July 9, 2006

 

 
   

   

When the War Hits Home


By Joshua Kors

 

So often the coverage of Iraq is just that: of Iraq — framed by the sectarian violence in Sadr City, miked up before a Baghdad market where hours earlier a car bomb exploded.

Stephanie James' story is different. Hers is the story of how the car bombs and mortar attacks have affected Robinson, Ill., a farming community of 7,000 residents, 250 miles south of Chicago and a world away from the guard towers and barbed wire of Log Base Seitz, west of Baghdad.

Hers, in effect, is the story of how the war hits home. And its center is not the insurgent strongholds of the Anbar province but a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

The Sergeant's Son

They called him Ivo. He was a friend of a friend. When James and her classmates at U. of I. would get together to play

Stephanie James is one of many soldiers from rural Crawford County, Ill., to serve in the Iraq war.  When families in Crawford learned that James' unit lacked vital supplies, they united to purchase the needed equipment.

   

                 

spades at her apartment, sometimes he'd join them at the card

table. James says she and Ivo hadn't talked much before, but

because of their card table connection, she wasn't that surprised

when he called out for her, as she was crossing the library parking

lot back to her Oldsmobile.

“He said, ‘Hey, I heard you were in Iraq.' I said, ‘Yes, I was.' He told me his father was too, that he died there.” He pulled up his sleeve, and tattooed below his shoulder was the date of his father's birth and the date of his death: March 17, 2004. “I saw the date there,” she says, “and I knew. I recognized it immediately.”

Like that she was right back in Iraq, at the logistics base where she was no longer Stephanie, the small town girl with a predilection for cards, but Specialist James of the 1544 Transportation Unit, Illinois National Guard, in charge of maintaining communication between guard towers and escorting contractors through the capital's war zones.

March 17, 2004, three months after her 20th birthday: “Me and [Specialist] Heather [Buzan] were just walking around the base. It was our first day there, and we didn't know quite what to do. We see our platoon sergeant by the laundry area, friends lining up to use the phones. In the blink of an eye there was this explosion.” A mortar attack hit the parade field, spraying shrapnel across the base. “I saw the explosion. Heather and I both did. We had these briefings where they teach you to get down during an attack. But we were kind of in shock,” she says.

“We knew we were in Iraq, and we knew we were at war. But the reality of it doesn't really hit until that first bullet flies by.”

James' sergeant leapt from the laundry area and yanked her and Buzan into a bunker. “That's when I heard this voice yell out for a CLS, a combat life saver.” But Sergeant Ivory Phipps had taken too much shrapnel. By the time the CLS arrived, he was dead.

It was a blunt introduction to the war, 17 hours into her service. As James meditates about that first attack and the life of Sergeant Phipps — how he'd calm the soldiers by answering their questions about the Middle East, information he culled from his service in Desert Storm; how at 43, he re-enlisted specifically to serve in Iraq — her mind drifts back to that library parking lot, two years later, where without warning Baghdad and Urbana would intersect.

“Ivo pulled his sleeve up further. And right then I knew what I was going to see. A light went on, and suddenly I felt so stupid. Ivo, Ivory. I had never put the two together.”

Tattooed above the date of his death was a picture of Illinois Army National Guard Sgt. Ivory L. Phipps.

“We stood out there in the parking lot, hugging each other, crying.”

 

Iraq, Unarmored

Her story about Ivory, Senior and Junior, illustrates a larger point about James' Iraq and, indeed, about rural Illinois itself. The specialist's hometown of Robinson advertises itself as a low-key, tight-knit community, a respite for city dwellers tired of fast-paced life. Its local paper gives the dates and times of upcoming church services and details the food to be served at nearby elementary schools. The names of soldiers are posted on the telephone poles in town. And while it's exaggeration to say everyone knows everyone, as James explains, that sentiment is there.

And it followed her to Iraq.

“In other units there were soldiers from 20 different counties, but in mine, a lot of us knew each other from outside the military. Your bunkmate's not just your battle buddy. She's your friend from high school, from middle school,” says James. These overlapping relationships put a dual face on Iraq. In one sense, after venturing into the alien heat and discomforting violence of Baghdad, James could return to base and be surrounded again by neighbors and classmates. But it was precisely because of those enduring relationships that every casualty, every IED explosion struck twice as hard.

James speaks with the flat force of a true soldier. But to explain this pain, suddenly she softens. She begins to talk about two brothers in her unit — one brother losing his eye to scrap metal ejected from a mortar attack — before shutting the story down. After a moment, she says simply, “There were a lot of siblings on our base.”

What still burns at James is that so many of those siblings didn't have to die — if only, she says, she and her unit had been equipped with the proper armor. When James began service in March 2004, driving to and from base to deliver essentials like fuel and water, her vehicle was so outdated it lacked standard war-time armor, known as “up-armor.” An up-armored Humvee features bullet-proof glass, steel plating under the cab to protect against land mines, and steel-plated doors to deflect sniper fire.

The vehicles at Log Base Seitz had none of those features. Before deploying, James' unit was told that the vehicles they would be operating in Iraq would also lack CB radios, equipment necessary to maintain contact with the base. Frustrated by these breaches in security, and recognizing that help was not coming from the army, James and her fellow soldiers petitioned their own families for money to purchase CBs.

Crawford County, Ill., is not a rich community. Its per capita income is just under $17,000, a microscopic amount compared to the $294 billion the White House has spent in Iraq. Still, when word spread through Crawford that those funds hadn't paid for CBs, the county's families came through. They raised enough money for the radios. And James' unit tried to do the rest, acquiring slabs of steel once they got to Iraq. “We welded them onto the doors to protect ourselves from IEDs, gun shots,” says James.

Even with the steel, the protection wasn't great. And it was tested every day in the streets, as her vehicle would draw fire. Finally in October 2004, seven months into her service in Iraq, James' unit received up-armored vehicles. The relief is palpable in her voice even now, as she tells the story.

“The new Humvees, they were air-conditioned, they were up-armored. Every day you went out there, and you knew something would happen. At least with the up-armor you had protection.” It was the difference, she says, between having shrapnel slice through your door and having it bounce off.

Beneath that relief, though, remains an anger rooted in those seven months without that protection. “It was unbelievable that they'd send us to war without the equipment to keep us safe,” says James. “Sure, up-armor is expensive. It costs a lot of money to put it on vehicles. But isn't it worth it? Aren't the lives of American soldiers worth that?”

She draws up images of the president in his own bullet-proof vehicle and of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, standing before a crowd of soldiers, downplaying the widespread equipment shortage by saying, “ As you know, you go to war with the Army you have .  They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

“It's so frustrating,” says James, “because you look back and say, this person would be alive if we had up-armor. This person wouldn't have a disability. This is one more person who would be coming home with us.”

The responsibility for these oversights rests with the president, the Congress and the Department of Defense, says James. “They're the ones who knew what kind of war this was going to be — or should have known.”

 

Staying Busy

What makes James' anger so compelling is that the specialist doesn't come across as an angry person. The emotion's there to be tapped when the topic comes up, but you can sense a larger stability in her voice, one that has pushed her past the tangled emotional issues that have dragged down other vets. To be sure, there is a documentable success in the arc of her story: from Robinson to college to Iraq and determinedly, back to college again.

James says she understands the depression that many soldiers bring back from Iraq. As she explains, “In Iraq, you don't have time to think about these issues. It's ‘Oh my god, someone's dead or someone's hurt.' We have a memorial service one night, and the next morning you're out the door on another mission.”

“At home, when everything's stopped, everything you repressed because you didn't have time — it all comes up.” Back in Illinois and back home, she says, “I started getting really depressed too.”

Soon, though, the specialist realized the way out that depression: staying busy. She re-enrolled in the university and soon moved to D.C. to work on Project Vote, a non-profit that works to boost voter participation in low-income communities. That more than anything, she says, keeps those war issues from coming up — that and a supportive family.

“My family has always been there for me. It goes to that small town thing: My roommate at school was also in the military,” James explains. “Sometimes it does help to talk about it. And I know, if I need to, there are a hundred people here I can call.”

 
Tel.: (646) 456-7738                                                   joshua@joshuakors.com