Jeffrey Gettleman
New York Times
10 September 2005
FORT DIX, N.J., Sept. 9 - After 12 months of bombs, bullets, scorpions and sweat, Carlo Giordano has a new enemy - boredom.
Specialist Giordano, a 27-year-old soldier with the Fighting 69th National Guard battalion, based in Manhattan, is a plumber on Long Island. Or at least he was, before he went to Iraq.
But not even 24 hours after he stepped back onto American soil, he admitted that it might be hard to go back to unclogging toilets.
"What I was doing over there was exciting, you know, like an adventure," Specialist Giordano said on Friday. "So I'm not sure what I'm going to do now. Maybe I'll be a cop."
While it is one thing to leave behind war, it is another to return to civilian life. And unlike active-duty troops, who swap one base for another when they leave a combat zone, the transition home for National Guard troops is more complicated.
Coming home means saying goodbye, to comrades, to fatigues, to a certain way of doing things. Now comes the hard part: trying to resurrect or retrofit their old lives, as plumbers, carpenters, pizza makers, paper mill workers, lab technicians, students and stockbrokers.
Of course, no one complains about being back. The soldiers from the Fighting 69th were laughing, joking and play-wrestling on Friday afternoon as they went through demobilization drills at Fort Dix, in south-central New Jersey, even though most had not slept in days. The unit, based out of the Lexington Avenue armory, was sent to Iraq last fall and has been returning home, planeload by planeload, this week, slowly reuniting with their families. Relief was the word of the day, and some soldiers could not stop talking about beer and women, Caribbean cruises and Ford Mustangs.
But just over the horizon lay worry. Or at least contemplation.
"I was just talking to my wife and I said, 'Now what?' " said Capt. Sean Flynn, a former public relations executive from Tivoli, in upstate New York, who is not quite sure what to do next. "I got the feeling this is going to be a period of metamorphosis for me."
A few soldiers said that their wartime experience had not changed them and that they would return to doing exactly what they did before.
"I can't wait to get back to Delta," said Leonardo Uribe, a flight attendant from Queens. "The moment I turned in my gun, it was like this huge burden getting lifted."
The Fighting 69th did not have the easiest of missions, patrolling the Baghdad airport road, Iraq's crucial and infamously violent link to the outside world.
But the battalion has always had a knack for dangerous turf.
It was formed in the 1850's by Irish immigrants trying to protect their families from Manhattan's warring gangs. It fought at Bull Run in the opening salvos of the Civil War and was one of the few Union units that did not buckle there.
Robert E. Lee was so impressed, he dubbed the 69th "the Fighting 69th," and the name stuck.
In World War I, the unit slogged through icy rivers in France to beat back the Germans. In World War II, its soldiers helped lay siege to Okinawa in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
Continuing this history seemed to mean a lot to many of the soldiers, even the younger, harder New York types. Few shared any reservations about serving.
"My high school friends just don't get it," said Nicholas Dubovici, a 19-year-old from Queens, who graduated from high school just months before he was sent to Iraq to run patrols with 40-year-old men. "What we did was important, and my friends are still interested in, like, high school stuff."
The tour in Iraq marks the end of an era for the Fighting 69th, which as much as any other battalion, has lived the war on terror from the first strike.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the battalion was rushed to ground zero, to help sift through the smoldering wreckage and guard the site. Then it was dispatched to West Point to protect the academy from a possible attack.
In May 2004, its soldiers were called up for overseas duty and soon began training at Fort Hood, Tex. Five months later, they ground their boots into Iraqi soil. Now, they get a rest.
According to New York National Guard spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Fanning, the battalion will not be sent back to Iraq anytime soon because President Bush passed an executive order at the beginning of the Iraq war that National Guard troops would serve no more than two years in connection with the war, and most battalion members have served close to that.
"They're considered hands off," Colonel Fanning said. "We're going to do our very best to leave these guys alone."
Sadly, not all the men came back. Nineteen of the nearly 800 soldiers serving with the battalion were killed, many by roadside bombs.
Captain Flynn said the hardest part was the feeling of not returning whole.
But his year in Iraq was one of the most satisfying of his life, he said, even though he is not certain what his next move will be.
"I will never forget that January election," he said, referring to Iraq's first free vote. "There was something huge going on, and I thought, holy cow, we're part of this."
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Citation:
Jeffrey Gettleman, "After Duty in Iraq, a New Transition to Being the Nonfighting 69th", New York Times, 10 September 2005. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/nyregion/10dix.html?ei=5070&en=36f27bfc4e975d20&ex=1127016000&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print