02 January 2006

Iraq Looms Close for Private Recruited in Wartime

By Monica Davey
The New York Times, 02 January 2006

LYNDON, Kan., Dec. 31 - When she signed up for the Army in 2004, Katherine Jordan had little to say about war. Asked about Iraq at the time, she said she was far more concerned about the rigors of basic training and more focused on the fear that she might wind up here, in her hometown of 1,000, never amounting to much.

The local recruiter made her parents, Byron and Mary, feel comfortable, too, they said. They hoped the conflict in Iraq would fade away by the time their only child finished training, Mr. Jordan said back then, on the same afternoon that his freckle-faced daughter marched across the Lyndon High gymnasium in flip-flops to collect her diploma. "We don't think she is going to be in a battle zone," he said that day.

Eighteen months later, the Jordans are preparing for Pvt. Katherine Jordan's first deployment, a mission to Iraq. In a time of war, when the Army has struggled to find willing recruits (and parents) and last year fell below its recruiting goals, Private Jordan was one of thousands of Americans who enlisted anyway. In her case, like those of some other service members, the conflict she gave little thought to when she signed up has now become a consuming reality.

At 19, she has increased her life insurance to $400,000 in recent weeks, Private Jordan said. She has also watched her colleagues react to the news of the deployment. "Some people are freaking out," she said. "But I don't know what the point of that is." Others bought their girlfriends engagement rings so they would have someone to come home to. A few colleagues, she said, got pregnant and are unlikely to go anywhere.

Private Jordan spent the holidays here, back in her little town some 30 miles south of Topeka, buying a laptop computer for her journey and toiletries to last for ages, writing a love letter to her boyfriend and dutifully appearing at one family party after the next, all in her honor.

Mr. and Mrs. Jordan said they expect their drive to Kansas City International Airport on Monday - when their daughter returns to her unit in Friedberg, Germany, before it ships off to Kuwait in the days ahead - to be the hardest goodbye ever. They confide that they will shed many tears, though Private Jordan insists she will not.

Likewise, much of Private Jordan's time at home on the eve of her deployment has been a portrait in contrasts: of a father's fierce pride and worry, but a service member's nonchalance and certainty; of a young woman who now fluently speaks the military language of acronyms and weapons systems, but who still also gossips with her old high school girlfriends like the teenager she is; of a soldier's new, intense focus on the task ahead in Iraq but her admission that, even now, she does not fully grasp all that has happened there.

"I don't know all the facts as much as I should," said Private Jordan, of the First Armored Division, 501st Forward Support Battalion, as she sat in her childhood home here. "What I know is that we're protecting our country still. We're concentrating on keeping insurgents away from the United States."

If Private Jordan was once ambivalent about Iraq, she now seems certain she wants to go. She said she knows that her job, as one of only a few female mechanics in her unit, could send her out to pick up disabled vehicles - potential targets for attack. Still, she said, she is more excited than nervous. And she is already anticipating the higher paychecks she will make in a war zone; she said she hopes to save $15,000 so she can buy a car when she gets home.

"Honestly," she said, "a lot of my friends like Iraq. It's not as bad as people say."

Private Jordan said she felt prepared for the situation on the ground in Iraq. Her unit has trained for months, she said, to understand the nature of roadside bombs, to scan for out-of-place objects and to consider anyone a possible suspect.

"The threat changes day by day, so I'm going to live day by day," she said. "You can just hope God is on your side and move through the tour and all that other great stuff."

Mr. and Mrs. Jordan say they are proud of their daughter, and proud of her strong wish to go to Iraq. Still, if the mission were called off, Mr. Jordan said, "We'd say, 'Oh that's too bad,' and secretly we'd be cheering."

In truth, Private Jordan's trip home was an odd balancing act for her parents. On the one hand, she is a 19-year-old, whom they said they worried about as she wandered her way through O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, as she stayed out with friends one night here until 3 a.m. without so much as a call home, as she proposed a road trip to Manhattan, Kan. On the other hand, she is about to be a soldier on her way to a war zone.

At one point, Mr. Jordan, who says he knows there will be plenty of sleepless nights ahead for him, grew choked up as he offered a prayer before his extended family: "Katherine, you know we love you. God will be on your side because I just know he will be."

Of course, he told his relatives, voice shaking, he was still terribly frightened.

Mr. Jordan, 52, was also once a soldier. As a young man working at a bank in Des Moines, he received a draft notice and felt sure he was going to Vietnam. "I was probably as devastated as I could get," he said. So he signed up, he said, hoping to get a safer assignment.

In the end, after two tours in Thailand, Mr. Jordan said he came away believing the military had been the best thing to happen to him. He needed the order in his life, he said, and he said he now believed the same might prove true for his daughter.

During one of several dinners in Private Jordan's honor, her uncle, Gene Jordan, another veteran who is now 62, quietly passed her a shell casing from an M-14. He said he had carried it with him all through his Marine tour in Vietnam and wanted her to carry it now. It brought him luck, he said.

He had but one piece of advice for his niece: Keep your tail down.

He said he rarely spoke of what he had seen in Vietnam, even to family members. Of war in general, he said, "For a long time, I thought this was going to be over."

"I hate to see her see any of it," he said of his niece.

If Private Jordan's biggest fear was once that she might disappear into her small town, never being anyone special, she seemed to have overcome that, at least on the eve of her deployment.

Sprawled out on her bed on a recent afternoon, Private Jordan showed her old high school girlfriends - all of whom are in enrolled in college - her photo albums from the military. As they stared at the images from an Army base in Germany, she spoke the puzzling language of the Army, of "getting dropped" (being ordered to do pushups), of "getting chaptered out" (being kicked out of the military) and of the "gas chamber" (where soldiers are tested on their ability to get their gas masks on in the event of chemical warfare).

The young women shared pizza and breadsticks at the local hangout, Buzzard's, but Private Jordan's words - and the new tattoos, $1,000 worth, that cover her back and forearms - now seemed a universe away. "I'm a homebody," said Candace Howell, 19, who is a sophomore at the University of Kansas, explaining why she and most of their girlfriends had not enlisted.

And, one morning, just after 9, three elderly women waited in a bus in the driveway outside the Jordans' house to get a look at Private Jordan. They were headed to their weekly bingo game, and Mr. Jordan, who drives the bus for the Osage County Council on Aging, agreed to introduce them to his daughter.

Eventually, a yawning Private Jordan emerged from the house and stepped onto the bus, still in her fuzzy slippers and Metallica sweatshirt.

"Do you like the Army?" one of the ladies, deep into her 90's, inquired. "Yes," Private Jordan answered. She is going to Kuwait, then Iraq, her father said proudly. "But you know, to me, she is still a kid."

In three years, Private Jordan's enlistment will be over. She said she had yet to decide whether to make the military a career and extend her service or to leave and do something else, perhaps back here in Lyndon. "If the war in Iraq ends, I might get out, because what's the point of being in then?" she said. "But if another war is happening, I could get back in full time, that's what I'm thinking."

------------------------------------
Citation: Monica Davey. "Iraq Looms Close for Private Recruited in Wartime," The New York Times, 02 January 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/national/02soldier.html
------------------------------------