Richard
09-30-2011, 07:53
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
A 20-hour-a-day Job
IndepRcd, 30 Sep 2011
Wade Van Gilder hasn’t missed a National Guard drill in 41 years. And today, he’s wearing his camouflage for the last time as a soldier.
“It’s going to be a big change for me,” he said a few weeks ago in an interview on his 60th birthday, as he reached the Guard’s mandatory retirement age. “If I didn’t have to leave the military I wouldn’t leave it. I’d stay in it.”
Since enlisting in 1971, Van Gilder has jumped out of airplanes and taught others how to jump out of airplanes. He twice tried to get sent to Vietnam, but as the war was winding down he never made it. Several people he worked with in Iraq now live safely in the United State thanks to his actions — work he did outside of his actual military duties. He’s a Green Beret, a veteran of a Special Forces unit that doesn’t exist in Montana anymore. He drove an M-48 A-1 tank and taught other soldiers how to fire their weapons.
He saw the Guard evolve over four decades. He was in Bosnia amid ethnic cleansing and when Slobodan Milosevic was captured, and in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured.
And, he said, he’s one of the few people still around who is certified in shooting a bazooka.
Stateside, he served a couple of terms as Mineral County Sheriff— at the time, the youngest sheriff/coroner ever elected in Montana. He was the first Montana sheriff to graduate from the National Sheriffs Academy in Quanitco, Va. And in 1992, CBS featured him in its “Top Cops” television series for the capture of a dangerous murder suspect from California.
Saturday at 5 p.m. colleagues, commanders and even some of the people he helped rescue from Iraq will honor him at a ceremony at the Service Club at Fort Harrison. (People wishing to attend should RSVP to his daughter, BreAnn Hebel, at breann@pixelek.com). He’s retiring as a CW4 Warrant Officer and the owner of a stack of medals and commendations.
When he wakes up Sunday, no longer a soldier, he’s not quite sure what he’ll do. He has a moose tag for hunting season, although some of his passion for actually shooting an animal has diminished somewhat following his combat experiences.
“It’s going to be tough for me,” he said. “A lot of the soldiers retiring, they can just shrug their shoulders and walk away. It’s going to be difficult for me to do that, but I’ve got no choice …It’s a life-altering event.”
But he’ll be fine, he says.
“I’ll get through it,” he said. “I’ll just take it one day at a time.”
Back in 1970, Van Gilder felt another duty — to his mother and sisters. He lived in Missoula but enlisted with a cavalry unit in Dillon.
One winter back then, storms were bad and roads impassable.
“So I went out to Fort Missoula, and being young and not knowing the process, walked into the front door of the 19th Special Forces Group,” he said. “And before the weekend was over, they had me transferred and enlisted.”
So he became a Green Beret, a jumpmaster and team leader.
“Being a member of the 19th Special Forces group was probably one of my proudest moments, one of the highlights of my career, because we were always doing something,” he said. “We were always parachuting, we were always doing survival courses and so this gave me an opportunity to travel around the United States to the different schools and attend training that I would have never attended otherwise.”
He stayed in the Special Forces until that unit was disbanded in Montana. He was transferred to Fort Harrison, and drove to Helena every month for more than 10 years until taking a fulltime job as a technician at Fort Harrison in 1990. There, he set up and ran the base’s Central Issue Facility, which oversees equipment for soldiers. Later, that meant issuing equipment to — and shaking the hand of — every MANG soldier deployed to the Middle East.
By 1999, he said, he was getting restless and deployed to Bosnia, attached to a Texas National Guard unit — the first time a Guard unit was given the command of a combat unit overseas.
He experienced several countries and cultures, along with a couple of skirmishes, dodging snipers and landmines.
Then, later, came Iraq, and Van Gilder deployed to Baghdad, serving as division property book officer for the Army Corps of Engineers, working under a two-star general and overseeing supplies, including a significant motor pool, and travelling by helicopter around the country.
In the Green Zone and outside, that meant a lot of enemy fire and all its consequences. During his 18-month deployment, about three to four soldiers were dying every day, on average, along with scores of Iraqis from suicide bombers and other violence.
“There was nothing safe about the Green Zone. Nothing,” he said.“We had indirect fire, we had mortar attacks and rockets attacks …They started about 6:30 or 7 o’clock and they just bombarded us every day. They’d just come out of the sky. We had casualties constantly, and injured and devastation. And this was right in the city. The city was a combat zone.”
The Tigris River ran roughly around Van Gilder’s office, and everything across it was Red Zone, from which mortars launched every day.
“We got hit daily,” he said. “Your adrenaline flow and your anxiety level was just sky high all the time. You lived in your clothes, and lived in your vest and hardhat and helmet and carried your weapon with you 24 hours a day.”
It was a 20-hour-a-day job.
“You worked until you couldn’t keep your eyes open, and you collapsed and you’d just get up and start working again,” he said.
The corps would build something, like a sewer system or a building, and terrorists would destroy it. For much of the time, the military was in reactive mode more than in an offensive mode, he said. He saw things, he said, no one should ever have to see, including having people walking on the street next to him shot by snipers. Iraqis who worked with the Americans were targeted by insurgents along with their families, and Van Gilder lost many friends that way.
“If you weren’t there, you don’t understand what it was like,”he said.
The criticism of the war in the media and among the American public was disheartening.
“The bottom line is they don’t know what they’re talking about,”he said. “The media, CNN and whatnot, obviously they’re broadcasting a story that makes them money, and a lot of it was true but it was very misleading. The stress the soldiers were under there was unmeasurable. It was just unbelievable.”
Still, Van Gilder calls the deployment rewarding — not pleasant or enjoyable, but rewarding.
“You come home with a renewed faith in God,” he said. “You come home with — I did anyway — with a lot more respect for President Bush. He had his plate full in trying to handle that war over there. And when you go over there and see what we’re trying to accomplish and you’re part of it, you just have a different viewpoint of it. The president really had his hands full, and you see the criticism he gets when you get home, and a lot of it’s not right.”
Nearly four years after coming home, Van Gilder is still getting used to it and says life will never be the same. There’s unexplainable anger; there are people here complaining about trivialities. Van Gilder lost 60 percent of his hearing and now has hearing aids in both ears and says he still can’t hear.
“When you pick up bodies and you do things you shouldn’t be doing, and you see little kids, they’re tore apart ... and all that stuff just comes back,” he said. “I live by myself, so I still wander around at night, and still go for long drives trying to sort it all out, and there’s no answers.”
Families back home are damaged too by the deployment and have a hard time communicating with and understanding the soldiers. Van Gilder said he was even spat upon, in Helena, by people opposed to the war, yet he seems to forgive even that.
“You just turn around and go away,” he said. “But the sacrifice the soldiers pay over there is unmeasurable. You can’t put it on paper. You can’t evaluate it. And we keep trying but every soldier comes home with different issues.”
While in Iraq, Van Gilder quietly helped about eight Iraqis immigrate to the United States through various programs. They’re living around the country, some now married with children, including a few in the Helena area. Many call and email him regularly to see how he’s doing. A couple will be at his retirement ceremony Saturday.
Counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder has been a huge help, and Van Gilder has nothing but praise for the VA hospital at Fort Harrison, which he said has taken great care of him physically and mentally, and the American Legion has done wonders to help him get his care.
“I don’t know where I’d be today if they hadn’t done that,” he said. “I’d be more of a wreck than I am. They’ve been wonderful.”
He resists comparing Iraq with Vietnam, calling them two different wars in two different eras. But at least the public treatment of veterans has improved.
“The recognition for soldiers is much better than it was in the’70s,” he said. “The treatment’s better. The benefits are obviously better. It’s an effort to try and compensate the soldier for what he went through, and no matter what it is, it will never be enough.”
http://helenair.com/lifestyles/community/a-hour-a-day-job/article_cbf99db2-eb35-11e0-b53c-001cc4c002e0.html#ixzz1ZRYZKyxO
Richard :munchin
A 20-hour-a-day Job
IndepRcd, 30 Sep 2011
Wade Van Gilder hasn’t missed a National Guard drill in 41 years. And today, he’s wearing his camouflage for the last time as a soldier.
“It’s going to be a big change for me,” he said a few weeks ago in an interview on his 60th birthday, as he reached the Guard’s mandatory retirement age. “If I didn’t have to leave the military I wouldn’t leave it. I’d stay in it.”
Since enlisting in 1971, Van Gilder has jumped out of airplanes and taught others how to jump out of airplanes. He twice tried to get sent to Vietnam, but as the war was winding down he never made it. Several people he worked with in Iraq now live safely in the United State thanks to his actions — work he did outside of his actual military duties. He’s a Green Beret, a veteran of a Special Forces unit that doesn’t exist in Montana anymore. He drove an M-48 A-1 tank and taught other soldiers how to fire their weapons.
He saw the Guard evolve over four decades. He was in Bosnia amid ethnic cleansing and when Slobodan Milosevic was captured, and in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured.
And, he said, he’s one of the few people still around who is certified in shooting a bazooka.
Stateside, he served a couple of terms as Mineral County Sheriff— at the time, the youngest sheriff/coroner ever elected in Montana. He was the first Montana sheriff to graduate from the National Sheriffs Academy in Quanitco, Va. And in 1992, CBS featured him in its “Top Cops” television series for the capture of a dangerous murder suspect from California.
Saturday at 5 p.m. colleagues, commanders and even some of the people he helped rescue from Iraq will honor him at a ceremony at the Service Club at Fort Harrison. (People wishing to attend should RSVP to his daughter, BreAnn Hebel, at breann@pixelek.com). He’s retiring as a CW4 Warrant Officer and the owner of a stack of medals and commendations.
When he wakes up Sunday, no longer a soldier, he’s not quite sure what he’ll do. He has a moose tag for hunting season, although some of his passion for actually shooting an animal has diminished somewhat following his combat experiences.
“It’s going to be tough for me,” he said. “A lot of the soldiers retiring, they can just shrug their shoulders and walk away. It’s going to be difficult for me to do that, but I’ve got no choice …It’s a life-altering event.”
But he’ll be fine, he says.
“I’ll get through it,” he said. “I’ll just take it one day at a time.”
Back in 1970, Van Gilder felt another duty — to his mother and sisters. He lived in Missoula but enlisted with a cavalry unit in Dillon.
One winter back then, storms were bad and roads impassable.
“So I went out to Fort Missoula, and being young and not knowing the process, walked into the front door of the 19th Special Forces Group,” he said. “And before the weekend was over, they had me transferred and enlisted.”
So he became a Green Beret, a jumpmaster and team leader.
“Being a member of the 19th Special Forces group was probably one of my proudest moments, one of the highlights of my career, because we were always doing something,” he said. “We were always parachuting, we were always doing survival courses and so this gave me an opportunity to travel around the United States to the different schools and attend training that I would have never attended otherwise.”
He stayed in the Special Forces until that unit was disbanded in Montana. He was transferred to Fort Harrison, and drove to Helena every month for more than 10 years until taking a fulltime job as a technician at Fort Harrison in 1990. There, he set up and ran the base’s Central Issue Facility, which oversees equipment for soldiers. Later, that meant issuing equipment to — and shaking the hand of — every MANG soldier deployed to the Middle East.
By 1999, he said, he was getting restless and deployed to Bosnia, attached to a Texas National Guard unit — the first time a Guard unit was given the command of a combat unit overseas.
He experienced several countries and cultures, along with a couple of skirmishes, dodging snipers and landmines.
Then, later, came Iraq, and Van Gilder deployed to Baghdad, serving as division property book officer for the Army Corps of Engineers, working under a two-star general and overseeing supplies, including a significant motor pool, and travelling by helicopter around the country.
In the Green Zone and outside, that meant a lot of enemy fire and all its consequences. During his 18-month deployment, about three to four soldiers were dying every day, on average, along with scores of Iraqis from suicide bombers and other violence.
“There was nothing safe about the Green Zone. Nothing,” he said.“We had indirect fire, we had mortar attacks and rockets attacks …They started about 6:30 or 7 o’clock and they just bombarded us every day. They’d just come out of the sky. We had casualties constantly, and injured and devastation. And this was right in the city. The city was a combat zone.”
The Tigris River ran roughly around Van Gilder’s office, and everything across it was Red Zone, from which mortars launched every day.
“We got hit daily,” he said. “Your adrenaline flow and your anxiety level was just sky high all the time. You lived in your clothes, and lived in your vest and hardhat and helmet and carried your weapon with you 24 hours a day.”
It was a 20-hour-a-day job.
“You worked until you couldn’t keep your eyes open, and you collapsed and you’d just get up and start working again,” he said.
The corps would build something, like a sewer system or a building, and terrorists would destroy it. For much of the time, the military was in reactive mode more than in an offensive mode, he said. He saw things, he said, no one should ever have to see, including having people walking on the street next to him shot by snipers. Iraqis who worked with the Americans were targeted by insurgents along with their families, and Van Gilder lost many friends that way.
“If you weren’t there, you don’t understand what it was like,”he said.
The criticism of the war in the media and among the American public was disheartening.
“The bottom line is they don’t know what they’re talking about,”he said. “The media, CNN and whatnot, obviously they’re broadcasting a story that makes them money, and a lot of it was true but it was very misleading. The stress the soldiers were under there was unmeasurable. It was just unbelievable.”
Still, Van Gilder calls the deployment rewarding — not pleasant or enjoyable, but rewarding.
“You come home with a renewed faith in God,” he said. “You come home with — I did anyway — with a lot more respect for President Bush. He had his plate full in trying to handle that war over there. And when you go over there and see what we’re trying to accomplish and you’re part of it, you just have a different viewpoint of it. The president really had his hands full, and you see the criticism he gets when you get home, and a lot of it’s not right.”
Nearly four years after coming home, Van Gilder is still getting used to it and says life will never be the same. There’s unexplainable anger; there are people here complaining about trivialities. Van Gilder lost 60 percent of his hearing and now has hearing aids in both ears and says he still can’t hear.
“When you pick up bodies and you do things you shouldn’t be doing, and you see little kids, they’re tore apart ... and all that stuff just comes back,” he said. “I live by myself, so I still wander around at night, and still go for long drives trying to sort it all out, and there’s no answers.”
Families back home are damaged too by the deployment and have a hard time communicating with and understanding the soldiers. Van Gilder said he was even spat upon, in Helena, by people opposed to the war, yet he seems to forgive even that.
“You just turn around and go away,” he said. “But the sacrifice the soldiers pay over there is unmeasurable. You can’t put it on paper. You can’t evaluate it. And we keep trying but every soldier comes home with different issues.”
While in Iraq, Van Gilder quietly helped about eight Iraqis immigrate to the United States through various programs. They’re living around the country, some now married with children, including a few in the Helena area. Many call and email him regularly to see how he’s doing. A couple will be at his retirement ceremony Saturday.
Counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder has been a huge help, and Van Gilder has nothing but praise for the VA hospital at Fort Harrison, which he said has taken great care of him physically and mentally, and the American Legion has done wonders to help him get his care.
“I don’t know where I’d be today if they hadn’t done that,” he said. “I’d be more of a wreck than I am. They’ve been wonderful.”
He resists comparing Iraq with Vietnam, calling them two different wars in two different eras. But at least the public treatment of veterans has improved.
“The recognition for soldiers is much better than it was in the’70s,” he said. “The treatment’s better. The benefits are obviously better. It’s an effort to try and compensate the soldier for what he went through, and no matter what it is, it will never be enough.”
http://helenair.com/lifestyles/community/a-hour-a-day-job/article_cbf99db2-eb35-11e0-b53c-001cc4c002e0.html#ixzz1ZRYZKyxO