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    Spc. Sochea Touch Borders His Homeland, Fulfills His Duty in CG15

    Spc. Sochea Touch Borders His Homeland, Fulfills His Duty in CG15

    Photo By Chief Warrant Officer James Marchetti | U.S. Army Spc. Sochea Touch, a plumbing and pipefitting specialist with a detachment...... read more read more

    SARABURI PROVINCE, THAILAND

    02.15.2015

    Story by Cpl. James Marchetti 

    Marine Corps Air Station Yuma

    SARABURI PROVINCE, Thailand - In 2006, when Sochea Touch and his family moved to Puyallup, Wash., he had no idea he was staying for good.

    At 13 years old, the nearly 7,500 mile journey from Cambodia to the U.S. was what he can only describe as eye opening.

    “I’d never seen an airplane before so it was really weird,” explained now 22-year-old U.S. Army Spc. Touch, on the site of his first international exercise at Ban Sub Prik village, located in Muak Lek District, Saraburi Province, Thailand. “Then a flight attendant served me a tuna sandwich and it was delicious. It was the first time I had ever had one before. I knew I was safe but it was new and scary.”

    “I didn’t sleep whatsoever on the flight, just kept walking up and down the aisles and checking things out,” added Touch, who is participating in Exercise Cobra Gold 2015 with a detachment of soldiers from Washington National Guard’s 176th Engineering Company (Vertical), based out of Snohomish, Washington. “Then we landed and I was seeing pavement instead of dirt on the roads, cars everywhere, people with blonde hair and blue eyes, and I thought I was on a totally different planet.”

    Many years before serving his new country in the National Guard, he remembers the everyday, uphill battle in providing a comfortable life for his mother and older brother. Touch continues to carry the memories of his prior life in the small village of Cambodia that he will always remember as home.

    “Every day after school, for lunch, I’d walk to the rice fields and see what I could get to eat from fishing,” said Touch. “We ate a lot of fish because they’re easy to catch, but if I found any snakes or turtle that was even better. My mother would walk to the city market daily because there weren’t any refrigerators. She would buy fruit for cheap at the village and try to make a little profit by selling it in the city.”

    One day, his mother introduced Touch to a new, strange-looking man.

    “I didn’t really know what was going on, and just thought he was just coming to visit a lot,” said Touch. “I had never really seen an American before, really. It’s hard to explain. It was really exciting but at the same time kind of scary, seeing something different like that.”

    As it turns out, his mother had met the man – Touch’s soon to be stepfather – during a deployment he served in Cambodia as a member of the U.S. Air Force. Following the tour, he returned to the U.S.to separate from the Air Force, but quickly made his way back to Cambodia with the intention of relocating the family with him to the U.S.

    Touch had to let go of everything he knew, start afresh and learn everything from the ground up, settling into his new home and middle school. He turned his focus to his education in order to completely acclimate to his new life in the U.S. and traverse the daily waves of culture shock that came crashing down from all angles.

    “I was used to only being around a few people and knew everybody’s name in my village. Now I didn’t speak the same language as everyone, so I had to start from scratch - had to learn my A, B, C’s,” said Touch with near-complete control of the language nine years later. “They had to bring an elementary teacher to my middle school just to teach me these things. Everything was very difficult and, during the beginning, everything I learned was from hand gestures and body language.”

    “I wanted to communicate as fast as I could,” he continued. “My friends and teachers - I wanted to know what they were saying, why they acted the way they did. My mind was so open to everything that I didn’t really have trouble making friends or anything like that. The people at my school really accepted me and were actually really curious why I couldn’t speak their language. They invited me to their houses all the time to kind of show me off to their families.”

    It took about two years for Touch to grasp the English language. By his freshman year of high school, he was able to thoroughly communicate with his peers, which was coincidentally around the same time he was first exposed to the U.S. Army.

    He remembers seeing the camouflaged soldiers disseminating information to students from a booth in his school’s gymnasium during a career fair he attended. At that time he was thinking of college and didn’t even visit the booth.

    “I didn’t really think anything of it until a few years later when I saw commercials about furthering your education through the National Guard,” said Touch. “I wanted a chance at higher education to better myself. That’s just my personality; the person I am wants to always improve. But when I didn’t have the money I looked for help, and the National Guard said they could help me.”

    Touch joined the Army National Guard as a plumbing and pipefitting specialist in 2011 and hasn’t looked back since. His stepfather was never keen on talking about his service, and it didn’t play a factor in his decision to join. He plans to make a career in the institution, and hopes to reach the rank of first sergeant one day.

    CG15 has brought him back to the Eastern Hemisphere for the first time since he departed his homeland nearly nine years ago, a homeland bordered by this current place of duty.

    “I heard about Cobra Gold right when I got into my unit in 2013,” said Touch. “The soldier that picked me up, my team leader, he told me that every so often there’s a mission where you get to go to Thailand. Immediately I let them know that I wanted to go, and was on the waiting list for the last two years before I finally got on it.”

    The project at Ban Sub Prik tasks Touch and his team from 176th Engineer Co. with the construction of a new multipurpose facility for the village’s elementary school; a duty that Touch believes gives new meaning to his career in uniform.

    “I hadn’t really been deployed before this so, wearing this uniform, when people would say thank you for your service, I never really felt deserving,” said Touch. “This project will really change the way I look at my uniform. I can say that I did my duty. I did what I signed up to do.”

    But his team need not toil in the endeavor alone, as they work side by side with constructors from the Indonesian Marine Corps and Royal Thai Air Force every day to get the job done on time and as efficiently as possible.

    “This building, to me, represents three countries coming together for the better of the youth,” said Touch. “Hopefully it’ll open the kids’ eyes and let them know that there’s another world out there.”

    “If I had seen something like this growing up, I probably would’ve wanted to do whatever the soldiers were doing,” he added when asked if he felt like a role model to the students that watch the project come to life during their school days. “It would have empowered me to become one of them.”

    In order to achieve a comfortable life for himself and his family by the age of 60, Touch asserted he would continue to do what he has always done in life up until this point in the continuation of his education and dual career.

    “When I set a goal, I tend to forget everything until that goal is reached,” said Touch, whose youthful disposition masks a lifelong journey experienced by so few by his age. “Right now my goal is to get my journeyman license, so I’m going to stay in the plumbing field and get my card and improve myself by joining the union.”

    “After that, who knows?”

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 02.15.2015
    Date Posted: 02.15.2015 11:33
    Story ID: 154551
    Location: SARABURI PROVINCE, TH
    Hometown: PUYALLUP, WA, US

    Web Views: 253
    Downloads: 1

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