From No Boundaries
Every generation, it seems, has its test. World War II. Korea. Vietnam. The Persian Gulf. Today is no different -- except that, in a sense, everything is different. If you're one of the roughly 2.6 million men and women who serve in America's military, you're on the front line in a war with no boundaries and no end in sight. Your training is unparalleled, but often irrelevant. Whether you're posted to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo or any number of other places, you're as likely to find yourself policing neighborhoods, guarding schools, distributing food or building roads as fighting enemy soldiers. Who could have foreseen that the generations of Americans weaned on Star Wars and Nintendo would be handed the challenge of a global war against terror?These sons and daughters wear every uniform -- Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard. Some are full-time military, some reserves, some National Guard. Of our active duty troops, almost 4 in 10 are racial minorities. Women make up 15 percent of the force. More than half of our soldiers are married. Domestic postings and civilian jobs have given way to multiple tours in distant places. The stresses are great, and the dangers still growing. Here is a glimpse into the lives of four soldiers who have answered their country's call.
A Kid Without Any Fear
You can't miss the house where Nicholas Cicero grew up: It's practically covered in yellow ribbons, red, white and blue stars, and American flags. At the door, Nicholas greets me with a grin and an enormous yawn; it's past noon, but he's only got a few days to catch up on his sleep after five months in Iraq -- and before shipping out again.
Nicholas had spent his whole life in this house, in suburban Wethersfield, Conn., before joining the Army a year after the September 11 attacks. He signed up just out of high school, for both patriotic and practical reasons. "I wanted to go to college but couldn't afford it, so I looked at the military options," says the smooth-faced 19-year-old, shyly looking away as he speaks.
Just then his father, Mario, who emigrated from Sicily at age 16, bustles into the room. He's come home for lunch, unwilling to miss a minute more with his son than is absolutely necessary. Nicholas used to work alongside him at the painting business he built up, and Mario admits he went along with his son's decision to enlist reluctantly. "I was worried Nicky wasn't going to get to go to college any other way. So it seemed like a good idea," he says. But the time when his son was in Iraq "was a hard five months." In fact, Nicholas faced an ambush on his first day there. Worse was to come.
His parents weren't surprised that Nicholas wanted to be at the center of action. Even as a youngster, he was the kind of kid who was always on the lookout for a bigger, scarier roller coaster. He'd eagerly signed up for one of the Army's most dangerous assignments, as a scout in the 3rd Infantry Division. The job not only offered a $7,000 signing bonus, but seemed to promise an extra measure of excitement. "Scouts are out there in front of everybody, riding Humvees and Bradleys," he says. "It looked pretty cool in the video."
Last March, he shipped out to Kuwait, where he waited for a month. "I didn't know anyone," he says. "But once I was there, I had to put my game face on." He was finally sent into Iraq on April 17, and was told to go out and detain anyone breaking the curfew. That led to the ambush on one of his very first patrols. A guy was walking down the middle of the street, cradling an AK-47. As Nicholas's Humvee approached, another man on a balcony started shooting at the Americans, and a car swung around the corner, opening fire as well.
"We ended up having to blow up that car," Nicholas says evenly. If he sounds calm now, he wasn't then. "That night I was on my cot thinking, This ain't no video game. You can't press the reset."
Throughout the brief "official" war, Nicholas did reconnaissance, trying to find the enemy before they found him. One of his buddies, a 25-year-old from Missouri with a wife and two little kids, died on the road from the Baghdad airport when the Humvee he was driving hit an antitank mine.
After Saddam's regime fell, Nicholas says, "our world flip-flopped. We went from being fighters to peacekeepers in a day. Our training didn't even come close to what we were now doing in Baghdad."
Suddenly, his job was to get the guys selling ammo and bayonets off the streets, and given the challenge, he's proud of what his outfit accomplished. "Not to brag, but our sector was the worst in Baghdad. And for the amount of people we had over there, we did a damn good job."
He didn't have much contact with ordinary Iraqis. "But there were a few kids who would come up and say hello. That was one of my worst fears, having a confrontation with a child. Fortunately, it never happened." Instead, some of the kids reported law-breaking to the Americans in pantomime ("Bang-bang! Argh!") and seemed to want to help.
A Family Goes to War
On May 19, he and his unit got a tip that car thieves were running a chop shop out of a certain nondescript building. When Nicholas and others arrived, the place was all locked up, so the Americans shot two locks off the doors. After that, everything happened fast. "We shot through the door, they shot back through the door, my sergeant said, 'Is anybody hit?' and I looked at my leg and it was bleeding." Another soldier was hurt too. But then the men who had been shooting from inside the building came around from the back and said they had only fired because they had thought someone was breaking in. The Americans took their weapons and released them. Nicholas never did find out if the original tip had been correct.His injury turned out to be minor -- easier to handle than the everyday deprivations. The heat was unrelenting, and what he wanted more than anything was a drink of cold water, or maybe some ice that didn't have E. coli in it. He also found himself missing silly things, like "The Simpsons," and he thought often of his father's Fettuccine Alfredo.
When friends ask about his experiences now, he usually makes jokes, not knowing what else to say. "We're going to be there quite a while, for years probably," he says. And in the future, he figures, fewer kids will be signing up the way he did, no matter what the financial incentives. He insists he would go back, though.
That night in Wethersfield, 65 of his father's friends, all of them Italian born, gather at a neighborhood restaurant, Casa Mia, to celebrate Nicky and their pride in him. After the antipasto, the fried squid and the tripe soup, when it seems the meal might be winding down, they bring out enormous steaks, followed by a ricotta and chocolate cake in the shape of an American flag. Nicholas is in uniform, showing his Purple Heart around and bashfully standing for just a few words: "Thanks for the support. Go Army!"
But even on that happy occasion, his family isn't forgetting the dangers behind Nicky or those still ahead. Until he got back from Iraq, "the worst part was hearing every day that another American soldier got killed," says his uncle, Roberto Cicero. "You don't hear the name, so it's always your kid." Nicholas's father, who had been smiling all night, is wistful as the evening comes to a close. "He's still a kid. We go upstairs and he has stuffed animals. Nicky never had any fear. Hopefully he will get some."
Maybe, but perhaps not right away. Two days after the dinner, Nicholas will be on a plane for Fort Stewart, Ga., where he'll train for his next mission -- in Kosovo.
A Family Goes to War
Julie Kennon is a Stanford-educated radiologist in Nashville, married to an attorney and mother to three precocious kids: Isabel, 6, Will, 5, and Cole, 3. But last spring and summer, Julie's home was not her ranch house on a quiet wooded lot, but a tent in the Saudi Arabian desert. A pilot in the Air National Guard, she was flying C-130s loaded with supplies and heavy equipment into Baghdad.
While she was away, her husband, Jerry, made do by bringing their three kids to work -- at the Louisiana air base where, as a fellow Air National Guard pilot, he had been temporarily assigned.
It's far from the lives the two were leading a dozen years ago, when they first met at pilot training. Like most of the 1.2 million who serve in either the National Guard or reserve forces, Julie and Jerry figured their obligation wouldn't seriously disrupt their civilian lives. Instead, they've been activated for the better part of the last two years. And though the Kennons are not complaining, their families, careers and finances have taken a huge hit.
Since the September 11 attacks, both have served on one classified mission after another -- lately, in operations overseas related to Iraq. In fact, shortly after Julie returned from her five months in Iraq, Jerry was off to Morón Air Base outside Seville, Spain, where he coordinated the flow of supplies into Iraq. For many months now, the Kennon children have rarely had both parents at home together with them. When asked whether the kids have suffered from their absences, Julie demurs while Jerry insists they're fine. "They're veterans," he says.
Julie does worry about her medical practice, where her partners have had to take over most of her weekend hours. Meanwhile, Jerry has his own work dilemma. "I've had to turn away 80 percent of my clients," he says. "When this is over, I'm going to have to build my law practice all over again." But he shrugs off any worries. "I wouldn't trade what I'm doing for the world."
Julie also feels the National Guard duty has been worth the sacrifices. "In the end, you just suck it up," she says. That's not always so easy to do. During Julie's tour in Iraq, Cole was just learning to talk. Whenever she got him on the phone, he would say, "Where are you, Mommy? Is it nighttime there?''
Hearing the Call
To get through the separation, Julie says, "you compartmentalize -- you call home, then go back to work and get busy flying. But Mother's Day was hard. And Easter.''Last July, she missed her sister's wedding -- so little Isabel took her place in the bridal party, while Julie listened to the service via cell phone. "I also missed Isabel's first tooth, but now you can e-mail a digital photo.''
Some of the family pressures were obvious when Julie and the children came to Spain last October for a quick visit. While they were there, Jerry tried to keep things light, joking about how he is hardly roughing it with a queen-size bed and cable TV in his room on the base. Julie, however, talked about feeling the stress.
As for the kids, they ran around happily. But they're also keeping track of their own sacrifices. When one of them mentioned the movie Finding Nemo, Isabel reminded her mom, "I saw it with Daddy. You weren't there.'' Julie sighed and said, "I still have to watch the video from your dance recital too."
Julie and Jerry point out that their children have never had a highly regimented routine anyway, between her hospital hours and all their trips for the Guard. And neither of them believes in coddling. On the base one day, Jerry took the family up into a C-5 transport plane parked on the runway, ready for takeoff to Iraq. When Will balked at climbing the final set of ladder stairs up onto the flight deck and started to whimper, Jerry waved him up, saying, "He's got to learn.''
In the cockpit, the pilot seemed near the end of his tether too. "Activated for the year, mobilized for the duration,'' grumbled the man, a commercial pilot who asked to be identified only by his first name, Steve. "It's getting old. I've got little guys, too, 8 and 10." Flying into Baghdad "was fun the first time,'' he says, but that was a while ago.
Many in the Guard are upset they've been given no end date for their service, but the Kennons aren't complaining. "I got into this to fly and because I believed in the mission," Jerry says, "and that hasn't changed.''
Julie loves the Guard, too, but seems less certain of her future as a sky warrior: "If I'm back in the desert next spring? Honestly, I don't know...''
Hearing the Call to Serve -- Again
On September 11, 2001, Calvin Walker was working as a deputy sheriff in Rock Island, Ill., where he, his wife, Cristina, and their young son had just moved into a new home. "I always say a plane hit my house too," on that day, Cristina says. That's because as soon as he could talk her into it, Calvin quit his $36,000-a-year job to return to the Marine Corps, a full decade after he had left the military, as a low-ranking lance corporal making an annual salary of $20,000.
Then he drove their growing family -- Cristina was now pregnant with their second son -- across the country to their "new" new home, a boxy two-bedroom at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. As they passed through the nearby towns, "all I kept seeing were tattoo parlors," Cristina remembers, "and I kept saying, 'Where are the normal neighborhoods?' " Before long, Calvin had shipped out for eight months, spending time first in Iraq, then in Liberia, where the U.S. military was helping ensure a peaceful change of government.
At 32, Calvin is one of the many older veterans -- older, that is, by the standards of earlier conflicts -- who re-entered the military after the terror attacks. When asked about his decision, though, he doesn't get into American foreign policy. He doesn't mention President Bush or, for that matter, Saddam Hussein. For him, the whys of war are secondary to his faith that God, as well as Uncle Sam, wanted him back in uniform. With his country under attack, he says, "I thought I could do something better in the military than in law enforcement."
"He kept saying we don't need a lot of material things,'' Cristina adds, so the salary cut didn't deter him. Brought up in a nondenominational Protestant church outside Atlanta, he converted to his Portuguese wife's Catholic faith three years ago. In a long conversation in their living room -- filled with holy cards, a framed picture of Pope John Paul II and statues of the Virgin Mary -- Calvin repeatedly connected the dots between his service and his spirituality.
Return to Service
As his ship, the USS Carter Hall, moved endlessly back and forth through the waters about three miles off Liberia's coast, in support of the roughly 200 soldiers who had gone ashore, Calvin passed the time by giving what he called "Catholic information" classes to fellow Marines, and led Sunday communion services. He also found comfort in saying the rosary every day. Among his prayers was that he wouldn't have to go ashore. "Our commanders said if you go into Liberia, there's a possibility you'll have to engage in combat with kids, with teenagers." He dreaded the thought of doing that, and luckily never had to.In Iraq, he had far more to do while helping secure the airport at Mosul. Usually, he worked the front gate, searching the hundreds of people who showed up every day looking for work. Did he feel like a stationary target? "In the daytime you felt a little better, with a lot of your fellow Marines there, but at night you were more concerned."
"Didn't you tell me there was shooting in the background all the time?" his wife says.
"It makes you think, " he answers. "It happens -- suicide bombers." But he believed "we had a good hand protecting us." On a couple of occasions, he was sent to patrol villages near the airport. "They were telling us a lot of guys from the regime had gone into the villages, so it was our job to do recon."
Calvin had no trouble admitting he was scared. "I guess if you're not, you're going to get somebody killed."
His recon party took along a translator, who spoke to the men in the villages. They hadn't seen anyone at all, the villagers insisted. Some of them said, "Don't you have family? Go back home."
Home, in Calvin's youth, had been Decatur, Ga., where his father was drafted during Vietnam. But his mother sounded like the real soldier. After his parents divorced when Calvin was ten, she supported him and his two sisters by working in the school cafeteria, as well as part-time in a photo shop and a grocery store. Each day, he watched her do what had to be done.
"Do I take after my mother, dear?" he says to his wife with a laugh.
He says when he first signed up with the Marines, right out of high school, he was just eager to get away from home. He never saw combat, and served most of his four-year tour as a member of the Marine Corps color guard in Washington, D.C.
This time, though, he was compelled by a more somber sense of duty, and was happiest when he had fulfilled that obligation and could head home. "We felt we had done something for the operation," he says, "and that was good enough."
Operation Desert Smile
What do 312 pounds of jellybeans, 11,000 bottles of salad dressing and 5,000 containers of shampoo have in common? Give up? These items, and many more, were donated to Operation Desert Smile -- Reader's Digest's holiday gift of love for troops in Iraq.
Last September, when we asked advertisers and suppliers to join our "bagathon," they responded with more than $500,000 of merchandise. (The biggest surprise -- literally -- was the arrival of 51,840 servings of pasta from Ragú Express!) Some 500 Digest employees volunteered 2,000 hours and stuffed 5,000 sacks with products and edibles. Reader's Digest added magazines, books and music. We also included 6,000 patriotic letters from schoolchildren, courtesy of QSP, our school fund-raising division.
All of this would have been for naught if the USO hadn't made arrangements with our most generous donor, Maersk Line, Limited. The shipping company sent our gift bags overseas in two 40-foot-long containers, all for free.
"Our troops are risking their lives for us and spending the holidays without their families and friends," says Reader's Digest Editor-in-Chief Jackie Leo. "Operation Desert Smile is our small thank-you for their great sacrifice."