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Story time had just ended in Charles Seelaus's second-grade classroom at Edward Gideon Elementary School in Philadelphia. Seelaus put down the picture book he had been showing the children, seated in a circle on a large white rug in the corner reading area. He told them he had some important news to share. This, he said, would be his last day with them. Instead of finishing out the year, he would be going to Iraq to help fight the war that had just begun.A little boy named Stephen began to wail, setting off a small tidal wave of tears from the other children. "The school is in a 95 percent poverty area," says Seelaus, "and many of the kids come from broken homes. I had become a surrogate father to a lot of them -- and it was like Daddy was leaving. The tears just kept rolling down." Seelaus tried to reassure the children that he would write to them. He then went to the blackboard and spelled out a parting message: "You are the Best and Greatest." When a little girl pointed out that he had left out the "the" in front of "Greatest," he almost lost it himself.
Nearly 40 years old, Seelaus had only been teaching for seven months. In a major career shift, he left his job as a computer programmer to work in an inner-city school. Despite the severe pay cut, Seelaus, who spends his spare time writing children's stories on the Internet featuring "Medley Mole" and "Buddy Rabbit," knew from the first minute he stepped in a classroom that he had made the right decision. He felt born to teach. But now he was leaving. The 2-228th Aviation Regiment, the Army Reserve unit he had joined to generate extra income to support his wife and four children, had been mobilized for the first time in its history. He wondered if he'd ever see a classroom again.
Three months later, Seelaus, who'd never been away from his family more than a few days, arrived in central Iraq, 42 miles north of Baghdad. The sunset that first evening, a brilliant spectacle of orange and crimson color unlike anything he had ever witnessed, stunned him. Then, as night fell, the Milky Way appeared with pinpoint clarity in a starry sky that revealed constellations he had never seen before. "Everything was sparkling," he says, "until the mortars started coming in."
Abruptly, the night turned into chaos. With no bomb shelters constructed yet in the new camp, Seelaus dove for the ground, digging into the caked dirt that was more like solid mud than sand. Soldiers who were 1,200 yards away from him were hit. While the President had declared an end to major hostilities, the harsh reality was that the war was far from over. As Seelaus noted, "We were not in a friendly place."
They were told to trust no one. The local workers who came on the base to help paint and rebuild could easily be the same people launching attacks at night. "Some saw us as liberators, but others as an occupying force," says Seelaus, whose instinctive friendliness slowly began to erode. "You can't help it," he explains. "A situation like that just hardens you. There were explosions all the time, day and night, yet no target to shoot at. You could hear the sound of RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and know they were close -- but by the time helicopters got there they were long gone." Rumors would spread that the white Nissan pickup trucks outside the gate were going to storm the fences with live bombs. "You don't want to get cynical," he says, "but you get cynical."
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