DEL.ICIO.USAcross Georgia, citizen soldiers of the National Guard have marched off to Iraq. In the coming months, the AJC will tell the stories of those left behind in Dublin, home to 48th Brigade soldiers and families.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/05/05
 RICH ADDICKS/AJC | |||
| Wanda Allen (above, left), assembles her body armor. She leaves behind daughters (from right) LaWanda Allen, Victoria Allen and Sarina Morris. 'They make you wear these things?' asks Sarina, trying on her mom's cap. | |||
 RICH ADDICKS/AJC | |||
| Brean Hancock (left) hugs friend and former cheerleading teammate Ashlee Ensley during a visit to Dublin High School. Last May, Hancock graduated from the school. This May, she was headed to Iraq. | |||
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MOST POPULAROn the Friday before Mother's Day, Wanda Allen's three daughters gathered at her house to help her pack for a big trip. They ordered pizza and made a mess of her youngest girl's bedroom as they spread out a confusion of gear and clothing and tried to cram it all into a couple of bags. At times, it felt like a slumber party.
"What's this?" asked Victoria, almost 13, holding what looked like a canvas fanny pack.
"That's my gas mask," Wanda replied matter-of-factly.
Victoria removed the goggle-eyed device and stared at it as if she were confronting a giant praying mantis. She looked back at her mother.
"It goes in the rucksack with the other gear," Wanda continued. She was sitting on a stool trying to fit plates of body armor into a bulletproof vest. At her feet were a chemical suit, a Kevlar helmet and other paraphernalia that would improve her odds of returning home safely.
This was no ordinary trip. Victoria's mother was going to war.
——
Wanda Allen left Middle Georgia for the Middle East last month. The 51-year-old Dublin native, who carted her girls around town in a Jeep Cherokee, will have a far riskier driving assignment in the next year: delivering ammunition in an Army truck to U.S. troops in Iraq.
All around the state, civilians like Allen have been pressed into unfamiliar roles as members of the Georgia National Guard's 48th Brigade Combat Team. In Dublin alone, the newly minted soldiers include a teenager who was a cheerleader this time last year, two brothers from Russia who were plucked from college, and a father who volunteered when he found out his son had to go to Iraq.
With nearly 4,400 men and women, the brigade represents the largest overseas deployment of the Georgia Guard since World War II. While many of the soldiers belong to units from other states that were attached to the 48th to fill out its personnel needs, more than 2,500 of them are Georgians. They are a cross section of the state in camouflage.
Until the Guard activated them in January, they were police officers, firefighters, prison guards, ministers, teachers, journalists, farmers, factory workers, salesclerks, secretaries, students. They're fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, even grandparents. Though most are in their 20s and 30s, more than 600 are over 40 and a few intrepid souls are pushing 60.
The soldiers come from 145 of Georgia's 159 counties. Metro Atlanta, with more than half the state's population, is somewhat underrepresented, accounting for barely one-quarter of the force. The bulk comes from rural areas and small towns where National Guard armories have long been a fixture of life, a gathering place and a source of community pride — not to mention supplementary paychecks.
They come from places like Wanda Allen's hometown.
Most Atlantans, if they know Dublin at all, know it as a pit stop on the long, weary drive to Savannah. The seat of Laurens County is located off I-16, 50 miles southeast of Macon, where the gentle hills of Middle Georgia give way to the piney flatlands of the coastal plain.
That name? Dublin's first postmaster christened the city in honor of his deceased wife, whose family had Irish roots. Though the town has never claimed many residents of Irish ancestry, it makes the most of its tenuous Celtic connection with a monthlong St. Patrick's Day festival and a profusion of businesses with names like Leprechaun Fast-Lube.
Beyond the shamrocks, Dublin presents a familiar swath of the changing South. The main drag, Jackson Street, runs west from the courthouse and gives charming glimpses of the past: decades-old storefronts, a vintage hotel and theater, the inevitable Confederate monument, a row of handsome mansions built a century ago with cotton money. Once the street passes Piggly Wiggly and Bubba's Tire Center, the vista turns decidedly New South: chain restaurants, Dublin Mall, the new Home Depot, the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center.
One of the county's largest employers, the hospital cares for thousands of veterans and serves as a constant reminder of the sacrifices some Americans have been called upon to make. As a sign on the front lawn puts it: "The price of freedom is visible here."
Dublin has paid its share.
The unofficial town historian, lawyer Scott Thompson, can cite chapter and verse of the long local record of military service. He knows that 600 Laurens countians fought for the Confederacy, that a school board member was ousted because he opposed U.S. entry into World War I, that Dublin produced both a Tuskegee airman and a Medal of Honor recipient during World War II. A painting in Thompson's office shows the latter, Bobbie Brown, heroically leading the charge up Crucifix Hill in Germany. A highway leading into town is named for him.
Thompson also knows that Dublin had one of the South's first National Guard units. Over the years, it has been mobilized to quell civil disturbances and, more often, help out during natural disasters like the floods of 1994. The outfit's latest incarnation — Alpha Company, 148th Support Battalion — operates out of a beige brick building on U.S. 441 that looks like a mothballed schoolhouse from the Eisenhower era. In Iraq, the battalion will supply troops with everything from rations to bullets, sometimes traveling in convoys like the ones insurgents have attacked with deadly results.
Unlike infantry units, Alpha Company includes women. Seventeen are going to the war zone, where 9 percent of the U.S. force is female — the largest percentage of any American war. There would have been more women from Dublin, but four got pregnant and others were unable to make arrangements for their children's care. Wanda Allen, a state prison employee, will be leaving her youngest daughter with her husband.
Although female soldiers don't have combat assignments in Iraq, their supply and support roles have proved dangerous. Allen, the first woman to join the unit 28 years ago, figures she'll make a conspicuous target. "You're driving in a convoy, and who are they going to shoot at first? The ammo truck."
Of the more than 1,600 Americans killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom so far, at least 222 were members of the National Guard. Georgia has been relatively unscathed. Unlike Louisiana and other states that have lost dozens of soldiers, only three from the Georgia Guard have died in the war.
In all, Laurens County has 62 soldiers in the 48th Brigade, one of the highest per-capita totals of any Georgia county. In a smaller city like Dublin, population 16,000, it seems like everyone knows someone who has been called up.
"You're never far away from a life that's being affected," said City Manager George Roussel.
On a recent day, Roussel was sitting in the mayor's office across from His Honor himself, Phil Best. The two had no trouble reeling off a roll call of soldiers: The veterinarian's son. The resource officer at the high school. The news director at TV 35 and his son. Irene, who used to work at the middle school, and Tony, who worked at the city's wastewater treatment plant.
"And there's the lady who bought my house on Mimosa," the mayor added. "Her son's been deployed."
They could have mentioned three workers at the YKK door and window frame plant, or three members of Dublin High's class of 2004, or seven employees at the VA hospital, or eight state corrections personnel.
No wonder so many people in Dublin drop terms like "MOS" into conversation, as in: What's your boy's MOS? They don't have to be told that it means "military occupational specialty."
Down the hall at police headquarters, Chief Wayne H. Cain offered some more names, starting with his own family. His middle son, Luke, is preparing for his second tour of duty in Iraq with the Marines.
Last fall, during the battle for Fallujah, a Marine in dress blues walked into Morris State Bank, where Luke's mother works. Dawn Cain had been nervously following the news and assumed the worst. "When she saw him," her husband remembered, "she busted out squalling."
As it turned out, the Marine only wanted to open an account.
On the first Thursday of the year, a pleasantly cool morning for January, hundreds of Dubliners lined the streets to see Alpha Company off as it headed for Fort Stewart, near Savannah, to train for Iraq. A bus and two dozen heavy military vehicles carried the troops through a town decked with yellow ribbons as onlookers waved flags and held homemade signs of support. The soldiers smiled and put on a brave face, but more than a few looked rather bewildered by the twist of fate that had snatched them from their civilian lives.
The faces on the sidewalks and roadsides looked no less concerned. As the procession crept through the city, each block of the route seemed to tell a hidden story of the home-front worries that were descending on Dublin like a gray winter sky.
The motorcade passed the courthouse, where three memorials, sitting almost unnoticed in the grassy traffic islands at Jackson and Jefferson, bear testament to the ultimate fear. Bronze tablets display the names of the county's war dead: 22 in Vietnam, 12 in Korea, 104 in World War II, 23 in what the fading inscription hopefully calls the World War. A separate marker pays tribute to the county's last combat fatality, Marine Staff Sgt. Dewey L. Johnson, who died 25 years ago this spring in the doomed mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran.
The motorcade turned down Jackson and passed First Baptist Church, where the congregation has been especially attentive to Peggy Smith, whose husband and son were both being deployed. Britt Smith, the news director at TV 35, belonged to a Guard unit in Alabama until he found out that 19-year-old Greg was going to Iraq with the 48th. His mother was crushed: "I just fell apart." His father promptly requested and received a transfer so he could go to war with him.
The motorcade passed the VA Medical Center, where more than 300 Iraq war veterans are already registered for care. Their smooth young faces stand out at a hospital where most of the patients are older veterans like Willie Anderson, whose 22-year-old daughter, Faith, was headed to Iraq with the brigade. In Vietnam, Anderson was stationed near a base where the bodies of American soldiers were held for shipment home. The memory is so disturbing that he still goes to the hospital for counseling on post-traumatic stress. When a doctor heard him admit that he cries sometimes as he watches the news from Iraq, he was advised not to watch the news.
The motorcade continued past the mall, where cheerleaders from Dublin High turned out to see one of their own, a recent graduate who had won the Fighting Irish Spirit Award three times. Brean Hancock, just 18, is the youngest member of Alpha Company. Watching her ride by with a smile and a wave, one of her favorite teachers, Monique Blue, felt like pulling her off the truck and taking her back to class.
"But we were just on the sideline with her last September," a tearful cheerleader told Miss Monique.
"Baby," the teacher said, "it isn't September anymore."
The motorcade turned onto Industrial Boulevard and passed some of the factories and warehouses where many Dubliners earn their living. Employees from the YKK plant gathered to see three co-workers, including Ricky Stanley, a 35-year-old father of two, whose wife, Belinda, was wondering how to make ends meet without his weekly paycheck. Their youngest daughter had just made the cheerleading team at middle school, and Belinda Stanley wasn't sure she could afford $700 for uniforms, gear and workshop fees.
Finally, the motorcade veered onto Telfair Street and hit I-16, the highway where the soldiers would begin their long journey to Iraq.
That night, over dinner tables that suddenly seemed emptier, families in Dublin began their own difficult journeys.
On the north side of town, on a suburban lane called Easy Street, Traci Copeland, a 32-year-old preschool teacher, worried about how she was going to manage two young children, with another baby on the way in October.
Her husband, Hank, joined the Guard last August against her wishes. "We argued about it, but all I can do now is support him," she said one night as she collapsed onto the sofa after feeding her 15-month-old son.
Copeland used to teach in Hinesville, near Fort Stewart, where she watched young wives falter under the strain of separation from their husbands. "Some of them just fell apart," she said. "I've always been an independent woman, and I never quite understood what they were going through."
She does now. She fears that she's becoming one of those wives.
In the countryside south of town, Elen Rybakov Malone sat in a century-old farmhouse and agonized over whether she should have let her sons enlist in the Guard. "I'm just a regular mom who wants her kids to be safe and sound," she said as she served a plate of brownies at the breakfast table.
Actually, Malone is anything but a regular mom. She was a divorced mother of two living in Moscow six years ago when she met an American in an Internet chat room. Mickey Malone flew to Russia, courted and married her, and brought her back to his home in Laurens County along with her boys.
Dmitri, then 16, warmed to his new surroundings and grew to love fried chicken, hunting and dipping snuff. He was the one who signed up for the Guard when he was still an underage student at Dublin High. His older brother, Pavel, went along.
Elen Malone supports the war in Iraq, she explained in her unmistakable Russian accent; she just doesn't see why her college student sons have to fight it.
Her eyes moistened and she dabbed them with a napkin. "I never should have signed the permission papers."
On May 14, a hot Saturday afternoon that wasn't nearly as hot as the afternoons in Baghdad, the 48th Brigade assembled at Fort Stewart for a stirring send-off ceremony. It was the first act in a daylong pageant of emotions that would end hours later with lingering embraces and whispered words of goodbye.
But that afternoon, the mood was jubilant. As soldiers stood in formation on Cottrell Parade Field, politicians and generals made the requisite patriotic speeches. Then the brigade band struck up some Sousa and the troops passed in review to a barrage of clicking cameras. As each unit and town was announced over the loudspeaker, screams and gales of applause drowned out the music. It was a rolling pep rally.
For those who looked more closely, though, the scene held a sobering reminder. Bordering the parade field was a double rank of recently planted Eastern redbud trees known as Warrior's Walk. In front of each was a marker bearing the name of a 3rd Infantry Division member killed in the Iraq war.
There were 84 trees, but more were already needed. The morning papers listed three new fatalities.
The scene brought to mind something Wanda Allen had said as she packed with her daughters on one of her last nights in Dublin: "We keep saying everyone's going to come back. I pray we're right. But it doesn't always happen that way."
She slipped another plate of body armor into her bulletproof vest. Her daughters watched and wondered.
———
Postscript: On Tuesday night, less than two days after the bulk of the 48th Brigade arrived in Iraq, a rocket struck a crowded plaza outside a shopping area at Camp Liberty, a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport. One American soldier died and 16 others were wounded, including two Georgians — the brigade's first combat casualties. One of them, Clyde Miller, lives in southwest Georgia but had recently been transferred into the Dublin unit.
Late Thursday night, Wanda Allen phoned home to let her girls know she was all right.
— Staff writer Jim Auchmutey can be reached at jauchmutey@ajc.com, staff writer Anna Varela at avarela@ajc.com, and staff photographer Rich Addicks at raddicks@ajc.com.
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