Determined to serve
By VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian
Cary Monbarren, at his home in Missoula on Wednesday, talks about some of his experiences in Iraq as a staff sergeant with a National Guard unit. Monbarren, who has been deployed in Iraq since April, will return in a few days after a two-week leave.
Former Marine recruiter went the extra mile to get to Iraq - now, he's going back
For five years the United States Marine recruited young men and women from western Montana to join his branch of the service. His desire to become an officer led him from the Marines to the Army Reserves in 2002.
About the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, two things happened. His unit was called up and sent to Fort Carson, Colo., to help deploy troops from there. Meantime, people - mostly teenagers - he had recruited, were being shipped to Iraq to fight a war.
For Staff Sgt. Cary Monbarren of Missoula, there were no two ways about it.
"A lot of kids I put in the Marines were being sent to Iraq. I couldn't sit here in the states and watch them go. I had to be a part of it," he says.
He jumped through a lot of hoops and, he admits, "probably burned a lot of bridges." But he arranged a transfer to a Nebraska National Guard unit that was about to be deployed to Iraq.
Last April, days after the U.S. began bombing Iraq, he arrived for a three-month tour of duty.
Which became six months. Then nine months. On Jan. 1, Monbarren came home to his wife, Melissa.
He leaves for Iraq again Friday. Nine months has become a year, and his brief trip home is strictly R&R.
Monbarren has watched rocket propelled grenades shoot past the windshield of his truck, and sat in one of Saddam Hussien's marble hot tubs. He has baked in 130-degree days, and shivered through 30-degree nights.
He has eaten a pound of sand in Iraq's fierce sandstorms, bathed in bug repellent, and shared a meal of rice and goat leg with villagers.
"Best food I've had since I got there," laughs Monbarren, who lost 30 pounds in Iraq.
He'd do it all again in a second.
"Watching the news on TV while I'm home, it's kind of strange," Monbarren says. "It's all about how many people died today, how the Iraqis don't want us there. But when you're on the ground, it's a different story. You should see the look of little kids when you give them water. You see people cheer when you drive through their town. It's very different from when I first got there. We're out building schools now, getting medical help to people. It's not all about what got blown up today. We're doing good stuff."
Monbarren is the supply sergeant for the Nebraska National Guard's 1057th Transportation Company. While his job before deployment was, one way or another, to get his unit what it needed, be it size 16 combat boots or 50 plastic water cans, his duties are now many and varied.
He's worked security at a chemical plant and hauled an Egyptian doctor around the countryside.
"I've helped train Latin American troops in convoy operations," Monbarren says. "That was interesting."
It wasn't just that the Salvadoran, Dominican and Honduran troops spoke no English, and Monbarren spoke no Spanish.
Many of them had never driven a vehicle of any kind before.
"Try training someone who's never driven, to drive a 5-ton truck using hand signals only," he says. "That's an experience."
His unit spent time with the Multi National Division in Al Hillah, near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. There, he met troops from Poland, Rumania, Slovakia, Hungary, the Philippines and Mongolia.
"It was like being in the U.N.," Monbarren says.
"One of the great things about being in a transportation company is your job is to move troops and supplies around," he says. "So you really get to see the country instead of being stuck in one place."
Many units fly their state flags over their tents - although Monbarren's outfit flies not the Nebraska state flag, but a Cornhusker one - and he says he's run into countless Montanans on his journeys across Iraq.
"From my very first day there, when I get off the plane and right there in front of me is Lee Haldorson, who I used to work with in the recruiting office in Missoula," he says.
At one point, when his unit received an overshipment of ice, Monbarren hauled the extra treasure out to give it away and spied a Montana flag. Turned out to be the 889th Quartermaster Company out of Great Falls.
"Cat fan or Griz fan?" Monbarren asked the soldier in front of one of the tents.
"Um, Cat fan?" the soldier answered.
"Sorry," Monbarren said, pivoting away.
"No no no!" the soldier cried. "Griz fan! Big Griz fan!"
The 889th got the coveted ice.
While they've had close calls - "One thing about the Iraqis, they're terrible shots," he says - Monbarren's unit has sustained no casualties. One soldier did have to be shipped home when he came down with Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease transmitted by the bite of sand flies. The bites, Monbarren says, "spread and never heal. You end up with huge scars. If you get it internally, you can end up with lesions on your organs that can kill you."
Sand flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes are a constant worry.
"You bath in bug repellent and sleep under a net," Monbarren says. "You spray the nets, you spray your cot, you spray your body."
One of the people in his unit brought along a 5-inch DVD player - "You ought to see 30 guys try to watch a 5-inch DVD player," he says - and one night Monbarren was trying to watch it from across the tent, through both the netting and the crowd.
"This giant shadow came across my face," he says. "It was what they call a camel spider. It doesn't have a mouth, it has a beak."
With a 2-inch wide body and 5-inch long legs, it can cast an impressive shadow for a spider (although it's neither spider nor scorpion, but belongs to its own order called solifugid).
"For entertainment, guys like to catch a camel spider and a scorpion, throw them in a bucket and let them duke it out," Monbarren says.
Taking the scorpion to win is usually your best bet, he adds.
Melissa Monbarren saved Christmas for her husband. Due back on Jan. 2 for his leave, Cary bought presents for her everywhere he stopped on the long trip home to go with his big gift, a digital camera.
In Iraq, he got her a T-shirt that reads "Harley Davidson Baghdad - Opening Soon."
In Kuwait, a coffee mug that says "You bastard, you sent me to Kuwait." He also bought her gold there, and some beautiful Egyptian blown glass (that survived the 7,000-mile trip home, but a crushed Melissa accidentally dropped the day after she opened it).
They didn't let him off the plane in Crete, but in Germany he purchased a beer stein for her. In Portugal, a colorful ceramic chicken.
And in Baltimore, he got her the best present of all.
"I was supposed to go from Baltimore to Atlanta to Dallas, lay over there, and get home on the second," Monbarren says. "I was going through customs, and there was this lady in front of me who had a box with a Missoula address."
Monbarren asked the woman if she was from Missoula. She was. He asked if she was doing the Baltimore-Atlanta-Dallas layover-Missoula trip. She wasn't.
"I'm flying directly out of Baltimore as soon as I clear customs," she told him.
"There's a place there in the terminal where you can turn left and go into the regular terminal, or turn right and stay in the international terminal," says Monbarren, whose plane was continuing on to Atlanta. "If you go left, you can't get back in."
Monbarren turned left and followed the woman to the Northwest Airlines ticket counter in the hopes they'd have a seat.
They did - but it would cost him extra to change his ticket.
"I told them, 'I don't care; I'll pay anything to get home tonight.' "
Then they told him what the extra charge would run him: $900.
"I'll pay anything but that," Monbarren said.
Fortunately, a Northwest Airlines employee a little higher up in the hierarchy overheard the exchange. She asked Monbarren where he was coming from.
When he said Iraq, she not only waived the $900 surcharge. She upgraded him to first class.
Monbarren dashed to a phone and called Melissa.
"I won't be home tomorrow," he told her.
"I just freaked out," Melissa says. "Then he told me he'd be home that night."
"That was her Christmas present from Baltimore," Monbarren says.
He got home at midnight. They celebrated Christmas right then.
Two days later, on Jan. 3, they had Thanksgiving dinner.
"I've gained back 10 pounds since I've been here," Monbarren says. "We've been to every restaurant in town."
Northwest Airlines not only got him home a day early, and in style - a stewardess even gave him a bottle of wine and two wine glasses to help him and Melissa celebrate his return - it also found him return tickets on a different airline that let him extend his stay by a day.
"It's getting close to the countdown," Melissa said Wednesday. "I'm getting very emotional. But my job is to support him and take care of things at home, so he can focus on his job as a soldier."
Before they married, on Aug. 18, 2001, Melissa says her then-Marine made it clear that if America ever went to war, he'd be going.
"Even if he wasn't in the service at the time, I knew if there was a war he'd join up again," she says. "It hasn't been fun and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. But I'm so proud of him. How many people can say they've been part of the liberation of a country from a ruthless dictator?"
"I think it's going to be tougher to leave this time than it was the first time," Monbarren says. Melissa agrees.
And what's he taking back to Iraq?
"Maybe a McDonald's wrapper with a grease spot on it," Monbarren says. "A little scratch and sniff action. And pictures of snow. I'm definitely taking as many pictures of snow as I can."
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