RETURNING VETS: When Johnny and Jane come marching home

By Michele Deluca/delucam@gnnewspaper.com

April 04, 2008 03:48 pm

— When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We'll give him a hearty welcome then
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The men will cheer and the boys will shout
The ladies they will all turn out
And we'll all feel gay,
When Johnny comes marching home.
***
The Iraq War is five years old, and many veterans are returning home to their families in the Niagara region.
All are grateful to be back on American soil, but the lives they are returning to and their ways of coping and healing from their experiences are as unique as each individual warrior.
•••
When Robert Laubacker finishes up his work day as a safety inspector in Iraq, he’s got pizza on his mind. In a compound about 200 miles south of Baghdad, he worries about whether the parts for his pizza oven are going to arrive in time for the opening this month of his new pizzeria and ice cream parlor across from Hyde Park in Niagara Falls.
“It’s always been a lifelong dream of mine to open a pizzeria,” he said during a phone conversation from his base, just outside of Naseria.
He’s been there for about three years, almost the entire length of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart. First he was in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. After he finished his tour as a soldier, he returned to Iraq as a safety inspector for a private contractor.
Meanwhile, at home, just around nine months ago, his young wife, Shawna, gave birth to their baby daughter, alone. She has been raising the baby along while trying to finish painting their new business, to be called Pizzella’s Pizzeria, which the two plan to open April 14.
Laubacker’s boss wants him to stay in Iraq and recently offered him a tantalizing raise to continue working in a field where salaries can rise to six figures, but the Niagara Falls native knows it is time to return home.
“I loved working over here, until I had my daughter,” he said, acknowledging that even with the dangers there is an importance to the work. “With all these contractors, I feel like there one less soldier who has to come over.”
Despite that, he has worried about being selfish. “I'm not the one who has to wonder all the time, and think, ‘Wow, I wonder if he's OK.’ ”
This month, Laubacker will step out of a life filled with the dangers of war and into the life of an everyday family man and civilian trying to run a small business.
He is not coming home as the same man that left. Like many soldiers, he’s more comfortable driving down the middle of the road, a habit created in a place where approaching vehicles may carry hidden destruction.
He doesn’t like to sit with his back to the door in a restaurant. Overall, his wife said, he’s not as easy-going as he used to be.
“I don't notice it. People point it out to me,” he said. “I'm a little jumpy.”
He also worries that being at war has hardened him.
“The biggest change is that maybe I’m not as emotional,” he said, and, after a pause added, “Maybe you find ways not to show it.”
•••
Lt. Col. Jim Lawson of Youngstown recently returned from a six-month stint in northern Iraq, where he and a small squadron of his men helped secure an air base. He describes his time over there as “boredom punctuated by sheer terror” due to frequent rocket attacks from outside the base.
Lawson, who is director of security at the Niagara Falls Air Force Base, said his mission in Iraq involved “protecting the Iraqis basically to get their air force up to speed.” He described the overall experience as leaving him feeling optimistic.
“We’ve really made a huge difference over there in what’s happening with the country. There’s finally progress,” said Lawson, who added that Americans would be proud if they could see the job that all the U.S. forces are doing in Iraq,
Lawson was also struck by the demeanor of the Iraqis.
“The ones I had interaction with are very proud individuals,” he said. “They want the violence to end more than anybody.”
Unlike a lot of the reservists at the base and in Iraq, Lawson has been on full-time active duty for 18 years. The military is his world, and he is always ready to go where he is told, but as a family man, he was gratified by the support for his family and the families of his troops while they were in Iraq.
While in Iraq, Lawson’s 18-member security team from the Falls base received cookies, cigars and even beef jerky from folks back home. When one man’s wife reported the furnace had blown at home, someone connected to the base repaired it.
“We didn’t feel like we were left hanging out there. (The) folks back here are supporting what we are doing,” he said.
Still, Lawson was pleased to return home to his wife and two daughters. “I’ve been home for a little over a month, and I just know I have a big smile on my face.”
He is planning to return to his class in the Leadership Niagara program, which he had to postpone when he shipped out and which he honored recently with a flag that had been flown over his base. As a Texas transplant, he looks forward to learning more about the strengths of the Niagara region and his newly adopted community on American soil.
The Iraq experience, he said, “has made me love my country even more.”
•••
Chris Kreiger is certain his family lives in the safest house in the Town of Tonawanda. That’s because he is up at night as his wife and two young sons sleep, peering out his windows, checking the perimeter of his suburban home. Since he returned from 15 months as a medic in Baghdad, he is always on guard.
His wartime experience has left a toll, the least of which are the memories of constant danger.
“I had just walked out of my tent one time, and they literally blew it up,” he said.
Four times, a tanker he was riding in was hit by explosives. He is still trying to get help for the head injuries that plague him and seem to be the cause of seizures he’s been experiencing since he returned home to his family.
“Trying to come home and transition to everyday life is a lot harder than people think,” he said.
After a leg injury forced him to get surgery, the family lost their home waiting for the military to pay for his hospital fees. Now, Kreiger is on 100 percent disability but still feels that he has had to struggle for appropriate care from the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Buffalo.
Kreiger’s wife, Melissa, feels that the hospital has let them down, first by saying the facial ticks — which ultimately led to the seizures —were nothing to worry about. The couple also wished for more networking at the hospital, as they had to explain their whole story to every new staffer they encountered (see sidebar for the VA’s response).
His photos from Iraq, displayed across the kitchen table like a deck of cards, offer frightening images of death and destruction.
“Unless I can make you feel the fear, the anxiety, the sleepless nights listening and watching your friends die, you’re not going to understand,” he said. “You know what we think about? Are we going to live through this mission? Are we going to live to go back home?”
Shortly after he spoke, an ambulance from the Veterans Administration arrived to take him to a hospital in Richmond, Va. What lies ahead is at least two weeks of tests to figure out what has gone wrong in his body.
•••
Sometimes, it isn’t the war that can challenge the spirit of the soldier, it’s the war machine. Lockport native Joel Frank, who spent nearly eight years in the Army before officially separating Feb. 15, learned the hard way about the unrelenting inflexibility of the chain of command.
He was a second lieutenant when he took command of his first unit, a 42-man rifle platoon newly returned from Iraq to be “reset” before redeployment.
“I would listen to feedback from my senior enlisted soldiers, and if they had a better way of doing something, we're going to do it that way. Some of my senior commanders appreciated that, others didn't.”
One officer in particular was not impressed by Frank’s attempts to utilize advice from underlings.
“He and I butted heads constantly,” Frank said. In Iraq, Frank recalled, “I got sent packing to a very ungracious position,” pulled from his battalion and placed in charge of a brigade made up largely of soldiers with disciplinary issues or other problems. Their job was to track the movement of certain patrols through a quiet sector outside of Baghdad and guard an entry gate to Camp Victory. Frank essentially felt as if he had been placed in exile.
“My purpose in life is not to go through and (tick) everyone off, but essentially I have to stand up for what I believed in or else I couldn't live with myself,” he said.
While Frank was struggling with his new assignment in Iraq, he missed the birth of his son in a difficult delivery that threatened his wife’s life. Upon his return to their little family, there were other issues that needed to be faced, including a wife who had been used to taking command at home.
“I'm still adjusting,” he said. “Obviously, my wife isn't one of my men ... My wife had adapted and coped and had systems in place.”
Despite all the challenges, Frank feels at ready to deal with whatever lies ahead. “After dealing with people shooting at you and artillery coming in, it puts life in perspective and helped me reprioritize what was important, what I wanted to do. I came home and I reprioritized.”
Regardless, Frank retains a sense of pride at having worn “the uniform.”
“I don't regret my military time at all,” he said. “I expected my experience to be a little different, (but) I came home, I'm standing, I've got 10 fingers and 10 toes. It’s time to focus on me and my family.”
•••
Rebecca Hucknall of Albion enlisted in the Army Reserves when she was 17, because she said, “I wanted to do something unique as a woman.” Training camp was far tougher than she imagined, but she was told “the fastest way out is to graduate,” so she did.
After basic training, she received further training to work as a medical secretary in the Reserves. After three years, was hired to work full time at the Air Force Reserve Station in Niagara Falls.
Still, it was a shock to find herself in Iraq last year, in the middle of a mortar attack.
Hucknall, a tech sergeant, had been sent to Iraq with about 30 others in her unit to work at an aeromedical staging facility, looking after stabilized wounded soldiers until they could be flown out for treatment.
She walked to work that day, just like every other day, wearing her “battle rattle,” the flak vest and helmet troops are required to have with them at all times. The mortar attack shook her building.
“It was so loud. We were in a hardened facility, and we could feel the building shaking,” she said. “The first thing you do is you drop to the ground. You’re supposed to wait about two minutes, and then you’re supposed to try and get your gear on. I worked in what is called the control center, so I crawled over to the door and I screamed, ‘Alarm red,’ because the alarm hadn't gone off yet.
“All the nurses and the med techs are in charge of patient safety, as well. They have to scramble around, get the patients out of their beds and onto the floor. It definitely makes your heart pound.”
Hucknall would prefer not to go back to Iraq but knows there’s a chance she could be sent again, as she is in the military for the long haul.
“I'm definitely a lifer. I love it here. I love my job. I love the training,” she said.
Hucknall simply hopes for the best.
“I just hope something will happen soon to benefit either us or them (the Iraqis), and that way, the sooner, the better, it can be over.”
Contact editor Michele DeLucaat 693-1000, ext. 157.

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