Now this is happening to our ELDER CITIZENS!.....DYING AFTER BEING SENT TO IRAQ...this is going to turn whole communities against this VENDETTA WAR OF BUSH.....These are our citizens, fathers, business leaders....shipped off....HELD OVER for LONG TERMS beyond the call of duty....
In Iraq War, Death Also Comes to Soldiers in Autumn of Life
July 18, 2004
By EDWARD WYATT
AUGUSTA, Ga. - Master Sgt. Thomas R. Thigpen was 52 when he
fell dead of a heart attack during a touch-football game in
Kuwait on March 16 - a casualty that does not quite fit the
standard template of wartime tragedy: the fresh-faced
18-year-old cut down with the promise of a full life ahead.
He was not the oldest to die since the invasion of Iraq.
That would be Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney, 59, who
operated the machine gun in the door of his unit's Black
Hawk helicopters - the same job he performed in Vietnam -
and died after surgery for an intestinal problem. Sgt.
Floyd G. Knighten Jr., 55, serving in Kuwait in the same
unit as his 21-year-old son, died of heat stroke while
driving a Humvee without air-conditioning across the
scorching Iraqi desert.
In all, 10 soldiers age 50 or older have died in the Iraq
war, some of medical ailments that might have excluded them
from earlier conflicts, others under fire in the heat of
battle. That is a small percentage of the nearly 900
American service members who have died since the Iraq war
began, but it is 10 times the percentage of men in that age
group who died in Vietnam. It is nearly as many as those of
that age who died in the entire Korean War.
And those 10 deaths, if no sadder than those of the young
soldiers who never left their teens, have created a far
different, and perhaps surprising, landscape of grief. It
is a scene not of spring, but of harvest: a total of 11
grandchildren left behind, 21 decades of marriage, years of
service to communities, mortgages nearly paid off, and long
careers that were already pointed toward retirement.
"I told him, `Daddy, you're too old to be going over there
like that,' " said Liza Knighten, 57, who met her husband,
whom she called Daddy, 34 years ago near her home in the
Philippines while he was in the Navy. "He told me, `I'm not
too old to fight for our country.' "
The war deaths of middle-aged soldiers are a consequence of
a specific moment in American history. With a shrinking
roll of full-time soldiers and no draft to replenish it,
the nation's armed forces have had to reach deeper into the
Reserves and the National Guard, where men in their 50's
typically train and serve alongside soldiers in their
teens. About 5,570 of the 275,000 American troops in or
about to leave for Iraq and Afghanistan are 50 and older,
nearly all of them members of the Guard and Reserves.
The deaths raise questions about why older men, many of
them veterans and some in obviously questionable health,
are deployed to a war zone. Seven of the 10 died of heart
attacks or other "nonhostile'' causes, as the Pentagon
classifies them, while three were killed in combat.
Though the Army and other service branches have mandatory
retirement regulations that can kick in anywhere from age
55 to 62, depending on a soldier's length of service and
other circumstances, there are no age limits on the
battlefield. "If you're a soldier, you're expected to be
able to do your job and to go where you're needed," said
Lt. Col. Gerard Healy, an Army spokesman. "Where you're
needed is most likely to be in a combat zone.''
All members of the armed forces must pass periodic fitness
tests - meeting standards in push-ups, sit-ups and a
two-mile run - and military regulations require physical
examinations on base at least once a year for members of
the Reserves and the Guard. But medical assessments can be
subjective: A condition like high blood pressure, which
would bar a recruit from enlistment, is allowable in an
experienced soldier if it can be controlled through
medication.
Most of the older soldiers understood the potential
sacrifice they were being asked to make, because many of
them had faced it before, in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf
war of 1991. And if they or their families had doubts -
"Let's sit this one out," one veteran's wife urged him -
those misgivings were most often squelched with a nod to
duty, country and an almost fatherly sense of
responsibility to the younger soldiers they had taught.
Sergeant Thigpen, who lived here in Augusta, was to become
eligible for voluntary retirement from the National Guard
in June 2003. But that February, his unit was called up to
serve in Iraq, pushing his retirement back at least a year.
When his wife of 25 years, Theresa, visited him at a
training camp in Indiana before he left, "he broke down and
cried," she said.
"He said, 'I don't want to, but I know I have to go.' He
told me he had 19-year-olds, who he trained, crying on his
shoulder, and there was no way he could let them go by
themselves."
In Shape, They Thought
His scheduled return was more than a month away, but Mrs.
Thigpen, 50, had already packed their suitcases for a
Caribbean cruise when, in March, word came of her husband's
death. Now, their modest one-story house on the outskirts
of Augusta is quiet, its solemnity enforced by a glass
display case just inside the front door that confronts
every visitor with medals and pictures and memories.
Family photos of some soldiers in their 50's who died in
Iraq show that they were predictably soft around the
middle. Not Sergeant Thigpen. While he was a grandfather of
two, he was also a former marine who ran several times a
week and, defying the gray mustache that betrayed his age,
finished the Army's two-mile run in 17 minutes. He often
joked about being in better shape than anyone else in the
family, including his 31-year-old daughter and 24-year-old
son, and for years he guided scout troops and church groups
on hikes in the Georgia wilderness.
In the Middle East, he was stationed at Camp Doha, Kuwait,
while many of the soldiers he had trained in computer and
communications systems worked at Baghdad International
Airport. Mrs. Thigpen said her husband, dismayed at being
separated from them, had volunteered for a half-dozen trips
on a supply convoy to Baghdad.
Most days, before she went to bed and just as he was
rising, the couple would chat by instant messaging on the
Internet. Rarely did he complain about life in the desert,
but occasionally frustration surfaced, as when she urged
him to take a short leave to visit his ailing mother in
Georgia.
"If I leave here, I'm going AWOL, I'm not coming back," he
wrote. But he came home at Thanksgiving, and went back,
dutifully.
He seemed able to handle the rigors of a war zone, Mrs.
Thigpen said, but over the years there had been warning
signs among the high fitness scores. Three times - in 1994,
2001 and last October, while in Kuwait - Sergeant Thigpen
had gone to doctors or a hospital with chest pains.
A stress test after the second incident convinced his
private doctor that his heart was fine, and the military
doctor's diagnosis after the third was "basically acid
reflux,'' Mrs. Thigpen said. But after he collapsed during
the football game, an autopsy revealed that two arteries
were partly blocked.
In their daily chats, Mrs. Thigpen, an assistant manager at
the Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles who was also
active in the women's ministry at Augusta's HIS Community
Church, talked about wanting to take up the ministry full
time. The couple were contemplating ways to pay for her
return to college. Now, because of her husband's death, the
Army will pay.
"It just shows,'' she said, "you'd better watch what you
pray for.''
'The Last Time I Go Away'
Outfitting a 59-year-old National Guardsman for war
requires some unusual skills, like persuading a doctor and
an insurance company to approve and supply 18 months' worth
of anticholesterol and blood pressure medication.
Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney arranged all that. But if he
had any reservations about whether his health or age should
keep him from going overseas, they evaporated when he and
his wife of 32 years, Carol, sat down for a family meeting
with their 26-year-old son, Chris.
Chris asked one question: "Dad, do you want to go?"
"He
said, 'Yes, it's what I trained to do,' " Mrs. Chaney, 58,
recalled in an interview at her office at the Chicago
Botanic Garden, where she is director of human resources.
When her husband's unit was called up, Mrs. Chaney was
recovering from surgery and treatment for cancer, but she
did not ask him to stay. She knew he had a deep need to go,
a desire nurtured over 30 years. "Bill said he wanted to
finish what he didn't finish in Vietnam," she said. "He
said, 'This will be the last time I go away to war.' "
Drafted into the Army in 1967, he served for two years
before coming home to a nation where opposition to the
Vietnam War - and sometimes to the soldiers who fought
there - had not yet crested. Seeking to put his Army
training as an air traffic controller to use, he was told
it did not qualify him for a job in commercial aviation,
his wife said. So he went to work in a warehouse. He once
sought out other veterans at a V.F.W. post near his home in
Schaumburg, Ill., a Chicago suburb, but felt less than
welcome.
Where the military was concerned, "he was kind of bitter
about everything," Mrs. Chaney said.
Not until 1986, when a huge "welcome home" parade for
Vietnam veterans in Chicago attracted more than a
half-million people, including Sergeant Chaney, was he able
to begin putting those feelings aside. He began talking
regularly with veterans he had met there. Three years
later, he joined the Illinois National Guard.
This Mother's Day, May 9, Mrs. Chaney was surprised to
receive her husband's call from a military hospital in
Germany. He had been evacuated from the combat zone because
of severe abdominal pain and had undergone surgery to
remove part of his small intestine. They spoke a couple of
times that week, as his condition improved. But when she
called on May 18, he was dead, apparently of a blood clot
in his lungs. Military officials had not yet contacted her,
she said, and that has been a source of continued anguish
during the two months since.
While the sergeant was in Iraq, his unit's Internet
connection rarely worked. So Sergeant Chaney resorted to an
old standard of soldiers: handwritten letters. He described
Saddam Hussein's palaces and talked about the generals
ferried about in his helicopter. But he expressed little
fear, Mrs. Chaney said.
"He told me he was more afraid when he was in Vietnam," she
said. Comparing resistance fighters in Iraq with the
Vietcong, he told her, "I've dealt with professionals.
These guys are amateurs."
Father and Son, Serving Together
When the commander from
the Louisiana National Guard armory knocked on Liza
Knighten's door one evening last August, his message was
simple and somber.
"He said, 'Floyd died,' " Mrs. Knighten recalled. "I said,
'No.' Then I said, 'Which one? Because I've got two.' "
It was her husband, Sgt. Floyd G. Knighten Jr., a
55-year-old mechanic with the Guard's 1087th Transportation
Company, who had died of heat stroke during a convoy across
the Iraqi desert.
Her 21-year-old son, Specialist Floyd Knighten III, who was
serving in the same National Guard unit in Iraq, was safe.
But that, she said, eased the pain only so much.
Sergeant Knighten, a barrel-chested Vietnam veteran with
the stomach bulge of a middle-aged man, did not have the
physique of a combat-ready soldier.
"He's got a belly on him, but who doesn't these days?''
Specialist Knighten said. "He was a strong guy, with a lot
of upper-body strength. That helped him as a mechanic.''
Floyd Knighten III was just 8 when his father came home in
1991 after serving in the gulf war. "I told him then that
when he goes back to war, I'm going to go with him.''
Father and son shared a truck on two missions across the
Iraqi desert.
"We mostly talked about wanting to go home,'' Specialist
Knighten said. "He was thinking about retiring, and he'd
talk about the fishing trips he wanted to take. But it was
awesome just being there together, especially being at war.
I did feel like I was at home because I had my dad there.''
Back in Olla, La., a quiet town of 1,417 about 100 miles
southeast of Shreveport, Mrs. Knighten says she does not
feel at home, even though her husband's relatives live
nearby.
"Before he left, he said we could build a home in the
Philippines,'' she said. Now, she does not know whether to
stay or try to return there.
"I've got nobody here except my Daddy,'' she said, weeping
softly, as she often does these days, and brushing specks
of dirt from the photo affixed to his tombstone. "I grew up
with him. I'm not going to get over this.''
Needed at Home, and in Iraq
It took nearly a week for the
soldiers of the Third Battalion, 15th Infantry, Third
Infantry Division to locate the body of Sgt. First Class
John W. Marshall, 50, who was blown from the turret of his
armored vehicle as his unit fought its way into Baghdad in
April 2003. But then Sergeant Marshall never made things
easy for himself, or anyone else.
"I'll get rid of them in a heartbeat'' was his half-joking
prescription for dealing with incompetent or inattentive
subordinates, said Denise Marshall, his wife for 16 years.
Apparently he did just that on the run into Baghdad, taking
the place of another soldier who had been manning the
turret. His actions earned him the Silver Star.
A career soldier, Sergeant Marshall enlisted in the Army at
18 and worked his way up the ranks, serving in South Korea
and Germany. Early on, he took a five-year leave for
treatment of Hodgkin's lymphoma, but resumed his career. He
was eligible to retire in 2002, but as the prospect of war
in Iraq loomed, he decided to re-enlist.
He had plenty of reasons not to go. His son Richard, 16,
was suffering from night terrors that had started a few
years before, while Sergeant Marshall was stationed in
Kentucky and rarely home in Hinesville, Ga. His wife had
developed a disorder that left her temporarily blinded in
one eye and required surgery.
"I told him, 'Let's sit this one out,' " Mrs. Marshall
said. Her doctor had written a letter to her husband's
commanders asking his deployment to be deferred at least 30
days so he could help at home. "He read it,'' she said. "He
didn't like it.'' The letter sat on his desk while Sergeant
Marshall prepared to go overseas.
"His response was: 'I trained these guys, Denise. I really
need to be there.' I knew if he didn't go, somewhere down
the line, maybe in five years or so, he would look at me
and say, 'I should have been there.' ''
Now home alone with their three children in Hinesville, the
military town near Savannah that borders Fort Stewart, Mrs.
Marshall says she feels isolated. Few men from Sergeant
Marshall's unit have visited, she says, and none have
reached out to offer help with her boys, Richard and Kevin,
15. Though their house bubbles with the laughter of a
daughter, Jennifer, 13, and the shouts of
pre-kindergartners at the day care center that Mrs.
Marshall runs at home, the air of vitality can be
misleading.
Recently, Mrs. Marshall recalled, Richard asked his mother
about his father's attachment to his unit, and to the Army:
"Did Dad love them more than he did us?''
"No," she answered. "But he felt obligated to do everything
he could to get them back safe and sound. He just didn't
come back with them.''
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