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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Minnesota Dreaming
Wednesday 14 July @ 16:26:24 |
 by Benjamin Malakoff
Since March 2003, almost 4,000 Minnesota soldiers have been deployed to the Middle East. Another 900 are slated to leave this summer and that many more will come home. So what’s it like for them?
Soldiers always seem to remember the date they signed up for duty, in the same way you remember your first kiss or the night your band first played live on stage. Ask one of them how he or she got into the Armed Forces, and he or she can’t tell you when they first wanted to be a soldier, but the date they enlisted is branded into their minds. Anthony Mielzarek remembers August 28th, 2001.
 The Minnesota Army National Guard specialist is one of about 900 soldiers from Minnesota who will begin a tour of duty in the Middle East in the first two weeks of June.
Since March 2003, about 1,900 Minnesota National Guard soldiers and an equal number of reserves have been deployed to the Middle East to fight in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom. About half of those Minnesota soldiers in the Middle East will return in the next six months. What’s it like for them?
For Mielzarek, this war is just a job. At 24, he says he’s in the Army for life and frequently says, “It’s always a good day to be a soldier.” He swears the others in his company would “give you the shirt off their back,” and seems to have only one personal issue with the war he is committed to being involved in: “You want to serve your country but you got other things going on as far as your own life at home,” Mielzarek said. “That stuff kind of has to be put on hold to do things that you may or may not agree with, depending on who you are.”
Mielzarek’s affair with the Army began, like many soldiers, in high school. His grades were too poor to gain him admission to college and his attempts at community college had failed. On a call with a college admissions officer, it was suggested that he join the military and then attend college after completing the first round of his training.
Three years later, the Stillwater native is about to ship out to Iraq, with a company that provides ground transportation from five-ton trucks on down to Chevy pickups. He was about to complete his junior year of college at Minnesota State University, Mankato when he was called up, and he hopes to complete a major in business and a minor in — you guessed it — military science when he returns.
As with their assignments, soldiers are not permitted to voice their personal opinions on military activity.
Mielzarek did say: “People will always be afraid of things that are different, and no one really likes war. No one wants to go to war. And families will miss soldiers and friends will miss soldiers but a lot of times people feel it’s a good thing.”
When asked to place himself on the political spectrum, Mielzarek replied: “What I am, I guess, is an American, and that’s pretty much how I see it.”
In the Armed Forces, the X-factor is assignments. Some go to Panama, Bosnia, Camp Ripley in Northern Minnesota, Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Florida, and, of course these days, the Middle East.
The assignment for Lieutenant Colonel Patrick O’Sullivan is to lead the Military Science department at Minnesota State University, Mankato. In that, he also heads the ROTC program there, a course of study that this year will produce nine commissioned officers by the end of the summer (O’Sullivan said the chance of those nine being deployed to assist U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are unknown).
ROTC programs are a feeder for the Armed Forces. While students who participate in it during their freshman and sophomore years are under no obligation to serve time, those who complete their junior and senior years leave school as officers and must enlist.
Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, O’Sullivan, a 21-year Army lifer, has noticed a change in the atmosphere of Mankato’s ROTC program.
“The emphasis on taking ROTC seriously goes up in a wartime environment because they know that come commissioning point, they are liable to be deployed,” O’Sullivan said.
O’Sullivan, a Florida native, said he has no close friends in the Middle East but does correspond through e-mail with an MSU ROTC grad who is now an infantry platoon leader in Iraq. The grad has been there for about nine months, an experience that has run the gamut of emotions. “Combat is a very stressful environment,” O’Sullivan said. “He’s under significant stress, but he has free time, downtime, to hop on the Internet.”
Sergeant First Class Roger White is the commanding officer at the Army Recruiting Center in Mankato. His office is nestled between Wilson’s Leather and Sears in a side hallway of Mankato’s River Hills Mall — which means a teenager can get a smoothie, a pair of pants and active duty in one trip.
White said enlistment at his station is at the same level as before the conflict in the Middle East began.
“I expected (enlistment) to stay about the same because I think that for every person that’s turned off by it, there’s somebody else that’s willing to step up and want to help,” White said.
As in MSU’s ROTC program, the mindset that Minnesota recruits have while signing up for the Armed Forces has changed. While O’Sullivan said participants are taking ROTC more seriously, White said new recruits are more conscious of what they’re getting into.
“I just think the people who are looking to enlist right off the street are more aware of what they’re enlisting for,” he said. White knows several people who are in the Middle East, including his brother in Afghanistan.
“He just sent me an e-mail on Saturday,” said White, who is the latest male in a long line from his family to serve in the Armed Forces. “He had just gotten done eating dinner and he sent me an e-mail to say ‘What’s up?’ So for some people, if you’re eating dinner and sending e-mails, it’s not so bad. But that’s one of the jobs that are like that and there are jobs over there that are not like that when they’re over there.”
If anything happens to his brother, White said he would continue to recruit for the Army.
The next step after an Army recruiter visits a high school is for those interested high school students to visit the recruiter. At that time, the students are treated to weapons showcases and shown drill and ceremony, which was what intrigued Joshua L. Tverberg when he was a junior in high school in 1998. At a recruiting station in Bloomington, he was fascinated by seeing soldiers take apart and re-assemble M-16 rifles.
He remembers January 23rd, 1998.
 A sergeant specialist for the Army Reserve, Tverberg recently returned from a six-month tour in Kuwait and Iraq. He was trained as a broadcast journalist by the Army and worked in the press center in Baghdad.
As a soldier who has returned from Iraq, he said he’s generally treated with respect, and in the veterans’ community he said he is treated the same as veterans from other wars. He admitted his job doesn’t have the same danger as someone on the front lines, but he is quick to mention that there are throngs of Army personnel supporting the ones who are on the front lines.
While speaking by phone last week from his family farm in Norwood Young America, Tverberg never came right out and gave his opinion on the conflict. He said he volunteered to go to the Middle East, he said, and he takes immense pride in what he did there.
“There’s not many people who can say they liberated a country, and I was there and I was part of that,” Tverberg said. “We made history. My kids will read about what we did in their history classes.”
Mielzarek is very aware of the opposition to the U.S.’s current military activity, to which he replies that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion — Tverberg also said each person is free to have his or her own view.
Minnesota Army National Guard Lt. Pete Demos, a platoon leader who returned three weeks ago from a year in Iraq, has a more rare opinion. Demos does not want people — in Minnesota, in America, in the world — to believe the war is good or bad. He wants recognition for the soldiers’ work in the effort to rebuild a country.
“One of my soldiers, they were on the cover of the Star Tribune two days ago,” Demos said. “There are pictures of the stuff (the soldiers) did bad, but where are all the pictures of us helping out the schools and the orphanages and the monasteries and stuff like that? Where are they? Nobody’s covering that.”
On the subject of the media, one Air Force Reservist who would not give his name said: “It’s not as bad as the media portrays it to be. It’s not a walk in the park, and some places the fighting’s really bad, but it’s not as bad.”
Greg Fenske, of Madelia, is a civilian who has two roommates associated with the Armed Forces: one in the Army Reserve, in Iraq, and another in the Air Force reserve who has not been called up. He said his roommate in Iraq is enjoying himself, and when they correspond he “says he’s bored and asks for porn.”
Demos came in the second wave of soldiers sent to Iraq, and his unit’s job was to set up communications for other units on the front line. But he is quick to point out that communications was only half of what his unit was intended to do, the second part being to rebuild the country. While in Iraq, his unit was stationed in Tikrit and Adwar, the town in which Saddam Hussein was captured.
In Adwar, Demos’ unit was in charge of rejuvenating an all-girls school. He said he and his men refurbished the classrooms, installed blackboards and desks and rounded up scores of supplies. Now at home in Burnsville and taking the summer off to fish with his two boys before going back to his career as an airline pilot, Demos said he and his soldiers got more respect from people in Iraq than in the United States.
The unit Demos commanded encountered fighting from time to time. He remembered watching out for Improvised Explosive Devices on trips along desert roads, as wel as occasional fighting. He also said, as most soldiers do, that Iraq can get as hot as 129 degrees.
“It was actually —it was very challenging,” Demos said. “It was challenging in the fact of surviving the hot weather and handling the enemy, but also challenging with having the secondary mission of trying to rebuild the community that we were a part of.”
Tverberg got his 15 minutes of fame while in Iraq. You wouldn’t recognize him, especially if he’s not in uniform, but you’d remember what got him his star turn: He tossed the first pitch, via Satellite, for the Minnesota Twins home opener last season. Five other soldiers, all from Minnesota, joined Tverberg onscreen for the ceremony, and the pitch was broadcast across the Midwest.
Tverberg’s pitch was part of a patriotic show the Twins wanted to put on that included a video collage of images from Iraq and the Army’s 34th Infantry Division Band. The ceremony received a standing ovation. But, soldiers said, it is much more common for them to encounter people opposed to the war.
“I hear lots of different things as far as people talking and things like that,” Mielzarek said. “I feel that this is just part of my duty and when people try to come down on that, I basically just say, ‘It’s my duty. It’s my job, and that’s what I do.’”
Tverberg said: “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion and I just let them know what my opinion is. I’ve been there. They most likely haven’t. I just tell them that after seeing the things and talking to the people, it was just something that had to be done. Weapons of mass destruction or not, that was just one reason to go in. What these people and their families had to go through, they had to be stopped.”
Many soldiers insisted the Iraqi people want them to stay.
“Their biggest fear is for us to pull out,” Demos said.
Tverberg also said that the affability of the Iraqis, whom he called “cordial” people,” is something the media leave out when reporting from Iraq.
 Lt. Col. Mike Walton had an interesting task in Iraq — his eighth deployment in 10 years — he said at his office in Fort Snelling.
According to Walton, a U.S. official decided two weeks before he arrived in Kuwait that journalists should be embedded into every unit in the theater.
“Instead of having the military dispense the war, like a “Wag the Dog” thing,” Walton said in reference to the movie about a government-fabricated war, “you have these journalists who actually go and do those stories, take those pictures.”
After landing in Kuwait, Walton’s unit, which included Tverberg, was given 48 hours to set up in the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. They stayed there for two and a half months, accrediting, educating, training and embedding journalists into active units, while also handling public affairs for other agencies that shared their space. After Kuwait, Walton’s unit moved into Baghdad, right after the 3rd Infantry Division swept through the city near the end of combat. He said there were burnt buildings, body parts, children looking for food in the streets. He speculated that it’s worse now than it was then. He worked out of Saddam’s presidential palace and assisted an ambassador, among other tasks in his unit’s three and a half months there.
Originally from Kentucky, Walton was pleased to return to his post in St. Paul and he said his turning over of his public affairs position in a few weeks is long overdue. When he returned from Iraq, he said leaving his unit was like leaving a family.
Most of the young Minnesotans continue to support, or at least not question, the war. But some older veterans say that returning soldiers often tend to support wars, and only years later begin to question.
“When they start to turn against war, or if they change their minds at all, depends in part on what they saw of the war,” said William Wolf, a Vietnam veteran in Minneapolis. “Some people never see the atrocities, and on some people the propaganda works better. It took years for what I had seen to sink in.”
Tverberg gave a speech at a Memorial Day ceremony to a group that specifically requested a veteran of the Iraq war. He guessed that the collection of former soldiers from the World Wars, Vietnam, the first Gulf war and other conflicts wanted to hear from an Operation Iraqi Freedom vet to provide another perspective.
“I think they just want to ask questions,” Tverberg said. “I met with the guy in charge and he said it will probably be just a lot of questions.”
Many of these young Minnesotans, who went to war out of idealism, believe they have easy answers. But for others, as the occupation drags on, the questions are just beginning.
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