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June 2006
Baby Noor returns home to Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Iraqi baby who was rescued by Georgia soldiers and then melted hearts around the world returned home from Atlanta on Wednesday.
Baby Noor, discovered by soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team and brought here for life-saving medical care, was delivered to her home in Abu Ghraib by the U.S. Army.
Noor spent six months in Atlanta with two host families while undergoing surgery and follow-up medical treatment.
U.S. military officials took Noor’s grandmother, Soad, to meet the baby in Kuwait and flew them both back to the Baghdad airport.
From there, Noor was escorted in pre-dawn darkness by soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-22 Infantry Battalion in humvees back to eastern Abu Ghraib, the unit’s public affairs officer, 1st Lt. Kristofer Deniger said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
Deniger said the family was happy to have the baby, now eight months old, back at home.
“It was pretty much a flawless trip,” he said.
Baby Noor was shuttled out of Iraq after soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment went into the family home on a routine search last December.
Soad asked the Gainesville-based Charlie Company infantrymen to help her grandchild, who was born with a severe form of spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord does not fully form. Noor had an enormous tumor-like growth on her tiny back.
The U.S. Army arranged for Noor, Soad and Noor’s father, Haider, to travel to Atlanta, where her stay was sponsored by Childspring International, a Christian non-profit that brings sick kids from other nations to Atlanta for treatment.
“This particular humanitarian effort started with a young medic who noticed a child in need and ended with the most powerful nation on the planet, and its citizens, showing compassion and concern and a desire to do the right thing for her,” Lt. Col Kevin Brown, commander of 2-22 Infantry, said in an e-mail Wednesday.
“I’m honored to have served with our brothers from the Georgia Army National Guard, who really got this thing moving,” Brown said. “Saving Baby Noor was as important to us as it was for us to kill and capture terrorists.”
Brown said he would like one day to return to Iraq — when the insurgency has subsided — to check on the progress of Noor.
He said the U.S. Army has conducted over 20 medical assistance missions in Abu Ghraib over the past year and provided pre-natal vitamins to over 1,000 expectant mothers.
“This effort probably helped prevent another few dozen Baby Noors with various birth defects,” he said in his e-mail.
Even as Noor was settling back at home, the Spina Bifida Association paid tribute to Charlie Company soldiers at a conference in downtown Atlanta. Sgt. Nicholas Jelks, a mechanic from Decatur who was the first to see Noor, accepted the Chair’s Excellence Award.
Jelks, who got a standing ovation from the crowd, said he felt honored to receive the award and was happy to learn that Baby Noor was reunited with her family.
“It’s good to know I made a big difference in someone’s life,” he said.
Chairman Douglas Sorocco said the soldiers were honored by the Spina Bifida Association for “reaching out to a child in need in war-torn Iraq” whose case help publicize the birth defect in which the spinal cord does not fully form.
Charlie Company has already received two other humanitarian awards for their efforts to help Noor.
Soad and Haider returned to Iraq in late March to attend to the family they left behind in Abu Ghraib. Noor was not determined well enough to travel then and stayed back with hosts Nancy and Edward Turner.
Nancy Turner boarded a commercial jet for Kuwait on Monday evening with Noor.
Doctors have predicted that Noor will have a chance at a fairly normal life though she may never gain the use of her legs and spend a lifetime in a wheelchair.
Childspring, working through an Iraqi businessman in Atlanta, has lined up a team of doctors in Baghdad who have agreed to see Noor annually. The organization also sent Noor home with a supply of shunts and catheters that might not be easily available in Iraq.
Doctors have said Noor will likely need to see a neurologist, urologist, pediatrician and an orthopedist on a regular basis. A shunt placed in her brain to help drain fluid buildups will likely have to be adjusted as she grows. “We tried to duplicate the medical team she had here,” said Christina Porter, USA director for Childspring. “I am overjoyed that Childspring has been able to what we could do to return Noor to her family.”
Special day for Baby Noor hero
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was a very special Father’s Day for 1st Lt. Jeff Morgan of Douglasville.
The Georgia Army National Guard soldier, back from Iraq just last month, spent the day with his children attending church and opening gifts of clothing — his children said their father had lost too much weight in Iraq and none of his shorts or shirts fit him anymore.
Later in the day, Morgan, 40, was able to see another child who is very dear to his heart: Noor al-Zahra, the Iraqi baby who he helped shuttle out of the slums of Abu Ghraib for critically needed medical care in Atlanta.
“She’s beautiful,” said Morgan of Noor, now almost 9 months old and teething. “It was awesome to see her. I feel very blessed. This is a great Father’s Day gift.”
Last December, Morgan was alerted to the plight of Noor, born with a severe form of spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spine does not fully form. Iraqi doctors had told Noor’s family that she would not survive long.
Morgan, a single father of five, took it upon himself to get Noor the medical treatment she needed. She arrived in Atlanta on New Year’s Day and underwent surgery at Children’s Healthcare to remove a tumor-like growth on her back.
On Sunday, Noor smiled and gurgled as Morgan held her in his arms. He was the first of the soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment to see the child after she left Iraq. The Gainesville-based infantry unit has received worldwide acclaim and two humanitarian awards for their efforts to save Noor’s life.
Morgan said he thinks Noor will have a great future now that she has received the medical care she needed.
The baby currently is staying with a host family arranged by Childspring International, a Christian nonprofit that brings sick children to Atlanta for medical care. Childspring arranged the meeting between Noor and Morgan on Sunday.
Noor’s father and grandmother, who accompanied her to Atlanta, returned to Iraq in late March.
Morgan’s children said they were enormously happy to have their father back among them and honored to call him their dad.
“I’ve never seen anyone from Iraq before,” said son Andrew, 13. “We’re very proud of him,” said daughter Abigail, 16.
Father’s Day has special meaning for Canton man back from Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two days after his second child, Lilian, was born, National Guardsman Jeremy Mays landed not far from Fallujah with the rest of the 48th Brigade Combat Team.
As he entered the so-called Triangle of Death in central Iraq, his wife, April, emerged from a different sort of peril, surviving a high-risk pregnancy marred by gestational diabetes, gestational asthma and toxemia. As she was giving birth — five weeks ahead of schedule — her heart stopped on the delivery table.
She is fully recovered now. Their 14-month-old daughter is healthy as well.
“It was very frustrating, not being able to be there for my wife,” said Mays, a 25-year-old Canton man.
His repeated requests for leave were denied when he was in Iraq, but he made it home in time to spend Father’s Day with his family this Sunday.
He never knew the full extent of his wife’s maladies during her pregnancy. As the daughter of a career Air Force officer, she was well-versed in the standard operating procedure of a military wife.
“I learned from my mother to say, ‘Everything’s fine, honey,’ ” said April Mays, 23.
She works for the Bartow County Department of Family and Children’s Services as she pursues a psychology degree from Kennesaw State University.
“We’d talk about every day. It was unbearable. But I had to be at my happy place. There was no crying on the phone,” she said.
Nor on the battlefield. Knowing his mind was elsewhere, his commanding officers restricted Mays to the base, where he was assigned guard duty.
Mays found solace from fellow soldiers and an unlikely friend, a local Shiite named Mohammed who worked at the base cafeteria.
“I’d give him things, like pants and shoes,” Mays said. “He had been through so much. His first wife had been killed by Saddam, but he had the strength to go on.
“It was helpful for me to remember that there’s always someone worse off than yourself.
“I had to hunker down and be the rock for my wife,” said Mays, currently in training to become a law enforcement officer in DeKalb County. “Whenever we’d talk, I’d say the same thing: ‘Everything’s fine, don’t worry.’ “
It was an awkward dance for the couple, forced into conversations peppered with necessary white lies on both ends. Even now — two months since his return — they’re adjusting to having each other back in their lives.
Both agree that their five-year marriage is stronger than ever.
“He’s a totally different person now, a lot more serious,” April Mays said. “He thinks about things before he says it.”
As a father, however, nothing has changed.
“Jeremy was always a great dad,” she said as Kathleen, their 2 1/2-year-old, sat in her father’s lap. “And Lilian and Kathleen are total daddy’s girls.”
Father’s Day holds special significance for Mays, who remembers little about what he was doing this time last year.
“Probably walking out of the tent, going to guard duty,” he said. “Holidays mean a lot more now than they ever did.”
Families bid farewell to soldiers off to Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tears flowed and the apprehension was evident on the faces of family members and friends who gathered Monday at Fort Gillem for a send-off ceremony for Georgia Army National Guard soldiers.
On the heels of the 48th Brigade Combat Team’s return from a yearlong deployment in Iraq, more of Georgia’s citizen soldiers are heading to the combat zone.
Company H of the 121st Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion leaves for Fort Hood, Texas, today for two months of training, after which the 175 soldiers will head to Iraq, many for a second tour.
“I’m excited to go,” said Pfc. Jason Tomassini, 20, who works at a sporting goods store near Douglasville. “I’ve always wanted to be a soldier since I was little.”
Company H, an airborne long-range surveillance unit, deployed to the Middle East in February 2003, spending seven months in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in March. This time they will spend 12 months there.
Although the 48th, with about 4,400 soldiers, was the largest Georgia Guard unit to serve in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Lawrence Ross, commander of the 78th Troop Command, said at least 475 Guard troops from the state are serving there. Several more units are preparing to go later this year, and eventually will raise the total number of Georgia Guard members in Iraq to about 700, Ross said.
An additional 215 soldiers of the Georgia Air National Guard are also in Iraq, according to the state Guard office.
One of those soldiers already in Iraq, Maj. Michael Fordham, plans officer for the 122nd Rear Operations Center, is in charge of base defense operations at Baghdad’s vast Camp Victory complex near the airport. He described his job running the watch towers, checkpoints and badging facilities as “sort of like running a small city.”
Fordham, a 27-year veteran of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with expertise in undercover sting operations, said that like many of the 48th’s soldiers, his civilian occupation helps him in his military role in Iraq.
Gary Rothwell, a special agent in Perry, said Fordham was good in his job in Iraq because he is “creative in working out solutions.?”
“If you’re playing a role and something changes, you have to figure out how to maintain your cover and use what’s given to you,” Rothwell said.
He said GBI agents often would be working on several cases simultaneously and that meant taking on several personas at once. Fordham credited those organizational skills learned at the GBI for his successes in Iraq.
He reiterated what Guard leaders say frequently: National Guard soldiers bring an important set of civilian skills to their duties in Iraq. That’s especially true of men and women who deal with Iraqi citizens and local governments and institutions regularly.
That kind of close interaction worried Sgt. Jason Strohmetz, 32, a lineman for Georgia Power who served with Company H in Iraq in 2003. He said he knew the nature of the Iraq war had changed vastly since he was last there — roadside bombs and insurgent attacks were not nearly as prevalent then — and he feared having to perform civilian-like policing duties in the midst of chaos and uncertainty.
“I’m more concerned about having to act like a police officer rather than a soldier,” he said. “Combat seems simpler.”
Ross said the long-range surveillance soldiers such as Strohmetz are badly needed in the fight against Iraq’s insurgency.
“They go forward in small teams and gather intelligence,” Ross said. “They look for infiltrators, look for bombs, bad guys. Their role is to not be seen, to be stealthy. It’s a tremendous role for our unit.”
But of all the anxieties of being called to war, Strohmetz said he most dreaded having to say goodbye again to his wife and four daughters. His youngest, Abby, 4, didn’t recognize him when he returned last time.
“I’m going to miss my family but I don’t mind at all,” said Strohmetz, who lives in Warner Robins. “I’m old-fashioned about the military. I feel like I’m supposed to be doing this when our country is at war.”
— Staff writer Rhonda Cook contributed to this article.
