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Noor’s odyssey full of promise and peril
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Curtis Compton/AJC
Host mom Nancy and Noor partake in their daily ritual of "girl talk" in front of a mirror. • Photos
Only the women were home when Charlie Company soldiers began to search the house in Abu Ghraib, a town just west of Baghdad where gunfire and bombs are commonplace. The family matriarch, Soad, answered their questions.
Do you know anyone involved in insurgent activity? Are you aware of any criminals in the area? Have you ever been coerced by anyone?
The infantrymen were on routine patrol that December day, the kind they had conducted since arriving in Iraq seven months earlier. Yet the random nature of Iraq’s war meant even the routine could go badly awry.
The soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team listened as an interpreter translated Soad’s answers. In Abu Ghraib, home to the notorious prison, years of Saddam Hussein’s ironfisted rule and months of the insurgency had taken its toll.
Suspicion filled the room.
This was not Soad’s first encounter with Americans. She’d seen a neighbor struck by a bullet meant for suspected insurgents. She’d watched an American tank run over a kiosk that soldiers had built for her and neighbors to use as a market.
And her eldest son, Bashar, had twice been detained by U.S. soldiers — first for a day or so on suspicion of firing a rocket-propelled grenade, and then again, just days before Charlie Company knocked on her door. She asked the Georgians to help her find him.
As the Gainesville-based soldiers turned to go, Soad made a bold request.
In the dimly lit family room, she showed Sgt. Nicholas Jelks her grandchild, Noor al-Zahra, a baby with big brown eyes who was not yet 3 months old. Soad turned the baby over to reveal a tumor-like growth covering her back.
Why don’t you do something about her instead of bothering the innocent? Soad asked.
Jelks turned to Pfc. Justin Donnelly, a teenage medic known as “Doc” who carried a digital camera on every patrol.
With a few clicks of the camera, counterinsurgency gave way to compassion. An ordinary mission three weeks before Christmas set off a chain of events that would capture hearts around the world.
The soldiers learned the Iraqi infant had spina bifida, a birth defect that would kill her if left untreated. Their effort to save Baby Noor, as she would come to be known, was a heartwarming tale of American generosity. It seemed like an unequivocal victory plucked from the chaos of combat.
Yet, doubt lurked — on both sides. In a country of bloodshed and pervasive fear, even the noblest of deeds don’t always meet with happy endings.
The soldiers’ chance encounter set an ordinary Iraqi family on a tumultuous journey to Atlanta that made news around the world, from CNN to Iraqi TV. No one could know what would happen after the media spotlight faded.
The soldiers saved a baby’s life. Yet their humanitarian mission also unleashed forces that would endanger her family — and lead to yet another bombing near Baghdad.
Compelled to help
In Iraq, trust is a word fading from the average vocabulary.
“One day they could be your friend; the next day they wanted to kill you,” said Sgt. 1st Class Michael Sonen, who led many of Charlie Company’s civil affairs missions, about the residents in Abu Ghraib.
Still, soldiers listened as Soad told them that Iraqi doctors called Noor “lame” and a “reject,” a baby who probably would live only 40 more days. This was a traditional society in the developing world that often views children with handicaps, especially girls, as liabilities.
Charlie Company soldiers returned to Baghdad’s Camp Liberty with photographs of the baby. First Lt. Jeff Morgan persuaded Army doctor Maj. Susan Robinson to visit the house and examine Noor.
“My reaction was, ‘This kid’s going to die unless we do something,’ ” Morgan said. “I’ve got five kids. No way I can imagine having medical care out there for my kids and not be able to access it.”
As a soldier and a “Christian in the combat zone,” Morgan said he felt compelled to do what he thought was right by helping Noor. Now, six months later, given repercussions Noor’s family has faced, it seems less clear-cut.
“There was never really any discussion about what would happen after Noor got treatment,” Morgan said. “Maybe it was right. Maybe it was wrong.”
Tensions mount in Iraq
Noor’s mother, Iman, was only 19, and the family thought Soad would be more capable of handling a trip to America. Soad said she could not travel unaccompanied by a male relative and decided her son, Noor’s father, Haider, also should go.
In late December, Charlie Company commander Capt. Anthony Fournier sent soldiers to fetch Noor and her guardians and bring them back to the base near Baghdad’s airport.
Fournier said that saving Baby Noor gave a tangible sense of success to soldiers who sometimes felt they were fighting without purpose. Even so, suspicion lingered.
A soldier guarding Noor’s trailer leapt from his chair when Haider emerged with a cellphone one day. Insurgents often use mobile phones to detonate makeshift bombs, the top killer of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Back in Abu Ghraib, the family worried, too. Neighbors warned that insurgents might target the family if it accepted help from the Americans. Soad’s husband and other relatives tried to dissuade her from taking Noor to Atlanta. The family also worried about lacking the means to provide for the lifetime of medical care Noor would need. Army doctors predicted that even with surgery, Noor would not gain the use of her legs. Noor’s home sits on a corner of two unpaved roads strewn with trash and stained with sewage the color of anti-freeze — not the best place for a child in a wheelchair.
Sending Noor to America, though, meant choosing life over death.
“I had hope there was a future for her,” Soad said.
A few days before leaving, she had second thoughts. She told a soldier that she worried about Haider’s safety in the United States. Maybe she and Haider would run into an American whose relative had been killed in Iraq. Maybe that American would seek revenge by killing her son.
You’re going to be pleasantly surprised, the soldier said.
Arrival in Atlanta
The media followed Noor in Baghdad and awaited her at the Atlanta airport.
Reporters scribbled notes. Camera flashes fired. Spectators clapped for Soad and Haider, their faces obscured by scarves and dark glasses.
Dr. Roger Hudgins, chief of neurosurgery at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, pledged to donate his services by operating on Noor.
“Obviously good works happen every day in Iraq, and good works happen with the soldiers,” he said. “We hear all of the negative. It’s about time, I think, that we have the opportunity to hear some of the good.”
The celebrity baby’s story emphasized U.S. contributions in Iraq at a time of sagging popularity for the war at home.
Sponsored by Childspring International, a Christian nonprofit group that brings sick children to Atlanta for medical care they cannot get in their native countries, Noor was examined at Children’s Healthcare, a state-of-the-art hospital that treats cancer, blood disorders and orthopedic problems.
The hospital contrasted sharply with clinics in Abu Ghraib. One near Noor’s house had filthy terrazzo floors, shattered windows and just three shelves of medicine from the black market or U.S. military.
Now Noor was receiving care in one of the world’s most medically advanced countries. Kevin McClelland, spokesman for Children’s Healthcare, estimated that Noor received $85,000 in hospital services during her stay in Atlanta. He said that does not include doctors’ fees or support services such as social workers or interpreters.
On Jan. 9, an hour after doctors performed the first of several operations, Hudgins entered Room 137 to tell Noor’s grandmother and father that all went well.
“From her first days,” Soad said. “Noor has been very strong.”
“She is very strong because her family is very strong,” Hudgins said.
Soad asked Hudgins if Noor would ever walk. The surgeon paused. He previously had told Noor’s family that the baby would grow up in a wheelchair, as a paraplegic for life, but they yearned for a miracle.
“I’m not here to take away hope,” Hudgins said, “but time will tell.”
Modern-day marvels
Doctors wanted Noor to remain in Atlanta until she was medically fit to go home.
Soad, Haider and Noor settled into a routine with two host families that Childspring arranged. The families opened suburban homes, took their visitors to the Varsity restaurant and Georgia Aquarium and accompanied Noor and her relatives to medical appointments.
At a Kroger in Alpharetta, Soad and Haider marveled at small jets spraying a light mist onto bok choy and savoy cabbage. It was much different from the family’s consignment shop in Abu Ghraib’s market, where flies descend on open bowls of olives and freshly slaughtered chickens and sheep.
Haider stretched his arms to show that their store was smaller than a stainless steel compartment Kroger stocked with soy milk and organic yogurt.
Between doctor appointments, Noor and her family spent long hours in the home of Nancy and Edward Turner, who assumed host-family duties in the second month of their stay. Soad and Haider doted on Noor and listened to Arabic music while the Turners were at work. Haider marveled at a central vacuum system, sipped strong chai tea and played dominoes with Edward. Some evenings, Soad cooked lamb and rice. Nancy showed her how to use a treadmill. She dyed Soad’s hair with burgundy Revlon coloring that Soad had chosen.
Trips to the hospital brought good news. Doctors were pleased with Noor’s progress.
Yet Soad was anxious on the phone to Iraq. Sometimes, the tears flowed.
She missed her husband and the shop. She missed the birth of another grandchild. She had been in charge of her family of six girls and three boys. Without her, decisions were often difficult. She said she was willing to stay until doctors told her Noor was well enough to go home.
Then the phone rang one night in March. There was trouble in Abu Ghraib.
Danger on the homefront
Soad gave this account of what her son Bashar told her in that call:
Someone had blown up the family’s store. The bombers left a note criticizing the family for helping Americans. The note asserted that Soad and Haider did not really go to the United States to seek medical care for Noor. It also said Bashar had not been detained by U.S. soldiers but had been working secretly with them.
The attackers threatened to blow up the family home unless Soad and Haider came back.
The U.S. Army says it’s difficult to confirm Soad’s account because it handed over control of that area of Abu Ghraib to the Iraqi army in January. But Soad said the call prompted her to make a wrenching decision.
She and Haider would go home and leave Noor with Nancy and Edward, at least until doctors said it was safe for the baby to travel.
In late March, Soad and Haider boarded a plane with help from Childspring, an agency with four employees that had never handled a high-profile case involving threats of retaliation.
“I couldn’t take Noor back without finishing her care,” Soad said later from Iraq. “I couldn’t lose my family either.”
Soad and Haider avoided their house in Abu Ghraib, staying at first with relatives in a safer neighborhood. Worried that insurgents would strike, Haider went into hiding. Soad struggled to find money.
Childspring sent her home with $10,000. Without an income, Soad said she has been using that money to pay for living expenses and repay people to whom she owed money for items on consignment at her store. She said she needs at least $30,000 more to get her family’s life back in order: $10,000 to rebuild the store and $20,000 to restock the inventory and repay her debts.
“This definitely has something to do with our association with the Americans,” she said about her perils in a phone interview last month. “Everyone here knows who we are.”
When Soad and Bashar returned to Abu Ghraib one day to collect belongings, men in Iraqi army uniforms showed up and accused Bashar of cooperating with insurgents.
Soad knew insurgents and sectarian militias often kidnap people by posing as soldiers. Many people whisked off that way turn up dead, signs of torture on their bodies. Yet people like Bashar have few good choices. It is hard to say no to men with guns.
The men in military uniforms put Bashar and a brother-in-law into a truck. They drove off.
A family divided
Soad lost track of her eldest son but eventually heard about an Iraqi army unit with a record of him in detention. Haider remains in hiding.
“It’s difficult for me to be optimistic,” Soad said.
Lt. Col. Kevin Brown, commander of a 10th Mountain Division unit to which Charlie Company had been attached, said in an e-mail last week that he could not confirm Noor’s family had been targeted, but that they had been “clearly threatened … for the medical assistance provided for their child.”
He said the family has never expressed views that are hostile to or in favor of U.S. forces.
“The only association they have had is in doing what any parent would do and that is seek out the best medical assistance possible for their child,” Brown said.
Brown said the Iraqi army and fledgling police can provide “adequate/effective security to the family.”
Meanwhile, Noor has grown into a smiling 9-month-old baby who loves baths and sleeps through the night.
Several days ago, after doctors gave her a clean bill of health, Childspring sent Noor home with the help of lawmakers in Washington and the U.S. military. This time, because of security concerns, no cameras greeted her at airports.
Donnelly, the medic who first photographed Noor, was among the soldiers who took the baby back to her home Wednesday.
An uncertain future
Childspring has discussed Noor’s condition with a team of doctors in Baghdad — a neurologist, a urologist, a pediatrician and an orthopedist. The group sent Noor home with catheters and shunts like the one placed in her brain to drain fluids. As she grows, she probably will require surgery again.
Soad knows her granddaughter, saddled with a lifetime of visits to doctors, probably never will have access to the kind of medical care she received in Atlanta. Robinson, the Army doctor who examined Noor in December, said she believed Soad “would go the extra mile” for Noor’s follow-up care.
“A lot of her quality of life will depend on how motivated her family is,” Robinson said in a recent e-mail from Baghdad. “They described taking her to several places to get a diagnosis and were willing to take her to the United States.
“A normal life in Iraq is certainly different from a normal life in the U.S.,” she said. “We have witnessed many people in Iraq with disabilities, and they seem to carry on with what they consider to be normal.”
For their efforts to save Noor, Charlie Company soldiers recently received two humanitarian awards — from the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and the Anne Frank Center in New York. A few days ago, the Spina Bifida Association paid them tribute.
As the soldiers accept accolades, Noor’s family braces for an uncertain future.
Soad said she believes she did the right thing by taking her granddaughter to America. She dreams about visiting again the nation that saved Iraq from Saddam Hussein, the country of medical miracles, where anything is possible, but she can’t bear to leave her beloved homeland behind forever.
Soad worries about Noor and about her family’s fate.
She worries about Iraq. She wonders how it will all turn out.
Baby Noor returns home to Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ben Gray/AJC
Baby Noor, brought to Atlanta for life-saving medical care, was delivered to her home in Abu Ghraib by the U.S. Army this week.
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
Frank Niemeir/AJC
Jeremy Mays holds daughter Lilian, 1, at his home in Canton on Friday, while his wife, April, holds daughter, Kathleen, 2.
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
Kimberly Smith/AJC
Amanda Hickman (top) of Rome, Ga., gives her husband, Specialist Jeremy Hickman a tearful hug. Sgt. Ian Carter of Decatur bids farewell to Caddock, his 6-month-old son.
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.
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Subject: Two forces Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ and the American G. I. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom. Thank them both.... read the full comment by Good E-mail Message | Comment on Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril Read Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril
Good job,48th. Y’all rock - we are so proud of you! Yikes... read the full comment by Momma Kat Orr | Comment on Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril Read Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril
I am proud of the 48th and the job they did, especially helping baby Noor, and the other good deeds you did. GOD’s spirit dewells in you all.... read the full comment by bubba9 | Comment on Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril Read Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril
It is not this childs fault.. Yes, we should look at where we live too, but these guys/ gals were not here at the time. They were in Iraq, doing a job. They didn’t see an evil child or a family that was shooting at them.. They sow a child in dieing... read the full comment by Jeannie | Comment on Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril Read Noor's odyssey full of promise and peril