Home > Georgians@War > Archives > 2007 > April > 07
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Soldier shoulders memories of fallen
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tal Afar, Iraq — There are reasons why soldiers make certain decisions that are difficult for the outside world to understand.
Why a man in Spc. Rodney Davidson’s situation would choose to return to Iraq when he had the option of resuming a quiet life in the backwoods of Thomaston.
Or how a man can witness what Davidson did and still not let vengeance steer his battles here.
He doesn’t talk much about what happened two Julys ago, though he keeps reminders around him at all times.
Few in his current unit know what he has been through. Some are fresh out of high school, with little combat experience. They cannot imagine the horror.
• Video: Davidson talks about being back in Iraq. • Photos
On two searing summer days in 2005, Davidson stood in the gunner’s turret and watched the last of three Humvees in his convoy explode beyond recognition.
Both times, Davidson was supposed to have been the fifth man in the doomed trucks. Both times, the platoon sergeant switched him at the last minute.
He was with Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment then, just starting a yearlong tour of Iraq with the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team.
Within a week, Davidson’s 16-man tent contained eight empty beds. He lost his entire squad to two massive bombs hidden in the road.
Most days, the gruesome images flash through Davidson’s mind. He sees the faces of his eight fallen comrades; he hears their words.
Particularly painful are memories of Staff Sgt. Carl Fuller and Spc. Gus Brunson. Fuller was a military guy all the way who kept things bearable with his wicked sense of humor. Brunson shared Davidson’s love of hunting. Davidson keeps in touch by phone with Brunson’s father, Jeffry, though he cannot bear to tell the father the details of his son’s death.
The three soldiers had volunteered to go to war with the 48th Brigade. They were on loan from a different guard unit — Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN) (LRS). But Davidson returned alone to Company H, after a grueling year in Iraq. When he heard Company H had been called up, he chose to return to the war, even though the Army would not have required him to do another tour so soon. He has been here since August.
“These are my brothers,” Davidson says of his platoon mates, stationed at Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tal Afar. “This is where I belong.”
Davidson admits it’s a hard concept to grasp. It was for his wife, his mother, his sister. He had not even been home a month last May when he announced he was leaving again.
Such is a soldier’s sense of duty to his band of brothers.
——————————-
The Company H Humvees push out of the gates at Sykes, past jersey barriers and enormous bags stuffed with sand. These are meant to protect the base and are just like those at Camp Striker in Baghdad. The roads are safer here than they were down south, but Davidson cringes when the truck hits a jarring bump. He has a nervous habit of tapping his foot while standing in the hatch.
The driver, Spc. Jesse Wilkes, puts on music for the long ride north of the Sinjar Mountains, to the Syrian border. Davidson sings along with the band Poison: “I won’t forget you …”
On his right wrist is a blue metal remembrance bracelet with Fuller’s name on it. On his left wrist are two stainless steel bracelets that Alpha Company special ordered. Each has the names of four of their own who died in July 2005.
Makeshift bombs, otherwise known as improvised explosive devices, are the No. 1 killer of U.S. soldiers in Iraq; more than 1,200 of the 3,200 American casualties were from IEDs. Usually, it’s the gunner’s job to survey the road ahead for suspicious people, vehicles or things like tires or bags or wires.
“Got a vehicle on the left,” Davidson yells, referring to a car parked off to the side. “Not sure what he’s doing.”
When his plane landed on Iraqi soil last August, Davidson wasn’t sure how he felt being back here. The blast of blistering air, the flour-like dust, the familiar smells of burning trash. His time with the 48th rushed through his mind.
“This place wasn’t good to me before,” he says.
Davidson thought, too, about all that he had missed during his first tour: His mother suffered a stroke, his grandmother died. Family members “all say they understand,” he says. “But that doesn’t make it easier. I’ve been married seven years. Three of them, I’ve been away from home,” training or deployed overseas.
It helps that Davidson’s team leader, Sgt. Ellis Lowery, a law enforcement officer from McDonough, is on his third tour of Iraq. Lowery spent a year with the 48th, first in a tent not far from Davidson’s at Camp Striker and later at Tallil Air Base, escorting supply trucks to northern destinations.
Now Lowery is with Davidson as their convoy rolls north toward an Iraqi outpost. Lowery looks over at his platoon mate and shakes his head. It takes a unique person to be in that man’s shoes, he says.
Lowery knows the details of the blasts that killed the Alpha Company Soldiers — that both were caused by 600-pound bombs, that the entire platoon received trauma counseling and that for months afterward, Davidson saw pieces of body armor, Humvee seats and tools still strewn in the nearby fields.
It helps that Lowery knows, even though it rarely comes up in conversation.
——————————-
Despite everything, Davidson recently re-enlisted. He wants to finish a career in the Georgia Army National Guard.
With Company H, he has already spent another seven months in the Iraqi desert, where it is pitch black once the sun goes down. The soldiers use headlamps as they check weapons and trucks for the long night ahead on the Syrian border.
Davidson, a piano tuner at the Yamaha plant in Thomaston, is proud to be a part of this long-range surveillance company and is determined to go through Ranger school when he returns home. He has been trying to lose weight to “get ready” for the physically punishing 61-day course. Lately, he has been eating salads for dinner and lunch though he admits that the creamy, high-calorie dressing he slathers on probably defeats his effort.
Davidson will turn 41 this June; he tells everyone that he was born on 6-6-66. Others tease him and call him “Hippie.” In his younger days, he sported long hair and rode a motorcycle. But Davidson’s age and maturity helped temper the anger that overcame him right after his squad mates were killed.
On the road to the border fort, he points out a village in which Company H soldiers confiscated bomb-making materials. He remembers wanting to “slug those guys.” He doesn’t believe in abusing human rights but says he would consider it if he knew getting the right guy would save other soldiers’ lives.
Every time he looks into a detainee’s eyes, he still wonders whether that person was connected to the booby traps on Route Aeros and Route Red Sox in southwestern Baghdad.
“I’m not God, I can’t know a man’s heart and mind,” he says.
But he wishes that soldiers were given more authority to take action. He believes there are too many restrictions on when they can shoot their guns or detain suspects, especially after the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison.
Davidson is also troubled by politicians in Washington who he says make a political football out of this war. “If we pull out now just because the Democrats or new Republicans want it — well, that bothers me. That means by buddies died in vain.”
After arriving at the Iraqi outpost, Davidson gets ready for a reconnaissance mission by moonlight.
The Army issued him new equipment for his second tour of Iraq, but Davidson climbs atop his truck and throws on the body armor he had when he was with Alpha Company.
The vest with bullet-stopping plates is stained and dusty, the helmet equally so. On the right corner at the back of the Kevlar is a nick. That was from the explosion that killed Fuller. Davidson refuses to wear any other helmet.
He settles into the gunner’s stance all too familiar to him. The Humvee moves a few feet forward and then, boom. The truck comes to a sudden halt.
Davidson almost falls onto his 240 Bravo machine gun.
For the few seconds that pass before everyone realizes the truck rolled over a sawed-off pole, Davidson holds his breath.
He survived certain death twice. He knows at any moment his luck could run out.
ABOUT THIS STORY
Reporter Moni Basu first met Spc. Rodney Davidson in the summer of 2005 when she was embedded with the 48th Brigade Combat Team. She covered the memorial services at Baghdad’s Camp Striker for eight of Davidson’s platoon mates. Six months later, she caught up with him at Tallil Air Base and accompanied him on convoy security missions on the main north-south highway in Iraq.
Davidson returned from the war in May 2006. Two months later, in July 2006, Basu visited Davidson at Fort Hood, Texas, where he was preparing to return to Iraq. She is currently embedded with Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN) (LRS) in Tal Afar and recently joined Davidson on a surveillance mission to the Syrian border.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Reports from Iraq
I’m just so proud of my husband
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I sometimes wonder if my husband truly knows how proud and honored I am to be his wife.
With this being our first deployment, I’ve experienced many emotions. But one of the most profound is an immense sense of pride for what he’s doing. I’ve found this be hugely consistent with the military wives I’ve met.
They are all staunch supporters of their husbands, and with good reason. We’re married to true heroes — the ones who are living in harm’s way, who have left behind their loved ones and careers and who worry daily about making it back home to their families.
They voluntarily make these sacrifices to defend the rights of those who sometimes don’t understand or don’t appreciate what they’re fighting for. We understand their selfless service to this country and couldn’t be prouder they are our husbands.
How do you show your pride for your soldier?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Andie Heffernan
Military a path to citizenship for Cuba native
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 |
| Louie Favorite / AJC |
| “I’m pretty thankful for everything I have in the United States,” Hector Arbosferrer says. “I worked hard for it.” |
Every father wants a daughter to be proud of him.
Hector Arbosferrer is no exception. When Daniela turned 5, he worried she would be embarrassed to say her daddy was an immigrant who worked as a mechanic in a carpet mill in Dalton.
He wanted more for her.
He joined the Army.
A year after his enlistment, 26-year-old Arbosferrer finds himself in Iraq, risking his life for a country of which he is not even a citizen yet. And he is quietly fighting a battle of his own to change that.
Arbosferrer is one of a number of men and women in uniform who are still citizens of other countries. He carries not just a foreign passport, but one from a nation considered an enemy of the United States: Cuba.
A specialist with Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN) (LRS), Arbosferrer is stationed at Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tal Afar, and has been there since August. He applied for citizenship more than a year ago and was hoping his service to America would expedite the process. A 2002 executive order signed by President Bush waives some procedures for those serving in the armed forces.
But a series of bureaucratic mishaps has kept Arbosferrer from standing at al-Faw Palace in Baghdad’s Camp Liberty, where naturalization ceremonies are held, and taking the oath of allegiance. He dreams of that happening this summer before he leaves Iraq.
“I’m pretty thankful for everything I have in the United States,” he says. “I worked hard for it.”
Arbosferrer was born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, a city surrounded by sand and sea on the eastern end of the Caribbean island. His father owned a house on the beach and taught him diving and spearfishing.
In 1996, after his parents divorced, his mother, Ileana, immigrated to America with him and his sister Nancy.
He was only 15 then. His Hollywood visions of America were wiped out within seconds of his arrival at Miami’s airport. His grandfather, a retired construction worker, picked them up and drove them to his modest house.
Life was not easy. Arbosferrer ended up dropping out of school and marrying his girlfriend, Yajara, when he was only 17. They have three children.
When he joined the Georgia Army National Guard in 2005, Arbosferrer could not speak English. He learned the language in basic training.
The Army has given him a sense of accomplishment that might have eluded him otherwise, he says. It has given him the friends he lacked in Dalton.
But it has also put him in a precarious position. The United States has severed all relations with Cuba. As an American soldier, Arbosferrer knows he cannot go back to live there - not unless the political climate changes. In fact, he has not even told his family in Santiago of his military adventures.
“Nobody in Cuba knows,” he says. “I’m afraid of what they might do to my family.”
Not one for politics, Arbosferrer believes the Cuban government is manipulative and authoritarian. But he also thinks “it’s like any other government. If you mess with them, you will get crushed.”
Still, he misses the sound of the waves and the laughter of his boyhood friends.
He displays a small sticker of the Cuban flag on his Humvee windshield as proudly as he wears the Stars and Stripes on the right shoulder of his uniform.
On a mission out on the Syrian border, the rest of Arbosferrer’s platoon takes advantage of an afternoon lull to catch a quick nap or play a round of Yahtzee.
The young Cuban with the freckled face and clean-shaven head sits by himself on the hood of his truck. Slight in size compared with some of his platoon mates, Arbosferrer is quiet — he rarely talks about the life he left behind.
In his hands is a thick biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the iconic Latin American revolutionary executed in 1967 by the Bolivian army under the instructions of the United States.
“He’s one of my heroes,” he says of the man who eventually became the most famous face of Cuban communism. Cuban schools had their own agenda in their portrayal of Che. Arbosferrer wanted to make up his own mind. Next is the epic biography by Jon Lee Anderson.
“The Cubans put a twist on things,” he says. “I never trusted Cuban history. I’m not into communism, capitalism — any kind of politics.”
But after reading up on Che, Arbosferrer can say that he admires the revolutionary’s toughness and “who he was as a man.”
Ultimately, Arbosferrer believes, it is not country or ideology that builds character. It is the soldier within.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Reports from Iraq
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
