dismantled television sets from my last visit, two months earlier.
''Yeah,'' Norris said with his characteristic laugh, ''they're kind of like big paperweights.'' The joke aside, the television sets were also testament to the continuing difficulties he was experiencing. While he hadn't had a recurrence of the depressive episode that had laid him out at the beginning of the year, Norris was still spending very little time in his shop and having trouble concentrating. ''I just get antsy,'' he explained. ''I'll get started on something and then lose focus, move on to something else. I used to be able to keep everything in my head. Now, if I don't write it down, I forget it.''
In other ways, though, Norris seemed much sturdier than he had a few months earlier. Most significant, he was able to talk about Carl Morgain with a frankness he never before displayed. ''The fact is,'' he said in the shop that day, ''Carl only went to Iraq because I did. That's tough to accept, but it's something I've got to deal with.''
The previous month, Norris wrote me an e-mail message in which for the first time he described his reaction upon learning of Morgain's death. In that note, he also told me that so far he had been unable to visit Morgain's grave. As much as he wanted to, he said, he just didn't feel up to it yet. At the repair shop in April, I asked if he felt any closer to doing that.
''Closer.'' He nodded. ''Not quite there, but getting closer.''
He had heard that Janice was planning a gathering at her husband's grave for Memorial Day weekend, but the prospect of joining that group filled Norris with a certain dread. ''I think I've got to go on my own,'' he said. ''If I break down, I don't want a lot of other people around to see.'' He gave a quick, masking grin. ''Don't want to make a spectacle of myself, you know?''
The last time I saw Norris was the morning of Mother's Day, May 14. His house on the south side of Butler was in a state of chaos, boxes stacked everywhere, as the family was moving to a new home a mile or so away at the end of the week. So that we could talk in private, he ordered his kids to start packing the basement, then settled against the kitchen counter. It turned out that he had some news. Just the previous day, Janice Morgain, learning that Chuck was planning to skip a tree-planting ceremony at the armory to mark the first anniversary of Carl's death, sent Chuck a no-holds-barred e-mail message, angry and concerned in roughly equal parts. ''She basically said I wasn't dealing with what happened,'' Norris said, ''and that, for my own good, I'd better start.'' That very evening, he had finally gone out to Morgain's grave. ''It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be,'' he told me. ''I just stood there for a while talking to him, said my piece, called him a dumb ass for getting killed.''
For nearly a year, Norris had worn a black metal bracelet bearing Carl Morgain's name, but before he left the cemetery, he removed it and placed it on the grave. As he walked away, he told me, he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. ''It was like I was finally saying goodbye,'' he said. ''Like I was finally accepting what had happened.''
As he leaned against his kitchen counter, Norris told me something he had never mentioned before about that day in Iraq when he first learned of Morgain's death. Right after hearing the news, Norris said, he had to run another recovery mission nearby, and after that came the long, harrowing nighttime drive back to Baiji.
''It was a hellish, scary day,'' he explained, ''and I had to stay alert, so I just put the news about Carl out of my mind. I didn't even process it. It made it kind of easy. After that, I went through long periods -- weeks at a time -- where I just convinced myself that it hadn't really happened, that Carl was away on leave or out on a mission somewhere, that everything was fine and we'd catch up with each other once we got back home.'' In the kitchen, Norris gently shook his head. ''It really did help me get through it over there, kept me focused, but then you get back here.. . .'' His voice trailed off.
With the benefit of seven months of hindsight, Norris has also grown more reflective on his Iraq experience. While still supportive of the war effort, he says that he increasingly feels it was a mistake for the military to put him and the rest of Alpha Company in the Sunni Triangle. ''Not that we weren't trained for it or couldn't handle it,'' he said, ''but we weren't a bunch of 20-year-olds with a thirst for action. Most of us were older guys with families. We didn't want to kill anyone. So why drop us right in the middle of the Triangle? I think they kind of did wrong by us.''
If current troop rotation schedules are kept, Alpha Company could be called back to Iraq as early as 2008. Should that call come, Norris already knows what he will do.
''It's a contract I signed,'' he told me. ''If they decide they need me, I'll go.''
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