Alpha Company: Their War Comes Home

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I found this article on the front page of today's Sunday paper. Complete article is at the below link.
_www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_left_story/20080306_Alpha_Company__Their_War_Comes_Home.html

First of four parts
Alpha Company: Their War Comes Home
The Pa. National Guard unit suffered bombings and saw six comrades die in Iraq. Many fight still — to get lives on track and to find meaning in their sacrifice.
By Tom Infield
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The flat roofs across the street were checkered with black shadows. In the dim yellow light of a city sky at night, Sgt. Lorenzo Martinez thought he saw a man move.

He jumped away from the window and pressed his back to the wall.

Maybe, he thought, he was becoming too cautious, too wary. Ever since six of his friends in Alpha Company had been killed in hidden-bomb attacks in Iraq, he had been easily spooked.

His mind raced. Was the door locked? Was there a route of escape? What would he do without a weapon?
With just thumb and forefinger, he slowly separated the blinds and peered out again.
He froze.

Sure enough, it was a sniper.

But this was Philadelphia, not Baghdad, and Martinez was in his own bedroom on the second floor of his own house on North Fifth Street.

Somehow, the bald, 44-year-old father of two had transported himself back to Iraq, back to the dusty roads and drab villages where the bomb attacks that his outfit suffered in 2004 and 2005 made it the hardest-hit Pennsylvania National Guard unit since World War II.

This evening in June 2006, he'd had a couple of beers. He and his wife, Maria, had exchanged sharp words. His eyes, flashing in the round mirror on the dresser, had grown wild.

Now he yanked open the drawers and dumped them on the floor. He turned over the mattress and shoved it, with other furniture, against the door.

With the lights out, he stood staring at imagined danger across the way.

He began to dwell on the faces of the men who'd been lost - members of the First Battalion of the 111th Infantry, based at an armory in Northeast Philadelphia.

There was Spec. Gennaro Pellegrini, a police officer who boxed professionally and was known as "Punchy." Martinez could picture him all worked up, ready for a fight.

There was Sgt. Brahim Jeffcoat, long-faced and lean, who was a Temple University student and father of a 19-month-old girl. His round glasses gave him a studious look.

There was Nathaniel DeTample, a former 130-pound wrestler at Pennsbury High School in Bucks County. At 19, he was a rarity in Alpha: a private first class in the veteran unit. Martinez always thought he looked like a baby.

Martinez could bring to mind all the faces - of those three and of the others, Spec. Kurt Krout, Sgt. Francis Straub, Spec. John Kulick. They had been killed in a pair of bomb blasts three days apart in August 2005. The calamity had been major news across the state.

During his night of distress, Martinez had these men on his mind. "Where," he wanted to know, "are my friends?"

More than two years after coming home, and on the eve of the Iraq war's fifth anniversary, the 131 survivors of Alpha Company are still trying to sort out the meaning of their sacrifice.

These were citizen-soldiers, many of them family men, drawn from across the Philadelphia region. They are, today, police officers and prison guards, construction workers and drugstore clerks. One is an airport screener, one carries mail, and one digs graves.

The Inquirer set out almost a year ago to track down every Alpha member. About a third have left the Guard, and others have transferred to units as far away as Texas and Arizona. One died in a car accident, one went to prison, one melted into the shadows of Army Special Forces. It took court records to find some. Others, although still in the Guard and in the area, were wary of talking.

The newspaper ultimately reached all but one veteran, and all but five cooperated in reporting on how they were doing.

Alpha never expected to go to war. Its members knew it was possible, but the Pennsylvania Army Guard hadn't sent units into combat since World War II.

Many of the men had been in the Guard for years without ever venturing much farther than Fort Indiantown Gap on the eastern slopes of the Allegheny Mountains.

Then came 9/11. Then came the Iraq invasion. Alpha was called up in 2004 for almost six months of pre-Iraq training in Texas and Mississippi. The unit then spent nearly 11 months in the dust and danger of northern Iraq, where Alpha endured half a dozen bomb attacks and ambushes in which men were hurt. Besides the six men who were killed, 17 received the Purple Heart for getting wounded in combat.

Amid the relief and joy of coming home in late 2005, the survivors weren't fully prepared for what, to them, were unexpected difficulties of readjusting to civilian life.

Some emerged from the trial of Iraq stronger and more self-confident, with high hopes for the future.
But others feel derailed and don't know, yet, how to get back on track. Almost half - 46 percent - have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

For many, the stresses of reentry - reacquainting themselves with wives and girlfriends, returning to work or school - caused levels of anger and anxiety that required psychotherapy and medication, often at a VA hospital or clinic.

About a third were collecting VA disability pensions for PTSD, hearing loss, bad backs and other injuries - some while still serving in the Guard.

Almost every man said he had felt welcomed home. Sometimes strangers, seeing them in uniform, would say thank you. But many in the company saw an America bored with veterans' stories - too detached or too distressed by events in Iraq to care much about them. And that felt like an insult.

For some men, the path to recovery remains as elusive as the shadowy insurgents Alpha stalked on the plain of ancient Mesopotamia.

Sgt. Allan Dempster of South Philadelphia, rocked by two bomb blasts in September 2005, came back and was medicating himself with alcohol, only to learn that he had traumatic brain injury - which the Pentagon now calls the signature injury of the Iraq war.

Dempster never got a Purple Heart. The Army apparently did not consider his injury to be a combat wound. Yet it haunts him still. His evaluation of his own condition is both plaintive and concise.

"I am changed," he said.

Some of the men in the all-male unit said they'd almost rather be back in Iraq. Life was simpler there; a man just followed orders. Fifty of them said they'd volunteer to go back, and 10 others said they'd consider it.
All of the veterans, in one way or another, have been marked indelibly by their Iraq experience - some quite literally, as in the case of Sgt. Neill Coulbourn of Phoenixville.

Coulbourn has a tattoo etched on his big right arm that bears the names of six men - six dead men. Underneath, it says: "August 2005."

For Alpha Company, everything begins with August 2005.

The summer temperature at Forward Operating Base Summerall was routinely 110 degrees. The desert compound 110 miles north of Baghdad had been an Iraqi military airfield before the Americans took over. To Sgt. Dan South, it seemed "like a little fort in Indian country."

This was August 2005. South had been in Iraq for eight months. Several times, the unit was hit with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. As yet, it had suffered no fatalities.

South, 23, joined the Army out of high school in York County. He had been in the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, but had gotten out a few months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

He then joined the Guard to get the college benefits it offered and enrolled at Millersville University. As the war rolled into 2004, he began to suspect that he would never make it to graduation. Indeed, he was called up for 18 months. He joined Alpha for training and then flew out with the unit around Thanksgiving 2004.
He never wanted to go to Iraq. It wasn't that he opposed the war; he didn't. In fact, he wanted to earn the respect of his father, who had been a Marine at the Vietnam War battle of Khe Sanh. But South had other plans. He wanted to be back in school.

In the summer of 2005, nearly half of all U.S. troops in Iraq were from the Guard and Reserves. Never before had part-time soldiers carried so heavy a share of the load in fighting a war.

As guardsmen, the men of Alpha were typically older than regular Army troops. Fourteen were over 40, and the eldest was 55.

FOB Summerall, as they called their base, was near Beiji, an important crossroads with the largest oil refinery in Iraq. The fortress, an ocean of white trailers, was surrounded by a wall of enormous sandbags, each filled with a ton of soil.

For the 1,000 or so men of Task Force Dragoon, of which Alpha was a part, living at the FOB was only occasionally dangerous. Insurgents might lob in a mortar shell, but they knew U.S. forces would respond with shells twice as big.

By Army standards, the accommodations were comfortable. Troops ate in a cool, spacious dining facility where the menu included Baskin-Robbins ice cream. They bunked, in pairs, in steel, air-conditioned boxes that looked like shipping containers. Each day, soldiers could be seen running in shorts and T-shirts along the dirt-and-stone roads of the compound. The air often was thick with dust.

Many Alpha soldiers had volunteered for Iraq. They had been members of other companies in the battalion and agreed to fill vacant slots on Alpha's roster.

Still, they complained. They complained about the heat. They complained about the spiders and scorpions. They complained about their leaders. All the carping - which they saw as every soldier's right - let off steam.

Every day, usually twice a day, they rode dangerous patrols in their armored humvees. Every day, they were in danger from mines planted beneath the roads, from bombs hidden alongside the roads, from suicide bombers driving cars or trucks packed with explosives.

And every day, they counted the time until they could go home.

Almost every Alpha soldier was on at least one patrol that came under attack.

Staff Sgt. Anthony Kelly, a platoon sergeant from Drexel Hill, a law-school graduate with a shaved head, kept an e-mail diary in which he wrote: "Imagine rolling down the street at 60 m.p.h in a 12-ton freight car, equipped with a [machine gun] that spits hundreds of pointy metal bricks at a couple of thousand feet per second.

"Now imagine some yokel taking potshots at you . . . or planting a bomb for you to run over, or planting one in a car that he tries to drive into the side of your humvee (killing himself in the process). . . . It feels like driving through a really bad neighborhood."

Soldiers rarely had a chance to fight back.

"Me, personally, I never saw an insurgent," said Sgt. Mark Ransom of Royersford, a former Marine who would have preferred a head-to-head fight. "It was a year of just sitting around and waiting to get blown up."
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