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.”
|