Soldiering On

There are many roles to play and unfamiliarities to face as U.S. military personnel serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, some University of Illinois alumni and students tell their tales — both on the front and back at home.

 

By Dave Evensen

Lt. Col. Daniel Bruzzini transports a child of U.S. military parents for heart surgery. The neonatologist and his medical training team helped local Afghans reduce high infant mortality rates.

It’s hard to know precisely the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the University of Illinois.

 Some estimates say there are up to 1,000 veterans on campus, but the true number is murky.

Administrators know that 596 students on campus applied for Illinois veteran benefits this spring; unknown is the number of campus veterans who didn’t apply or who drew their benefits elsewhere.

Benefits records do not distinguish between those student veterans who served in the wars and those who didn’t.

Also unknown is the number of active duty and veteran alumni.

Even if they were all accounted for, however, numbers are just a small part of the picture. Family, friends, counselors and others learn that many war veterans are reluctant to share their experience and how it’s reshaped their lives. Perhaps they feel it’s simply time to move on. Others are trying to forget.

Yet there are also those veterans – and those who work to help them – who provide a glimmer of understanding to what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan: In the battle for hearts and minds, you lay your own on the line.

The Art of War

Katie Maglia is an art student at the U of I. She’s also a firefighter with the Air Force National Guard. The war has brought her two worlds together. Since enrolling at the University, the Tinley Park native – though only 22 – has deployed twice to Iraq.

The staff sergeant is the youngest in her firefighting unit (part of the 183rd Fighter Wing out of Springfield) and the only woman. Her fellow soldiers treat her well, but Iraq is a hard life. In her second tour, she was stationed at Baghdad International Airport, where her unit made 500 emergency runs in 140 days.

They cleaned hazmat spills and extinguished aircraft fires. Then there was the stuff that haunted her sleep. According to Maglia, there was an orphanage on base, packed with kids. When insurgents hit it with rockets, she was one of the first to arrive. Maglia is unable to talk about it at length to this day.

Heavy cement blast walls sheltered her unit during attacks. The fortifications were lifesavers. They were also ugly as heck, all the same dull color, all unchanging – much like the brown landscape, the eternally cloudless sky and her daily schedule. Her inner artist revolted.

She obtained permission to paint the walls. Working with a ladder and with materials sent by her mother, UI faculty and fellow students, Maglia made several large murals, ranging from the interpretive to the symbolic, including one that featured Chief Illiniwek, the former symbol of the University of Illinois. She felt obligated to paint murals for alumni of other schools, including rival ones. Maglia even gritted her teeth and painted a big, yellow “M” for the guys from Michigan.

“My mom had a big problem with that,” says Maglia, laughing. (Both of her parents – Kenneth Maglia ’81 ENG and Mary Ann Niemcyzk Maglia ’80 ACES – are UI alumni.)

Back on campus with plans for a military career, Maglia creates art that reflects Iraq. She works to debunk misconceptions about the war. In one project, she’s painting images on ceramic tiles – a common material in Iraq – of scenic places she’d photographed in the country during her deployments.

When she’s done, she plans to smash them symbolically with a rock.

“I’ll try to have the tile shatter, not so you can’t recognize them but to represent all the beautiful things that have been destroyed,” Maglia says.

“You’d still be able to tell what it was, but they would not be whole and perfect any more.”

Lessons Learned

Arnold Marks ’64 LAS, MSW ’66, is a listener. In his work, he knows the alternative. The clinical social worker was a mental health professional in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

“We sent them off to war in a very conflicted and ambivalent time in our country, and then when they came back, we said, ‘Thank you,’ and then left them to their own devices,” Marks recalls of Vietnam veterans. “Many of them have led shattered lives, fractured career paths, domestic violence, drugs, substance abuse.

“And we were determined – the military calls it ‘lessons learned’ – not to do the same thing with this generation of soldiers.”

Marks, 66, owns a private practice in Dallas and has devoted countless hours – including several times a month volunteering for a group called Give an Hour – to counsel U.S. service members and their families. He meets them in casual spots like bowling alleys to talk about serious stuff. If they open up, he’ll suggest simple solutions to problems or, if their troubles run deeper, recommend further care.

Members of the 33rd Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois Army National Guard take a moment to "send a big shout-out to Bruce Weber and the Illini on another job well done." They were in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 24, just hours after the Fighting Illini men's basketball team defeated Missouri in the annual Bragging Rights game. "The teams were all prepped for the day's missions," said Maj. Stan Manes '88 las, kneeling in front, "so I snatched them up prior to them rolling." Headquartered in Urbana, the team assists the Afghan National Police in Kabul Province

Some suffer post-traumatic stress disorder or lingering battlefield anxieties. Repeated tours are hard, Marks says, and yet he’s seen Marines who have served as many as five seven-month tours. Readjusting to civilian life can be difficult – families have learned to live their daily routines without their soldiers, and days can seem terribly disorganized.

“Over there in chow hall ... you don’t ask what’s on the menu,” Marks says. “You come back to America, and you go to eat whenever you want, you have 152 restaurants within three blocks of you, and they sometimes have a great deal of difficulty making these choices.”

On the UI campus, counselors recently started Boots to Books, a group to help veterans adjust to student life. A year into the effort, facilitator Ted Bonar, a Counseling Center specialist (another facilitator, student Stephenie Austin ’07, has since deployed to Afghanistan), realizes the wide scope of issues that war
veterans face.

“When they come to school after being in the military, there’s a culture shock to it. Feeling comfortable and feeling like you belong here can be a real challenge,” Bonar says. Juxtaposed with young students just coming of age during their college years, “there are people on campus,” he says, “who have been in combat.”

Baghdad Education

In fall 2006, one of the best defenses against insurgents for American convoys in Iraq was movement. Shoot back, but don’t stop moving. Now and then, however, you had to. That was how U.S. Marine Capt. Melvin Burch ’04 ED met Uson.

Burch distributed supplies to lots of children during his stops, but Uson was different. The boy, maybe age 5, approached the convoy one day when it stopped in Ramadi, not far from where Burch had seen a child killed by insurgent gunfire. Uson knew just one word of English: football.

The 34-year-old Burch, a father of one, took an instant liking to the boy. Later, when his convoy stopped in the same neighborhood, out came Uson, his bare feet caked with mud from a rainstorm. This time, Burch handed him a soccer ball.

“If you could have seen the smile on his face when I pulled that soccer ball out of the back of my vehicle, it was worth the risk we took just being in that neighborhood,” Burch recalls.

Burch’s platoon completed that tour without losing a single person. The children had left their mark on him, however, and during his second tour (in 2007), he and a Navy chaplain founded Hearts for Baghdad – Books for Baghdad, which acknowledged cultural connections through reading and provided a safe reading environment for children. During his down time, Burch, who majored in elementary education at the U of I, would read books written in both English and Arabic, such as Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” to the kids.

“It was exciting,” Burch recalls, “seeing what’s going on with the kids, who were not worrying about being in a combat environment, but being where they’re secure.”

For that and other youth efforts he led back in the United States, Burch received the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal in 2008. He still volunteers to teach kids where he’s stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, but he keeps photos posted of those children he met halfway around the world. Nothing, Burch says, is quite like a hug from an Iraqi child.

Echoes of War

Champaign-Urbana in no way resembles Fallujah. James Kubisiak, 23, can attest to that. But echoes of the violent Iraqi city still follow him even two semesters into his freshman year on campus.

The former Marine never sleeps more than three or four hours a night, unless he takes medication, which he doesn’t like to do too often. Crowds make him nervous. In class he sits near the back. “If there’s people behind me, it throws me off,” Kubisiak says. “It’s a weird thing. It’s nothing I do consciously.”

The Antioch native joined the Marines after high school and served two tours in Iraq. One day in April 2007, during his second tour, a roadside bomb near Fallujah killed two members of Kubisiak’s squad (one died instantly, the other a few days later) and seriously injured the squad leader. In a flash, Kubisiak was the new leader of a squad now down to five members.

The next day, insurgents struck again, this time hitting Kubisiak’s Humvee. He felt the vehicle drop and then saw debris on the windshield. Kubisiak wasn’t hurt, but two others were. He extracted one from the wreckage and kept him conscious on the trip to the hospital. The man lived but lost a leg.

Afterward, Kubisiak began feeling a “creeping” fear before missions. He withdrew. His long problem with sleep commenced.

“It warps your mind,” he says. “You really zone out of the reality of what could happen. You just go to your happy place [in your mind], I guess. I tried not to think about what could happen.”

After his discharge in 2008, Kubisiak enrolled at Illinois. His tuition and living expenses are paid for through the military, and he’s a morning DJ at WPGU, the student radio station. He’s let his hair grow, and upon reflection, Kubisiak thinks that America has stayed in Iraq for too long. Still, he blames his trouble concentrating in class partly on a feeling that school pales in importance next to what he’s already done. He also blames a lack of sleep.

Kubisiak sounds optimistic, however. Time heals, he says. He tries not to think about Fallujah or the possibility of being called back to active duty. A self-described longtime loner, he doesn’t anticipate asking for help. He doesn’t feel counselors can relate.

“It might be an ego issue, it might be a pride issue. It might be something I just don’t feel like doing. I don’t know. It’s a mishmash of things,” Kubisiak says. “In the military you’re told to suck it up and keep going. And then someone comes and tells you that you need to talk about it, and you say in your mind, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ You’re trained to think that.”  

Breaths of Hope

Lt. Col. Daniel Bruzzini ’90 LAS is one of the good guys, no matter the culture or place. The Air Force physician is a neonatologist, specializing in care for critically ill or premature babies.

In 2007, Bruzzini, 40, led an embedded maternal-infant medical training team in Afghanistan. For two months the group helped Afghan health workers in Kabul hospitals refine techniques to better treat women and children, who suffered widely under Taliban rule. Infant mortality rates there are nearly 160 deaths per 1,000 births, compared to about 6.3 per 1,000 in the United States.

Bruzzini’s duties included teaching undersupplied – yet smart and determined – Afghan health-care workers how to help newborns breathe. Without the “bells and whistles” of home, he improvised and prioritized. There was no time to bemoan the lack of $100,000 ventilators.

“Your biggest bang is [teaching them how to recognize] that the kid is blue,” Bruzzini says. “And how to open an airway. How to get that initial breath. How to keep the lungs open. Because that’s a 90 percent solution. In time they will get that last 10 percent.”

Now, as the director of pediatrics for the military’s Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills in St. Louis, Bruzzini recalls a sense of mission among his team members that elevated their daily duties.

“Anyone can do something for a reward, whether it be financial or for recognition,” Bruzzini says. “But it is best if no one knows about it, as taught in the Bible.”

His reward includes some lessons he might not have learned in the U.S. He once believed medical texts that said a premature baby born prior to 34 weeks after conception couldn’t yet coordinate the sucking, swallowing and breathing required for oral feeding. In Kabul, however, he saw babies that age with no access to formula or IVs. For them, it was breastfeed or die. The process was slow and arduous, but, to his surprise, they fed.

It was just one Afghan lesson of many that left Bruzzini, a father of two, tongue-tied in awe. No matter where you are, he says, babies are the greatest gift, both innocent and unifying. And despite the upheavals raging around them, those tough little nuts are determined to live.

Evensen is a freelance writer living in Champaign.