Veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan to Retire on September 11

 

Master Sgt.Pamela Bleuel (left) in Afghanistan

In July 2009 I was pushing my bike toward a gap in the blast wall on Camp Adder, Iraq.  I lived in a trailer on the other side of that wall. A soldier wearing a bandana over her nose and mouth walked toward me and asked why the hell anyone would ride a bike in wind like this.  

I don't remember my answer, but Pamela Bleuel and I started talking about being old soldiers who enlisted late and had three college-age daughters back home.  She was 43 at the time, I was 56.  

Now she's 56, a master sergeant, and retiring on Saturday, September 11.  She enlisted in the year 2000 at age 35 to pay off her student loans.  She is a math teacher.  She liked the army a lot more than she expected, became a drill sergeant and when I met her was training troops in convoy security on Camp Adder.  She wanted to be convoy security but the rules at the time did not let her. She stayed in Iraq for two tours, then was in Afghanistan five years later. 

I visited Pam in her home in Kentucky in 2010 and 2014 and was thinking I would be visiting again this year, but plans changed. Maybe next year. I wrote about Pam when I was in Iraq in 2009.  Here's the story:

"I'd rather be digging a damn ditch than sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned office pushing FRAGOs (Fragmentary Orders)." That was one of the first things Staff Sergeant Pamela Allen Bleuel said to me when I met her walking across on open area in a sandstorm. She is a cheerful, imposing, funny woman of 43 who joined the Army Reserves on a whim just before 9/11 and now has an intense love-hate relationship with life in camouflage.

Until last month SSG Bleuel was the sergeant in charge of the convoy training school here on Camp Adder. She taught troops how to drive and fight in convoys and how to best use the ungainly MRAP fighting vehicles that are now the standard troop carrier across Iraq. She loved convoy training and did not mind when her tour was extended. When she did the unit she went to decided her training as a military police officer would be best used processing FRAGOs--the daily changes to orders that bubble through the military system day and night.

Bleuel loves being outside, moving troops, and has no desire to sit in air conditioning, but she will do the job as well as she can until the end of her extended tour. 

She joined the reserves in 2000 at age 35 with no prior military experience at all, because she saw two soldiers hanging up a sign in the small town in Kentucky where she lives. The sign said the Army would repay student loans for reserve soldiers. She had three daughters between 8 and 13 years old at the time, taught math at the local high school and had $30,000 in student loans. She signed up. She went off to basic at the end of the school year, trying to fit basic and advanced training into the summer break. Training did not quite fit her school schedule and she was just about done with training when the 9-11 attacks hit.

At that point she just wanted to serve and was jealous of the regular Army soldiers who were whisked away to airborne schools and other assignments. She served as an MP until 2004 when she trained to be a drill sergeant. Every summer after that she would "push troops" through Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the 11-week summer break at her school district. Her experience as a drill sergeant and an MP lead her to convoy training here in Iraq.

 
Now she is ready to go back to being a drill sergeant part time and a full time teacher. "Each year it gets easier to go back to pushing troops and harder to teach school," she said. "It's not the kids. It's the damn parents." She then gave her version of the teacher's lament that parents call her, email her, come to school to say their little child is special. "In the Army you don't deal with that. Mom doesn't call basic training," she said.

 
She also likes the structure and clarity of Army life, at least in training. "We have a goal; get the trainees ready to be soldiers." She also likes the deference of soldiers when compared to civilians. "When I get back from Knox and I am in a crowd at Wal-Mart, I wish I could yell 'Make a hole' and have everybody get out of my way."

 
Bleuel's wall is covered with pictures of her three children. She is very proud of them--even the one who, "Is a liberal and wants to save the whole damn world. She voted for Obama. We don't talk about politics." Bleuel is somewhere to the right of Oliver North politically and hates everything about France, which is a double layer of irony given her name.

 At age 43 she has eight years of service and will have to decide soon whether she will make the Army a career or not. I'm guessing she will. The look she has in her eyes when she talks about basic training and convoy ops is not there when she talks about Algebra 2.

 

Faith in the Military: Another Friend For Life

In 1979, I was assigned to the Wiesbaden Military Community Headquarters.  For the first few months of the year I shared a room with Air Force Sgt. Cliff Almes.  His discharge date was May 2, 1979, my 26th birthday.  He did not go home like everyone else.  On that day I drove Cliff from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt in my 1969 Renault TS with a 4-speed shifter on the column. 

Also on that day, Cliff began 10 months in the novitiate of the Franciscan Brotherhood at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt.  He later became Bruder Timotheus. He is still there. He is also an American so he fixes things at the monastery and for the last 15 years has been the network administrator for Kanaan Ministries. 

Every week from May until I left for America in November, I visited Cliff in Darmstadt.  I worked for the base newspaper at that point.  It was printed in Darmstadt so I volunteered to go to the printer each week.  I would have lunch at Land of Kanaan and eat with the novices.  Kanaan was created in the rubble of Darmstadt after World War 2 by two women who ministered to bombing victims during the war.  

Seeing these young men from all over the world training for a life of poverty, chastity and obedience opened another world to me beyond America.

Bruder Timotheus is another friend who I have kept in touch with and occasionally visited since our time together in Wiesbaden.  It is one of the stranger aspects of modern life that Abel and Cliff, two men I consider the best friends I have, are a continent and an ocean away in Germany and San Diego.  But the modern life that allows us to be so far apart also lets us keep in touch no matter where we are.  Going to Iraq in 2009 was no interruption in our monthly phone calls.  

I visited Cliff in Germany twice in the past 15 years.  I hope to do it again someday.  

Faith in the Military: Friends for Life

In the middle of the picture above is Sgt. Abel Lopez.  This shot was taken in the Bravo Company, 70th Armor, motor pool in 1977.  We wore gas masks two hours at a random time every week. While we were masked we continued normal activity.  On this rainy day in Germany, normal activity included a Can-Can Dance.

And they are good.  I believe it is Gene Pierce on the left and Donnie Spears on the right of Abel, but I am not sure.

I listened to dozens of sermons and read books the base chaplain suggested.  Abel and I talked about everything we both were learning.  We were both trying to figure out what it meant to be a believer and what we should do to follow the Lord.  

C.S. Lewis said in his book The Four Loves that friends separated by time and distance will, when reunited pick up the conversation where they left it.  All through 1977 in the motor pool or in the field, when we had down time, Abel and I would start talking about prophecy, worship, versions of the Bible, books about the Bible, a sermon one or both of us heard, or a thousand other topics.  

In 1978, when I got assigned to Brigade HQ, the conversation had more interruptions, but it kept going.  In 1979, Abel finished his tour and went home.  Ever since we have talked about once a month, though sometimes circumstances keep us from talking for a few months at a time.  Thirty-five years later, we are discussing what we each read, where we go to Church, who we fellowship with, and should a Christian be involved in politics.  Less than a week ago, prophecy came up again when Abel and I talked.

One of the things that led me to re-enlist in 2007 was the hope of finding really serious believers to talk with.  I never met civilians who talk about faith the same way soldiers do.  

This series is clearly going past Holy Week.  I want to get to Iraq and I have not yet said how Jerry Falwell made me a Democrat.  I will get to that later this week.

Making a New Friend in a Locker Room

When I got home last night I said exactly that to my wife:  "I made a new friend in the YMCA locker room tonight."

After many years of listening to my jokes, she was waiting for a punch line.  But it was not a joke.

And she thought I made this friend in a "Very Neil" way.

I stopped at the YMCA to swim after driving back from Philadelphia.  The pool is not very crowded after 9 pm, so I swam my exhausting 300 yards--my next post will be how hard it is to learn how to swim at 60 years old.

After swimming I went to the locker room to change.  There was no one in my section of the locker room, but across the row of lockers another guy was changing and playing Rap music on his iPhone.  In three months of going to the Y I never heard anyone play music in the locker room.  I didn't want to hear his music and I had my iPhone, so I started listening to my current audiobook:  The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  It is read by a guy with a British accent.

A couple of minutes later, another swimmer opened a locker near mine to get changed.  I shut off the audiobook.  He asked "Was that a British recording?"  I told him what it was.  He said he went to high school with a girl who married Solzhenitsyn's son.  I asked if it was the son who plays the piano.  He said yes and as we got dressed to leave we started talking about Russian lit, Medieval lit. and science education.

We kept talking outside.  It was a lot of fun to meet a guy half my age who has read Tolstoy and wants to read Dante.

It was a great way to end an evening--thanks in part to Rap music.