NJ National Guards Back From Iraq in their own voices

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
CONSTANT PROVIDER Master Sgt. Minnie Hiller-Cousins heads the National Guard family assistance program at the Guard’s armory in Teaneck, N.J.

Voices From the Home Front
National Guard members and their families talk openly about the hardships of war, both overseas and at home.

By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: October 1, 2008
TEANECK
MORE than anything, John and Adriana Roldan love each other and their two little boys, Brandon, 5, and Samuel, 1. And so now that Mr. Roldan, a mechanic and a building superintendent and a New Jersey National Guardsman, has been deployed to Iraq for the second time in three years, he and his wife will start lying to each other again, just as they lied their way through his first Iraq tour.

That first time, Mr. Roldan told Mrs. Roldan that as a mechanic, he never left the base in Iraq.

And Mrs. Roldan — who has taken over his job as building superintendent — told Mr. Roldan that everything was great with their son Brandon.

The truth was, Sergeant Roldan was accompanying convoys in combat zones to repair armored vehicles that broke down. “Every time we went out, we got small arms fire,” he said. “I try to keep it to myself. I thought if I told her what exactly I was doing, she was going to be more worried.”

As for Mrs. Roldan’s lies: Brandon was 2 during that first deployment, and missed his father so much — “His two big words were ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ” — that he threw terrifying tantrums, his mother said.

“He used to bang his head against the floor, he used to bite himself, he used to scratch himself,” she said. “I guess he was just mad and furious that his Daddy wasn’t here and he couldn’t understand, being so small.”

Mrs. Roldan has developed a mantra for her husband’s calls home from Iraq: “It’s only a three-minute call, the lines are long, just tell them you’re doing fine,” she said. “Never tell them you’re depressed or sad.”

“Him not knowing what I do, I think it helps him through the deployment. I mean, I didn’t give him no problems, I always try to be as happy as I can when he calls. I said his son was great, he never cried.”

It wasn’t until her husband came back that he learned the truth. Mrs. Roldan had made a video of one of Brandon’s tantrums and played it for him. “John cried,” she said.

For her part, Mrs. Roldan didn’t learn about the dangers of her husband’s first tour until three years later, when he told a reporter during an interview at the end of August, days before he left for his second tour. “I thought he was safe,” she said, “Now all of a sudden he’s in convoys. Now I don’t know if he’s telling me the truth.”

LAST month, 2,850 of New Jersey’s 6,000 National Guard citizen-soldiers left for Iraq, the largest combat deployment of the state’s Guard since World War II. And it is not just the soldiers doing hard duty. During the Vietnam War, the average soldier was 19. Today the average age for the active-duty Army is 27; 55.5 percent of Army soldiers are married, as are 45 percent of the National Guard, according to a 2007 Office of Army Demographics report. For every active duty Army soldier (518,000) there is nearly one child (493,484).

In some ways, the demographics for soldiers of the Iraq war and their families are closer to World War II (when the average soldier was 26) than the typical unmarried, teenage soldiers of Vietnam, according to Richard L. Baker, an information specialist for the Army Heritage and Education Center.

In June, when Guard members (including 250 women) left New Jersey for two months of training at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Tex., before shipping out to Iraq, they left behind 1,400 children, according to Amanda Balas, the state Guard’s youth coordinator. And that number is growing. “I know of 20 more since,” said Ms. Balas, who sends handmade quilts to newborns of deployed soldiers.

Family members are hopeful that the units are heading for a relatively safe mission; the soldiers spent their two months in Texas training for guard duty at military prisons in Baghdad, Bukka and Balad. Specialist Gregg Walls, 39, is an accountant from Teaneck who is being deployed for the first time and has left behind his wife, Iris, a real estate agent, and two young children, Gabriella, 6, and Ian, 3. In an interview in Texas, in late August, before leaving, he said he was not looking to be a hero: “Some of the guys want to do convoys, they want to get outside the wire, they want to do the hurrah stuff. Fine, have a good time, see you when you get back.”

go here to read all of it and understand what these families are going through.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/nyregion/new-jersey/05Rparent.html?_r=1&oref=slogin