Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Mary Junell | Former and current Soldiers who deployed with the North Carolina National Guard’s...... read more read more
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When Sgt. Thomas Taylor’s daughter reached out to members of the 1450th Transportation Company, who he deployed with in 2004, they were surprised to hear he was terminally ill.
It had been almost 15 years since Taylor’s unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard, left the U.S. to spend more than a year driving up and down the roads in Iraq.
Alicia Rose, who was a Specialist when she deployed with the 1450th, said Taylor’s daughter reaching out prompted some of the former Soldiers to start a group chat and eventually a Facebook group for the veterans of the 2004 deployment.
“There has been several fellow unit members pass and there have been a major lapse in communication,” Rose said. “Sgt. Taylor had 12 fellow Soldiers come to his funeral on December 4, 2018. Most of us hadn’t seen each other since 2005.”
Around this time someone suggested a reunion because although they enjoyed seeing each other, they didn’t want the only time they got together to be at funerals.
On March 16, 2019, 26 Soldiers who deployed with the 1450th for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004, met at the American Legion Post 48 in Hickory, North Carolina for their first reunion.
“I was a little anxious coming because you didn’t know what to expect,” said former Sgt. Richard Cowles, “Then after I got here, you see people and it made me more at ease.”
Most of the Soldiers from the deployment have since left the North Carolina National Guard and social media had yet to connect everyone when they returned to the U.S, leaving most of them having little to no contact with the Soldiers they spent the hardest year of their lives with.
Cowles said he hopes that holding reunions will help the Soldiers who need it most connect with their former battle buddies.
“Some of us here [at the reunion] came back and we did well, and we moved on and we’ve had jobs, but I’ve gone to the funerals, and some of those guys haven’t moved on, some of those guys are still in a bad place,” Cowles said. “Some people hold onto things and some of them let it go, and for those people who are still holding onto it, they need to see us and see that life goes on and maybe they can get out of the bad place they’re in.”
Chad Bailey, who served with the 1450th as a Sergeant, said going back to work as a police officer for the City of Marion after the deploying was hard; he didn’t have anyone to talk to who understood what he went through.
“It took me a while to reintegrate, and I don’t think I every completely, truly did The best thing in the world that happened to me was getting a job at the VA where I can work with guys who were there maybe not at the same place but at the same time, that helped a lot.”
Cowles, like many of the Soldiers he deployed with, said he struggles with the fact that not being in a combat unit means that people assume it must not have been that bad.
“People look at us like, ‘you were just driving a truck.’ They don't understand what we went through,” he said.
But for the 1450th it was much more than just driving a truck. The unit of under 150 Guardsmen collectively earned about a dozen Purple Hearts and the Soldiers joked that getting shot at was a common place occurrence; it was the IEDs they really had to worry about.
“It was like running the gauntlet once you got into Baghdad or north of Scania,” Cowles said. “Somebody was probably going to get hit, someone, with an IED or gunshots or something. You didn’t know who or how it was going to work, you just had to kind of roll with it.”
The veterans sat around round plastic tables, reminiscing about what they went through. Not all of the stories were happy memories, but most of them were glad to have someone to talk to who lived through it with them.
“I am a true believer that talking about trauma helps an individual cope and get the trauma out. It helps them heal on a whole level,” Rose said.
The members of the American Legion Post had to push the former Soldiers out the door when the event was scheduled to end, and the conversations continued in the parking lot. By the end of the night, they were already making plans for the next reunion.
For Rose, and many of the others who attended the reunion, the event brought some closure to one of the most difficult things she had ever gone through.
“That night I had a dream I was deployed again and I was with the same guys that I saw at the reunion but instead of this dream being more of a nightmare it was fun, we were having a blast and we all had confidence that everything was going to be OK,” Rose said.
| Date Taken: | 03.29.2019 |
| Date Posted: | 03.29.2019 14:56 |
| Story ID: | 316223 |
| Location: | HICKORY, NC, US |
| Web Views: | 568 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, NCNG Veterans Reconnect 15 Years After Start of Their Iraq Deployment, by SFC Mary Junell, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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