“I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY PARENTS …. THEY GAVE ME THEIR BIGGEST GIFT, THEIR POVERTY.”
CHAPTER 15: R&R
DEBORA WAS AT THE FRANKFURT AIRPORT TO MEET ME WHEN I landed, and she looked more beautiful than ever. We hopped into the car and traveled the same route to Baumholder we had taken after arriving in Germany just over a year earlier. Looking out the window, the green rolling hills of Germany rose in stark contrast to the flat brown desert surrounding Ramadi. The further we drove from the airport, the further my thoughts drifted from war. Ramadi was now a million miles away, and I could not wait to see my daughters.
Allison was starting her junior year of high school, and Ashley was a freshman. Both girls had arrived in Germany not knowing a soul, but Army kids learn to make friends fast. Not only did the girls have to deal with me being gone—they were also going to their third school in three years and had to figure out how to fit in, just like every high school student in the States.
Baumholder High School was a small school by American standards. The class of 2007 graduated a record number of sixty-six students, more than three times the historical average. Although the school was small, it did have excellent extracurricular events. The girls played in the band and were on the cross-country, basketball, and soccer teams. Since their competition was other American High Schools in Europe, their road games were in cities like Brussels, and class trips took them to London. More than anything, they hung out with their friends—most of whom had also just arrived in Baumholder—and endured the daily trials and tribulations of teenage life. They did this all while their dad, and most of their classmates’ dads, were gone. Discussing the dangers the soldiers faced in Iraq among the teens was socially unacceptable. Occasionally Allison and Ashley would talk about what could happen to me, but those conversations were brief and private. Thanks in large part to Debora, they have now grown up to be successful, independent young women, and I cannot be prouder of them. Allison graduated from the University of Iowa and is an Army nurse, and Ashley graduated from the University of Kansas with a master’s degree in social work.
My position as a battalion commander in Germany did have one big perk: we lived in a nice duplex house that we shared with the hardest working man in the Army, the artillery battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cheatham. Our house was in the center of Smith Barracks, directly across from the community club, where our dog Laika frequently found a way to sneak in the back door of the kitchen and make herself at home. The girls were waiting to meet me underneath a “welcome home” banner hanging over the door. We had a group hug and I finally felt like I was home. Just as my leaving changed the family dynamic, my coming home did the same. Dad was back, even if only for a couple of weeks. Debora has done a great job balancing her responsibilities with the Family Readiness Group (FRG) and raising teenage girls without a husband.
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Baumholder’s history dates back to the nomadic Germanic tribes using the pastures in the area to feed their cattle, followed in succession by the Celts and the Romans. The Germanic Franks established the first permanent settlement around 500 AD. In the intervening years, the French, Croats, Prussians and ultimately the Germans have laid claim to the region.284 Baumholder sits less than forty miles from the French and Luxemburg borders, nestled among hills, forests, and valleys. In 1937, the Germans began construction of the eleven thousand hectare Baumholder Military Training Area, used to train German and Austrian troops for combat on both fronts, as well as a camp for Poles and Russians forced to work in the fields producing food for the Reich. Following D-Day, the Nazis prepared a deliberate defense around the town, digging tank ditches across the training area in order to stop the Allied race across Europe. Fortunately for the residents, the Wehrmacht abandoned the positions prior to battle, sparing the destruction of the town. On 18 March 1945, the town surrendered without a fight to the Americans. The French occupied Baumholder in July 1945 and maintained control of the region until 1952, when the Americans assumed responsibility, and have had a large presence there ever since.285
The Baumholder American Military Community, sometimes referred to as “little America,” had a slice of everything found in the States. There was a Department of Defense School System from kindergarten to high school, a Commissary, a PX, a movie theater, a bowling alley, two gyms, a day care center and even American car dealerships. The only time a soldier or family member actually had to leave post was to get to the airport for a ride back to the States. That said, living in Germany was a great experience for all of us and provided a wonderful opportunity for our family to travel across Europe. My daughters would end up spending six of their thirteen school years living in Europe between our tours to Italy and Germany.
Every commander in the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armor Division left a rear detachment commander, with a major at the brigade headquarters, captains in charge at the battalion-level, and staff sergeants at the companies, organized along battalion lines, not by task force. Although it became confusing at times when one company was task organized to another headquarters, by and large the battalion rear detachments worked well together.
Captain Dan Costin was the Rear Detachment commander for the 1st Battalion, 35th Armor, and Sergeant First Class John Cebak was the first sergeant. They led a team of seven NCOs who were responsible for the soldiers left behind for medical or legal reasons, and for the newly arriving individual replacements who were completing pre-deployment training prior to joining us in Iraq. The Rear Detachment was also responsible for the welfare of the families of the deployed soldiers. Most of the task force’s families chose to stay in Germany rather than return to the States, which was actually a good thing since many of the family members who returned to America said they felt isolated being away from the military community. The families that stayed in Baumholder made the best of a bad situation and formed a tight knit community. There were community concerts by recording starts like Dierks Bentley, battalion Christmas parties with Santa bringing gifts to all the kids, and monthly company level potluck dinners to help the families pass the time until the soldiers returned.
Captain Costin and Sergeant First Class Cebak and the rest of the Rear Detachment were in a no-win situation, and yet they performed magnificently. They kept the soldiers focused and the families happy. Dan Costin was a tanker with a quiet and unassuming personality who had been a platoon leader on the battalion’s previous deployment to Baghdad. Sergeant First Class Cebak was the Battalion Motor Sergeant on the previous deployment, and a man I feel certain was capable of absolutely anything. He found and brought back two AWOL soldiers, raised a small fortune for the family readiness group through bake sales and car washes, and hand sewed the welcome home banners for our return—a true man for all seasons. Whenever he received a crazy request from me or one of the family members, no matter what time of the day or night, all he invariably said was, “Too easy.”
The Army’s institutionalized program is the Family Readiness Group, providing resources to help military spouses do what they have been doing for decades: pulling together as a community in a time of hardship. Debora held the position of Senior Advisor to the Battalion Family Readiness Group. The spouse of the commander typically holds the volunteer position that serves as the interface between spouses and the military members in uniform who are supporting them. Formal battalion-level meetings occurred monthly, during which Costin and Cebak passed information from the chain of command, as well as received feedback from the spouses on community issues. There was also a large social aspect to the FRG, with cookouts and baby showers. The companies also had FRGs, and an NCO to run the program. For the families to stay updated on events downrange, I would send periodic emails back to the families, and the brigade published a monthly newsletter.
The pre-deployment training was hard on family life. The training schedule was set well before my assuming command, and we were on a five-month race to prepare for combat. A week after I took command in June 2005, the battalion went “Block Leave”, a two-week period where no training is scheduled and every soldier has the opportunity to take a vacation. Debora, the girls, and I took the train to Paris, in the middle of the hottest summer in Europe’s history. Upon our return, the battalion had three weeks in garrison preparing for our predeployment training, then “Iron Warrior Gunnery” in Grafenwoehr, Germany, where every soldier spent two weeks learning to shoot their pistols and rifles out of the back of cargo trucks. Then the brigade task organized, with the companies attaching to the battalions they would be serving with in combat, and spent a month at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels. The companies then returned to their parent units, and everyone went back to Baumholder for a four-day pass. Immediately after that, we spent another month in Grafenwoehr qualifying our weapons systems from pistols to M1A1 tanks. Following that, we returned to Baumholder for a month of long nights in the motor pool as we made any necessary repairs on our vehicles while packing shipping containers in preparation to deploy. In mid-October, we loaded all or our equipment on a train and then had the opportunity to take Block Leave again, just in time for the final pack out and flight to Kuwait.
Prior to the deployment, there was an unspoken tension in our family knowing that I was going to be gone for a year. It was not the dangers of combat that worried my family as much as the extended separation. While I had been gone on countless field training exercises over the previous years, those were only for a few weeks at a time. To shoehorn in as much family time as possible, we took a weeklong cruise of the western Mediterranean. While we had a great time and saw many new places, something did not feel quite right about it. I felt as if there was an elephant in the room that prevented us from truly relaxing.
Unlike Desert Storm, where our contact had been irregularly received letters and maybe a half dozen phone calls over the seven months I was gone, Debora and I easily kept in touch during this deployment through phone calls and emails. I would telephone Debora right after I called the Rear Detachment every time we had a casualty so she could answer any questions the other wives would have. The Army has a procedure for the notification of families of the dead and wounded, and leaking the name before the official notification was strictly taboo. Until the Notification Officer knocked on the door and told the family, Costin, Cebak and Debora ensured the news remained a secret.
Within the Baumholder community, there were roughly two thousand wives caring for children while their husbands deployed for war. I feel deployments are the hardest on the wives and families we left behind. Soldiers know what to expect, were highly trained, had good leaders, and were usually too busy to worry about the danger. Spouses, on the other hand, had long days and lonely nights to worry about their soldiers. In essence, there were now hundreds of “single mothers” trying to keep families running, as well as filling in as soccer coaches, and shade tree mechanics. Once, Debora served as the official scorer for a softball game, the accurate results of which will never be known.
The leadership in Baumholder did a tremendous job trying to keep normalcy for the families, thanks in large part to the Herculean efforts of Brigadier General Michael Tucker, the First Armored Division’s Assistant Division Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jay Larson, the garrison commander, Kathy Ledbetter and Dan Furlano from the Army Community Services, and Danny Robinson, the high school principal. Despite their best efforts, USO shows and community events could only fill the void so much. Sadly, there were memorial services for the fallen soldiers from across the brigade two or three times a week as a grim reminder of what the deployed troops faced. The families could either dwell on the danger their husbands were in, or get on with their lives.
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My R&R was a magical time, a true escape from the harsh reality I had left behind in Ramadi. Carpe diem. We spent the first couple of days hanging around the house, grilling steaks and binge watching many of the DVDs I had purchased from the Haji Mart, Ramadi. The store offered a wide range of bootlegged movies and television shows at bargain prices. Once the viewer became accustomed to someone getting up and walking in front of the bootlegger’s camera, or the local weather in Toronto flashing across the bottom of the screen, watching the latest releases from the States became a treat.
One night we did have a dinner guest, Allison’s new boyfriend, David Crow. Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical of anyone dating my daughter, and especially having him show up during a family dinner while I was on R&R. It was important to Allison that I meet him, although I figured he would be out of the picture by the time I returned. Little did I know that six years later they would marry after David’s graduation from William Penn University.
Baumholder was a great community in which to live and work, but the weather on top of “The Rock” was unpredictable and often cold and rainy. For a getaway, Debora reserved a week at the Armed Forces Resort in Garmisch, Germany, a picturesque village at the foot of the Alps. Debora and I had gone there for a long ski weekend when we were first married and since then the town had always been special to us. We packed into the car and drove for five hours across Germany. Once there, we hiked in the mountains, swam in the pool, walked through city center looking at the shops, enjoyed the gorgeous view of the Zugspitze, and ate freshly made cakes in the afternoon at the Bäckerei in town.
Soon enough the respite was over. We returned to Baumholder where my sister Mary Deane and one of our nieces, Katie Glowen, met us. Both had a trip to Germany scheduled before I knew my R&R dates, and we all took an abbreviated tour of the Rhineland wine country. All told, that space of time back in Germany felt like the best two weeks of my life.
All too soon, however, it was time to go back to Iraq. We woke up early and ate breakfast on my last day of R&R, then sat in the living room waiting for my time to depart. The clock seemed to stand still as Debora and I tried to make small talk and not let the girls see we were upset, but tension lingered in the air nonetheless. Debora later told me the first dozen days of R & R were great, but the last couple were agonizing. She just wanted me to go, so I could be back for good sooner. At last, Toby Watson came over to the house signaling it was time to leave, and we rode to the airport together.
Before I knew it, I was airborne on a commercial plane, and an eye blink later landing in Kuwait, getting on a bus to Ali al Salem, and picking up my body armor and helmet for the flight back to Iraq. As we were boarding the plane, a maintenance problem canceled our flight, and it turned out that the next flight to TQ was not for another 24 hours.
“I got to get back to my unit. This is bullshit!” bitched everyone from private to lieutenant colonel, bombarding the air force sergeant trying to address the formation of frustrated return travelers. With no direct flights to TQ, we were loaded onboard a C-17 that was first making a stop in Qatar. We landed in the middle of the night and quickly learned that maintenance problems canceled the next leg of the flight. We were stuck in Qatar for at least a day, maybe more. More griping and more bitching arose from the assembled crowd. The Air Force did have transient quarters, an enormous tent packed with fifty bunk beds, to put us up while we waited for our ride. By the time we reached our bunks, it was after 0230 hours.
Yet another Air Force sergeant proceeded to brief us on the rules of cleanliness, the mess hall’s operating times, where the latrine was located, and other basic information. The most pertinent item was that General Order 1 did not apply to personnel stationed in Qatar, and the consumption of alcohol was limited to two drinks per day. Since we arrived so late in the day, the Air Force NCO issued us two days’ worth of drink coupons. I happened to be standing closest to the briefer when someone in the back asked what time the beer hall closed.
“0300-0500 daily.” he replied.
I looked at my watch and it was 0245. “Shit, too late.” I muttered.
As I looked up from my watch, I realized that the Air Force sergeant and I were the only two people left in the tent. I ran after the crowd. Another day on R&R and two free beers took the sting out of the delay.
It turned out that each of the forty soldiers on the plane had a different plan for their drink coupons; and each felt the need to tell everyone why his plan was the best:
“I’m saving mine till tomorrow so I can have four.”
“I’m having one now, one at 0500, one at 0700, and one at 0900.”
“Two for me now, two at noon tomorrow.”
Indeed, the permutations were endless.