"You'll Get Back in Shape in No Time"

That's what the other guys I ride with were saying on Sunday, Monday and today. It was nice of them to say, but the truth is getting back to climbing hills is just as tough as coming back from breaking my neck. Hills that used to just look like hills now look like Alpine climbs.

On the 40-mile Sunday ride the two nasty climbs are about five miles from the start. But I was already gasping from riding up the long shallow hill at the start and the longer, steeper hill at mile 2. On the first big hill, the group slowed at the top for a stop sign just over the crest of the hill. There was no traffic, so I went through the intersection at 22mph and caught the group on the descent. On the next hill two other guys dropped to the back, so though I was lagging, I was not the caboose on the train.

From that point on I never stopped wheezing. We rode the rollings hills at a moderate pace--they talked I wheezed--until we crossed Rt. 222 on the south side of Lancaster. The pack sped up and stayed above 20mph for the next few miles. Just as we were about to turn up hill, I drifted back and watched the bright-colored group of a dozen riders disappear. Another guy was behind me. He said he was going to try to catch up; he never did. I turned back toward home at mile 18.

The next day I rode just 17 of 29 miles of the daily ride and it was very difficult.

I know i will get back in shape, but it will be months, not weeks till I can climb like I used to.

Back to Work

Today I took the 7:06 am train to Philadelphia. This is my first day back at work after just over a year. Annalisa and Nigel drove me to the train station (Annalisa actually did the driving) and I joined the big crowd that gets on the train in Lancaster--more than 150 of the nearly 300 regular riders of the Keystone train get on and off in Lancaster.

I saw a lot of faces I recognized. the faces looked a little older than when I left--which means my face looks older too. The 7am train riders are, thankfully, a very quiet group. They file onto the train. The regulars walk the length of the platform and sit in the last car. Sometimes there is no sound all the way to Paoli--two-thirds of the way to Philadelphia. The train was 15 minutes late this morning because we got behind a SEPTA local and could not go around it.

After leaving the train I walk across 30th Street and down into the subway station. The El train arrived a couple of minutes later. I rode eight minutes to 2nd Street then walked up Market to Fork restaurant. They bake bread every day. As I arrived the baguettes were just coming out of the oven. I love fresh bread.

I ate bread, checked out my new office and started a series for short meetings to get moved back in to CHF. I learned abut changes in the computer system, got my access card key back, heard about the medical benefits and started cleaning up email and voice mail.

I had a couple of meetings about plans for my work for the next few months and talked to many of my co-workers about Iraq and returning to civilian life. They all thought I looked very different in a blue pin-striped suit than in a camo uniform.

It's great to be back. I'll be going to New York on the 17th, Orlando on the 27th, maybe to Boston or Washington DC in between. I really am becoming a civilian very quickly.

Reality Check

One of the things I thought about doing when I returned home from Iraq was getting involved in local politics. Specifically school politics. I care a lot about education and thought I could be of some help just by being involved. My wife, Annalisa, said I could get involved right away by going to three simultaneous events at my son's school: Wharton Elementary School in Lancaster: dinner, Parent Advisory Council meeting, and Parent Teacher Organization meeting.

530pm--free dinner supplied by the school. Chicken fingers, mashed potatoes and applesauce for the kids, turkey, ham or roast beef "wrap" sandwiches for the adults. Water and iced tea were the drinks--no soda in school. Annalisa, Nigel and I got in line and ate at the green formica-covered tables that fold down from the walls in the gym. About a dozen families showed up for dinner.
6pm--we went upstairs to the library and the PAC meeting. PAC organizes events and support for teachers at the school. The only guys in the room besides me were a local bookstore owner in the audience, the head of the group, Nigel.
645pm--Annalisa and Nigel left for Nigel's basketball practice.
655pm--the meeting switched from PAC to PTO. The bookstore owner left. The meeting continued for another 45 minutes discussing PTO business and plans.

The 16 parents (14 moms, 2 dads) who attended the meeting were not attracted by the free food. I knew many of them, at least by sight. They are well-educated, involved in their child's education, encourage learning and reading by reading and learning themselves, are involved in the community, and are, therefore, not at all typical of the parents of Wharton Elementary or any other school.

In racing of every kind, you have to start to have a chance of winning. The people who show up are the people have influence. How we spend time and money are great indexes of what we really care about. It was interesting to see who really cares about education.

In Today's Sunday News

Jon Rutter wrote the final article about my Army adventure in today's Lancaster Sunday News (Local Section, Page 1)
Photos here


On the home front

Neil Gussman returns from Iraq, where he served the country in myriad roles, including base communicator.


Neil Gussman is back from the Army, at 56.

The Lancaster businessman has returned home after two years away from everyday midlife.

"Boy," the nontraditional sergeant quipped earlier this month, "it seems like I've been gone forever."

The military experience was rich, if sometimes exasperating, he added. And it was a lot different from his 12-year Army hitch that ended more than 25 years ago.

Back then Gussman was, among other things, a tank commander in Germany.

His more recent sojourn with the 104th General Services Aviation Brigade's Echo Company was covered in a series of Sunday News stories spanning nearly 2½ years. It included combat training at Fort Indiantown Gap and Fort Sill, Okla., followed by a 12-month tour in Kuwait and Iraq.

Gussman served at Tallil Ali Air Base.

He initially aspired to become a chemical weapons specialist and expected to pull weekend-warrior duty at Indiantown Gap. Instead, the Army activated his unit and deployed it to the Middle East.

There, as the war wound down, Gussman was given various tasks. He dispensed tools in the motor pool before getting assigned to photograph and write about life on the base.

His work appeared in several Army newsletters.

He loved the journalist job, especially flying aboard Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters during supply missions.

"The last few months have been really good," said Gussman, who downplayed the risk of living in a war zone.

"Hardly anyone fired a gun over there," he noted. "I fired my camera a lot."

Military life, examined
Still, Gussman admitted, "Iraq is more dangerous than New Jersey." Also, he wisecracked, the shampoo selection is scantier. And it's harder to obtain good fresh bread or feed his habit of following Formula One auto racing.

One of Gussman's first stateside projects will be to get himself to a New York City Jewish bakery.

He arrived in the United States Jan. 4, but could not immediately return to Lancaster, where his wife, Annalisa Crannell, and children have been holding down the fort.

First, Gussman and his friends had to go through three weeks of heel cooling at Fort Dix, the sprawling New Jersey Army base where overseas soldiers are processed.

It was a fit and squeaky-clean-cut Gussman who bicycled to the main gate on a recent Wednesday to greet some visitors. Dismounting and padlocking the bike to a post, the camouflage-decked soldier ducked into a car for a tour of his temporary digs.

GIs hiked here and there among low-slung brick buildings. The campus soil was sandy, the air piney. Big silver transports floated in and out of McGuire Air Force Base next door. Behind this purposeful facade, though, were grunts at loose ends.

A lone soldier slumped before a barracks TV, watching an episode of "Yes, Dear." In other areas, men and women were simply standing in line.

That was true at the M.G. Robert Mills Dental Clinic on Doughboy Avenue, where Gussman traded last-minute banter with some departing buddies.

Sgt. Jeremy Houck, of Lebanon, who turned 32 that day, reported helping Gussman with "the problems that young NCOs [noncommissioned officers] have, you know. It was hard to tame him down. I struggled through it."

Thirty-one-year-old Nickey Smith, of Connecticut, allowed that Gussman was a good man to share an air-conditioned trailer with, but a big contrast to Smith.

The younger soldier likes watching movies and listening to music in his down time. Gussman, who coordinated a book club in Iraq, prefers reading and writing.

"Nickey was worried about me culturally," Gussman said, and so he introduced Gussman to such films as "Full Metal Jacket" and "Batman."

"His typing skills put me to sleep every night," retorted Smith, who had not been persuaded to take up literature. "I read a blog [posting] or two of his," Smith said. "That was a book in itself."

Indeed, Gussman's latter-day Army life did not go unexamined.

He calculates that he's written about 75,000 words on his blog, armynow.blogspot.com, and recorded nearly 50,000 visitors since June 2008.

The site reveals Gussman's fondness for tallying. He figures he rode a succession of bicycles 5,200 miles while in Iraq, for example, competed in four bike races in the United States and the Middle East, read 15 books and bought hundreds of Green Beans lattes in Kuwait.

Gussman's work has attracted wide media attention; The New York Times profiled one of his stories this past Thanksgiving.

Lt. Col. Scott Perry, Gussman's commanding officer, tuned in with relish.

"Sgt. Neil Gussman is an eclectic series of mutually unsupporting disciplines, dichotomies and passions that somehow have blended into an exceptional communicative force," Perry wrote in the unit newsletter.

Back home, Scott Haverstick, Gussman's bicycle racing partner, also has been reading.

"Very interesting for those of us who would not be inclined to do anything like this on our own," Haverstick commented.

Haverstick said he admires Gussman but continues to puzzle over why his friend's desire to serve God and humanity "would manifest itself in this particular way.

"I hope he's done" with combat regions, said Haverstick, adding that he's also curious about Operation Iraqi Freedom's long-term effect on Gussman.

"Everyone seems to be changed by their tour of duty," Haverstick said.

Last week, though, Gussman seemed his usual eclectic self.

He said he plans to soon climb aboard a commuter train and return to work as a writer at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, an industry museum and library near Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

"I might write about some of the stuff I can't write now," he promised in his blog.

He'll have to get used to riding his bike without an M-16, and he can forget all about the 130-degree temperatures and blowing grit he faced in the Iraqi desert.

He'll stay in the Pennsylvania National Guard reserves until he gets booted at age 60. But he said he might head overseas again, if he could reprise his role as a journalist.

His unit will be activated next in 2012 — the year Gussman turns 59 — "which would be the absolute last minute I could go," he said.

"I would definitely go back. I know some of my friends think I'm crazy, but ..."

Back to Work

Before returning to work on Tuesday, I had a couple of articles to finish. On Thursday I finished an article for On Patrol: The Magazine of the USO writing on the train to and from New York. Last night I was writing my next column for "We're History" in Chemical Engineering Progress magazine. I am revising it now as the clock strikes midnight and will be up for another hour.
(Update through the magic of internet revision, I was up till 2:30am rewriting to include an explanation of why snails have blue blood.)
So I really am back to work--writing about weird topics at weird hours.

An Old Friend's View of an Old Soldier

On the way home from New York City Thursday night, I called Abel Lopez, one of my two best friends from when I was on active duty in the 1970s. If I haven't mentioned him before, Abel left active duty in 1978, a year before I did. He was the commander of the tank next to mine in Bravo Company 1-70th Armor in Wiesbaden. We talked a lot about faith and about life, the universe and everything when we served together and have kept the conversation up for past 32 years. 

Abel and I seldom see each other, but talk every month or two about our current views of the same things we talked about back in Germany. He went home to Chula Vista in San Diego County and became a Federal Fire Fighter. He recently retired from the fire department. I talked to Abel on the 100-mile drive from Trenton to Lancaster, from just over the Pennsylvania line to my driveway. If you think it is wrong to talk on a cell phone while driving you should stop reading now. 

Anyway, the first thing Abel asked when I got on the phone is what I think the summary of my year in Iraq is. "I don't know," I said. We talked for a long time. He, like my friend Meredith Gould, think I went a very long way to prove L. Frank Baum (Author of the Oz books) was right, "There's No Place Like Home." One of my goals in going to Iraq was to become less tied to the life of luxury I was leading. 

That didn't work. My previous posts on the things I have done, bought, etc. since my return to America make it pretty clear that self denial is not one of my strengths. Abel thought that if I write a book about this year, it ought to be for all the people he sees in California who get to be our age and think they can reinvent themselves. They need to figure out how to do the best they can with who they are. And given the considerable lengths I went to in finding out how much I liked my life, I could make fun of my self in a big way writing that book. It also fits with my sister's advice to write one of the currently popular "One Year" books. 

I do know now that joining the Army and serving in Iraq is a great way to clarify what you really want from life--at least it was for me. It also made very clear that goodness has so many forms that one life and one place can never support it all. It is yet another thing that draws me to life beyond this life. I love the beautiful, civilized, literate world I returned to. 

Today I went to the Evolution Table at F&M and enjoyed the conversation of 22 professors and local professionals about current developments in Life Science. Tuesday I return to work with co-workers who have an average of 2.2 college degrees. But I already miss the courage and laser focus I met every day among the men and women I served with in Iraq. I clicked my heels three times, I traveled a long way, but I can't figure out which end of the trip is Oz.

Adjusting to Beauty

Adjusting to being back "in the world" is an odd process with stops and starts. Today I was in New York. I drove to Trenton then hopped on a train and got to spend the day with several different interesting people. That part was just fine. But since these people were in different parts of the city I had several views of this vibrant metropolis.

The most jarring was the Brooklyn Bridge. I took the Park Street line to one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. I walked up the middle on the tourist path. There was a point where those cables sweep up in a beautiful arc--it is where the group of walkers are clustered on the right of the path in the photo above. At that point of the bridge I looked up along those cables. The sky was perfectly blue, not a cloud in sight. It was cold. The wind was blowing straight across the bridge deck at more the 20mph. The flag above the bridge pointed straight north.

I stopped and stared up for a long time. I walked a little further, but I was still staring so I stopped again. The bridge look so majestic and tall and clean. The sky line in every direction was brick and glass and steel. Planes and helicopters flew overhead. Boats made there slow way under the bridge in the shipping channel.

Everywhere I looked was a contrast to the low, dirt-covered, place I left. Trees and grass grew everywhere the concrete did not cover in New York. At Tallil the lawn was gravel. My senses were overloaded. I was in civilization. This is home.