CALLED TO DUTY

Ledger-Enquirer ^ | September 11, 2004 | MICK WALSH

[AmericanMade1776]

Navina Prasad had to deal with death and destruction long before his Fort Benning unit was shipped to Iraq last year.

The 28-year-old Army specialist, a member of the 63rd Engineer Co., a heavy equipment construction outfit, spent the early months of Operation Iraqi Freedom at the Talil Airport.

One of the war's earliest battles took place at An Nasiriyah, just outside Talil, as soldiers from the 3rd Brigade stormed their way toward Baghdad.

Prasad, though, wasn't actively involved in the fighting. "It was all construction work," he said. "Hot construction work."

But clinging like dust to his desert BDUs was the painful memory of why he was in Iraq in the first place.

"It's something I cannot get out of my mind," said the native New Yorker, who was making his rounds as a mortgage consultant on Sept. 11, 2001, when the world as he knew it was turned upside down.

The son of immigrants from Guyana, Prasad had grown up in Queens. Six years earlier, he had joined a local National Guard unit to, as he says, repay the U.S. for all it had given his family.

His wife, Sarah, was eight days away from delivering the couple's first child when Prasad saw the smoke arising from what until that morning had been the World Trade Center.

[AmericanMade1776]

Part 2)The radio told me a plane had hit the Twin Towers," he recounted. "I was in Manhattan at the time and tried to drive as close to the scene as possible. But everything had stopped. New York was at a standstill."

Prasad rushed home to Queens to be with his wife, who was scared and nervous. "We didn't know what to expect. We felt we'd gone to war."

He wasn't far off.

Within a day or two, his Guard unit was activated. And he was assigned to the clean-up detail at the World Trade Center area.

The 31 days that followed would haunt Prasad for years.

"It was terrible work," he said this week from the comfortable north Columbus home he shares with his wife, daughter, Alicia, and infant son, Daniel. "Uncovering body parts was the worst. There was this dead pregnant lady and all I could think of was my pregnant wife back home in Queens. Most of the things I saw I find very difficult to talk about."

Adding to his despair was the fact that two people from his neighborhood were killed in the attack.

Prasad felt frustrated that he couldn't do more than clean up the horrific mess that the terrorists had left.

So he volunteered to go on active duty.

"I wanted to be a part of the war on terror," he said.

And a part of it he was when the 63rd, part of Fort Benning's 36th Engineer Group, was deployed to the Gulf early in 2003.

The engineers are expected to make a return trip to Iraq either later this year or early next. But they'll go without Prasad.

His tour of duty is up later this month.

"I haven't decided if I want to go back to New York when I separate or stay here and look for a job," he said. "Know anybody that's hiring engineers?"

Prasad said the third anniversary of 9/11 is really no different than any of the days between then and now. "It's on my mind every day. It never leaves."