Called up

Sgt. T.J. McClurg’s accident came at the end of a hellish week for Charlie Company, a Chico-based Army National Guard unit with members in Iraq. The week came to a terrifying end on Nov. 11, 2004, when McClurg, who had been a welder and painter in Chico before becoming a squad leader in Iraq, was hit by a roadside bomb.

Two days earlier, a roadside bomb had killed his platoon leader, and another soldier lost his foot in the explosion. And earlier in the week, two fellow guardsmen from another platoon had been injured.

Twenty-four members of Charlie Company’s Chico unit had arrived in Iraq to serve with the Guard’s 579th Engineer Battalion in April 2004, almost a year after President Bush had declared an end to major combat operations. The guardsmen weren’t all from Chico, but they’d all enlisted to become combat engineers with Charlie Company, a unit specializing in skills like heavy equipment operation. They ended up fighting an insurgency that was waging a mushrooming guerrilla war.

McClurg was driving a semi-armored Humvee down the center of the road near Camp Anaconda almost 50 miles north of Baghdad when he heard a deafening explosion. “You always drive down the middle of the yellow line because the roadside bombs are on the side,” he explained in a November interview.

In a gesture characteristic of his leadership, McClurg had assigned his “up-armored” Humvee to squad members while he drove a vehicle that had been issued without armor. But he had modified it by placing a sheet of salvaged steel on the Humvee side. He had topped the vehicle with a fiberglass sheet, providing passengers with a makeshift roof. His welding skills had come in handy in a war that soldiers sometimes fight on the cheap; McClurg believes they saved his life.

“The Humvee was wavering and filled with dust and my leg went numb,” McClurg recalled. “I was yelling, ‘Who’s hit, who’s hit?', and I grabbed my radio, but the frequency was blown out.”

He could hear shots behind him, and in what he calls the “mad chaos,” tried to dislodge himself from the Humvee. But when he tried to stand, a sharp pain seared his left leg, and he noticed the front of his boot had been blown off.

McClurg himself had been hit by an “IED,” an improvised explosive device, one of the crudely constructed bombs made from scrap artillery that were being left along roadways to maim and kill. He was struck in the left hip, he said, by three mortar shells “daisy-chained together” that sprayed shrapnel through his leg and foot. His gunner, fellow guardsman Harold Parker, was badly wounded in the explosion.

Looking back, McClurg figures he was chosen as a “weak link” in a convoy of U.S. military vehicles traveling west. In other words, someone handling a remote control device might have spotted his Humvee as only semi-armored and its passengers as easy targets.

McClurg has a broad grin and a football player’s even broader shoulders. But at 28, he now has a severed toe tendon and can’t walk the distance of the central corridor at the Chico Mall without swelling and throbbing in his foot.

Since returning to Chico, McClurg has been working at the local Armory, a non-descript red-brick building off East Avenue backing up to a chain-link fence topped with razor wire that secures parking for a half-dozen Army vehicles. For many Chico residents, the war is a distant event, but the Armory is a place where you can begin to measure the costs of the 3-year-old conflict, and the use of the National Guard’s so-called citizen soldiers.

Charlie Company has brought the war to Chico’s doorstep. Thirty-two members of the local unit have served in Iraq, and all have come back except for two there now. Though Charlie has small units in Lakeport and Red Bluff, its largest unit—130 people from ages 18 to 59—is housed at the Chico Armory, where it holds weekend drills and trains soldiers in combat engineering. They learn bridge and road construction, demolition and landmine removal.

But in Iraq, National Guard soldiers have been on the frontlines; together with Army reserves they comprise about 40 percent of the troops fighting the war. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Charlie played a key role in combat for 12 months after it was merged with the Santa Rosa-based Alpha Company. “We went over as combat engineers and ended up as infantry,” says Sgt. Eugene Schoen, who runs the armory. “We saw some pretty devastating things.”

To most Americans, Guard soldiers are their “weekend warriors,” ready to respond to local disasters. Un-deployed, they serve one weekend a month and two weeks a year. The local unit has cleaned parks in Oroville, provided airport security and produced a team of dog-handlers who worked on landmine removal in Afghanistan. At home, they are teachers, firefighters and students. Many have families.

But the Iraq war is just one of several new demands on Charlie Company. The war on terrorism has produced other demands, not always related to combat engineering. Twenty-two members of the Chico unit returned earlier this year from a tour on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt where they helped with peace-keeping in a volatile border area. Four guardsmen have returned from Afghanistan, and 14 are there now on reconstruction projects.

Many of the deployed guardsmen have paid a high price for the Army culture they say they love. The deployments change their lives, and often change them.

Guardsmen like McClurg have lost comrades and suffered major injuries. Others have seen their marriages crumble. Some come home disturbed by nightmares or suffer an edginess in crowds or have a tendency to jump at the sound of a firecracker. Some question themselves daily or hourly, wondering if they could have done more to save friends.

The Armory’s Schoen, 42, is a single father who left his children with his own mother while he served 12 months in Iraq. He’s a man with a brisk manner who’s not easily given to emotional expressiveness. But he admits it was difficult to leave his children, ages 9 and 10. “It was hard,” he said. “I was scolding them on Webcam from across the seas.”

The deployments place Charlie Company at the crosshairs of twin national debates–whether the war in Iraq is worth pursuing, and whether Guard units should be there. Since Hurricane Katrina, anti-war groups and some legislators have lobbied to eliminate the Guard’s role in Iraq, and the military hopes to make Guard soldiers subject to fewer deployments. According to the Califonia National Guard’s Web site, the guard nationwide has lost 352 soldiers to this war—still a relatively small part of the total 2,305 U.S. troop casualties. But casualty counts are just one measure of the cost of war.

For McClurg, one cost of war is represented by a baggie of the shrapnel that was removed from his leg. He’s known at the Chico Armory as the guy who got blown up. “God was on his side that day,” Schoen says.

Five years after graduating from Pleasant Valley High School, McClurg signed up with Charlie Company. It was 1999, and he was a young father drawn by the promise of a GI Bill, a weekend Army job and a Guard unit bent on community service. He particularly liked the fact that Charlie had helped in a Caper Acres building project. “I thought, ‘Wow, I could be part of something my children could benefit from in the future,'” he said.

But the story of post-9-11 Charlie Company is also the story of how our country has waged its first major war without a draft.

In early 2004, McClurg and an Oroville man, William “Zac” Gable, were two of the Charlie members who were “called up.” McClurg liked the idea of serving his country, but was anguished to leave his 6-year-old daughter, Dakota. “I was 70 percent excited to get to do something like this, and 30 percent not excited,” he said.

But for his part, Gable was 100 percent stunned and his parents outraged. He opposed the war in Iraq and his discharge date was approaching when he was deployed—in fact, it fell within two weeks of his deployment date. But President Bush issued a stop-loss order that kept him in active duty. Gable, 23, was stuck with going, and decided he’d do his best to take care of the men in his unit.

Schoen remembers the awful experience of leaving the Armory with his guardsmen by bus. “I had these mothers grabbing onto me saying, ‘Please bring my son home.'”

Schoen brought his men home. But in a 12-month period, the company they fought with—Alpha—became known as one of the hardest hit Guard units fighting the war. There were three casualties in the 95-member company and 22 purple hearts—meaning that about one in four of the men were killed or badly injured. Two of those purple hearts went to Chico residents McClurg and Bruce Himelright.

The men trained for eight weeks, polishing their shooting skills in Fort Lewis, Wash., and drilling mock mob scenes with Iraqi citizens at Fort Irwin, Calif. They were preparing for what they thought would be a convoy protection mission in Iraq.

The guardsmen worried whether they were well prepared for what they’d face, as well as whether they’d be under the command of combat-experienced people, they told the News & Review. Many Guard units, after all, hadn’t been in combat since the Korean War, and some not since World War II.

But by the time they got to Kuwait for a last, brief training session, they were facing their first rude surprise—they had been re-assigned to security for Camp Anaconda, the air base in Balad that had been captured by Americans and was under almost constant fire. They would soon face the kind of guerrilla war that, Schoen says, is difficult to train for.

At Camp Anaconda, they worked “outside the wire.” They were on the perimeter of the camp trying to protect its residents from the barrage of raining mortar and booming explosions. When they first arrived, mortar attacks came as often as every three hours, Gable said. “It’s like having shotgun blasts next to your head,” he said, recalling the explosions that would break a night’s stillness. “It rings your bell … even if you don’t get hit by shrapnel, your ears are ringing.”

McClurg recalled the fatigue and stress.

“It would be 130 degrees outside, and they’d keep you up all night, and then you’d sleep in these tents and the air conditioner would break down,” McClurg recalled. “You almost become a robot, almost accept that you might get injured, almost accept your fate.”

By all accounts, Alpha Company helped stabilize the camp environment through a combination of no-nonsense soldiering and a Chico-based public relations campaign. From observation posts, Gable said, the soldiers were able to shoot or capture some of the people responsible for launching mortar and rocket attacks on the base.

And Schoen collected 400 boxes of toiletries, jackets and shoes donated by Chico residents to take to poverty-stricken villages around the camp. The charity distribution, Schoen said, created good will between U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. “Pretty soon they were telling us, ‘Don’t go down that road, we saw something suspicious,'” the sergeant said. But the Chico men couldn’t create enough good will to win a guerrilla war.

The first tragic turning point came June 22, when several company soldiers were shot from behind as they searched for arms in the farmlands outside Camp Anaconda. Shot dead were Alpha’s Lt. Andre Tyson from Riverside and McClurg’s best war-time buddy, Patrick McCaffrey from Tracy. And shot 12 times was Chico’s Himelright. Only one of the bullets injured him because he wore a bullet-proof vest, Schoen said.

A Los Angeles Times article quoted sources who indicated it might have been an ambush by Iraqi trainees. The Times said McClurg was parked about a half mile away at the time.

“That was a big wakeup,” McClurg said. “It definitely hit us hard. I was down for about 24 hours; I just couldn’t get out of my bunk. A lot of it is going over and over in your mind what you could have done differently. But then you just have to do what you can to stay alive. You just have to put it aside, put it on a back burner.”

Schoen, a Gulf War veteran, said his experience in that earlier war was quite different. “That was clear, there was a line, and you pushed them back from the line. But this is guerrilla warfare. The enemy could be a kid or a woman. You have this adrenaline rush to go, but you get there and find out this wasn’t what you ever trained for.”

Now, McClurg wears tattoos on his inner biceps that remind him of the cost of his combat experience. There are three stars representing the three friends he lost—two for McCaffrey and Tyson and one for platoon Sgt. Michael Ottolini, a former Sebastopol resident. On one arm are the words “all gave some” and on his other arm the words “some gave all.”

He’ll leave the Guard reluctantly, perhaps this summer, he said, at the request of his wife. But like other men who come back with a new-found sense of purpose, he says he feels he helped put Iraq on the road to democracy. If the United States pulled out now, he said, the deaths of his three friends “will have been for nothing.”

Gable fought alongside McClurg, and though the two men saw the war differently, they praise each other’s service. Gable’s conviction—the certainty that soldiers have that they’re in the right—failed him, but his loyalty to his unit, he says, saw him through. He views the war as a “waste of resources and human life.”

Gable says the United States should pull out its troops, showing that it’s learned something from the war’s mounting death toll. “If we learn something from their deaths,” he said of the Alpha Company casualties, “they won’t have died in vain.”

Gable left the Guard after returning, but had it not been for the war, says he would have liked to have been “career National Guard out of Chico.”

Schoen has little sympathy for Gable’s position. “Without the National Guard it would be really bad over there,” he said. “We did so much for the people of Iraq.”

But Schoen hopes that Charlie Company can soon pursue more of the community service projects he loves to undertake. For months, guardsmen have been training for a March 26 marathon, the Bataan Memorial March, that will raise money for Enloe Children’s Medical Center. “I’d rather fight over here,” Schoen said. “We could do so much for this community.”