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Posted on 04/11/2003 9:15:15 AM PDT by knighthawk
Nikki Johnson doesn't like to hear the conflict is almost over -- not with her sister a prisoner of the Iraqis
FORT BLISS, Tex. - The Iraqis, giddy with the first breath from under the yoke, were properly jubilant: They, after all, have a country to build.
But for the ordinary Americans who make work, tend, staff and feed their young to the great military machine which -- whatever else it has done or may yet do to varying degrees of world approval -- will give the Iraqis that glorious chance, the dramatic fall of Baghdad yesterday was greeted with bone-weary pragmatism.
This too was fitting, because these people, after all, know the cost of war.
It is doubtful whether any other single place in the United States has contributed or suffered more in this one than Fort Bliss, the sprawling base that sits in the shadow of the Franklin Mountains here and was once best-known as the proud home of the Patriot Missile, but is now recognized first as the post of that sad little group known as the 507th Maintenance Company, whose members were ambushed on March 23 near Nasiriya.
The 507th -- part of the 4,500 men and women who have gone to Iraq from Fort Bliss since the American Thanksgiving, more than a third of the base's full complement -- was never meant to be anywhere near combat, nor were its members equipped for it.
They are the army's fixers -- truck and heavy equipment repairmen, mechanics, supply specialists, and, oh yes, cooks, who were theoretically twice-removed from the front lines because they were cooking not for combat troops, but for those who were merely keeping the combat troops rolling forward.
Yet what happened to the 507th, and it is not entirely clear yet why they were where they were without combat support, provides a sterling illustration both of the dangerousness of war for all its participants and of the practised sorrowful equanimity with which it is accepted here.
What is certain is that the unit lost nine members, though it took days before most of the deaths were confirmed by the military, and had five more taken prisoner (one, Private First Class Jessica Lynch, was later daringly rescued on April 1) and promptly paraded on Iraqi state television, the footage later shown across the world.
One of those whose frightened faces were shown on television was a 30-year-old woman named Shoshana (Shana) Johnson. Specialist Johnson is a cook, the single mom of a darling two-year-old girl named Janelle.
Specialist Johnson hails from an Army family: Her dad, Claude, is a veteran of the first Gulf War; two uncles and a pair of cousins are also in the military; an aunt is a former Air Force nurse; and her baby sister, Nikki, served six months in Kuwait as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, just completed officers' training school and is now awaiting her own posting at Fort Bliss.
Nikki is a captain, and an army quartermaster, and for all that she has questions about how her sister came to be on the front lines, and rues the lack of official information coming to the family about Shana's whereabouts, it has not put a dent in her own mettle.
"I understand the need for a military," she said yesterday at her parents' lovely house in an El Paso subdivision called Cooperstown, after the city that is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame. "I don't have to agree with every single part of every operation, but I understand the necessity. I don't want my sister to be a POW, but that comes with a wartime situation."
She also has an inkling, she says, of why Shana may have been delegated to be in the convoy. "She's older than most of the others in the unit," Nikki said, "and sometimes, you may just want two responsible people in a vehicle, and maybe somebody grabbed her to do something like that. She's a responsible individual." Nikki also believes that Shana has the mental fortitude to get through her captivity.
"Nothing could prepare anyone for this [being a POW]," she said, "and if this was a draft situation, where all she'd had was basic training, it would be different. But she's had experience being away from her family, experience with difficult living conditions. I think she has what it takes."
Nikki herself has been away from her own daughter, who is almost two. She left for her posting in Kuwait when her little girl was only seven months, and it just about tore out her heart. She doesn't plan on making the military a career for that very reason, and nor did her sister. "She wants to be a chef," Nikki said. "A lot of people who want to be chefs become Army cooks, though I don't know how many of them get to do it."
She wouldn't discuss her personal views of the rightness of the war in Iraq, saying only that it is a variable, and "depends on if you know you're doing a good thing for that country." But she was fiercely outspoken about those who protest it. "People have the right to protest the war," she said, "but once it starts, they should remember they can say this crap because we have soldiers who do go and fight, and they don't do that."
Her sentiments, and the enormous "Bring Shoshana Home" banner hung over her parents' garage, are echoed in the yellow ribbons and bows found on virtually every house near the base and on the marquees of most schools and businesses and tied to car bumpers. The big plastic ones can be had from the K-Mart for 99¢, and lest you think this is trivial, it is not, for soldiers are notoriously impecunious (a private with eight years in yesterday told me, rather proudly, that he earns $1,500 a month, or about $18,000 a year), even those from the richest nation on the planet, and their families could not afford even this tender show of remembrance if the price-point was higher.
What would be deemed a jingoistic bumper-sticker cliché in some parts of the world and even in the United States -- "Freedom isn't free," as the sign outside the Capt. John Chapin High School reads -- carries a certain terrible heft here.
Proof comes in the flights that return home with the wounded, 47 of them arriving at an air base in another part of the state yesterday.
And it is in the El Paso Times every day. The paper, like hometown newspapers across this country, has a spanking new column called "Casualties," which keeps a running count of the dead, the missing and the captured, and which yesterday featured eight shiny faces of the dead (the oldest was 25), eight names of those who had been identified as missing but are now known to be dead (the oldest was 26), and seven POWs (the oldest 31).
The loss is felt most acutely on the base itself. It even looks bereft: The great warehouses once full of equipment have none now; dust blows up in the huge lots where the big trucks and armoured vehicles were parked and in vast parade squares; along Cassidy Boulevard, the little bungalow headquarters of various deployed units (the 108th, the 31st, the 35th, the 11th among them) sit idle. Even Sheridan Road, called Colonels Row because it's where the brass gets to live in beautiful homes with verandahs, is quiet.
The new three-storey, brown and beige barracks at the corner of Chaffe Road and Stennis Street where the single men and women of Echo Battery lived in Building 2471 is unoccupied and unremarkable; only a small sign announces it's the home of the 507th Maintenance Company.
The busiest people now at Fort Bliss are the PAOs, public affairs officers, readying for a media crush at a memorial service tomorrow for the dead of the 507th who will not be returning to their rooms, and the base chaplains left to comfort their friends.
The only busy place for months now has been the fancy new deployment centre, where, unit by unit, the young men and women have gathered with their families before heading off to war, and then walked on to planes and into an abyss.
It works like this. A unit gets its orders, and then the soldiers receive their SRPs, an acronym for Soldier Readiness Process, whereby, sometimes within a day, they go through the vast amount of paperwork that armies adore, making sure they are leaving with a clean slate -- that their financial affairs are in order; that their wills and powers-of-attorney are complete; that guardians are in place if they have children; that they have filled out their DD-93s, the form that notes their next-of-kin for notification purposes; and that they receive any religious items, such as rosaries or a Bible, they may wish to take with them. That's how you build a soldier, and a cook, it turns out: You tell them they may well die, or be injured, and that they had better head off with their lives in place, and nothing important left unsaid.
No one knows if it works, because the only people who would know don't come back.
I asked Nikki Johnson how her parents were coping. "They turn on the TV as soon as they get home from work," she said. "I try not to watch too much, because they always say, 'They're moving closer' or 'The war is almost over,' and all I can think is, if the war is almost over, where is my sister?"
cblatchford@nationalpost.com
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