A Soldier's Story

Army Ranger Brendan O'Donohoe's journey from Midd grad to war veteran came into sharp focus -- for him and his family -- when he returned from Iraq

Photographs by Bard Wrisley

It's Thanksgiving Day, and as I look across the dinner table at my 27-year-old brother, a collage of images from our childhood flashes before my eyes. Scenes from previous Thanksgivings and Christmases, sitting at this very table, emerge and fade and dissolve in my mind, one memory morphing into the next; throughout dinner, I glance at Brendan and can still see glimpses of that same childhood face. But now there's that jagged, angry scar that cuts along his cheekbone and comes within a centimeter of his right eye, a wound he obtained in Kosovo two years ago when a tree branch crashed through the glass of his Humvee. There's the weariness he wears on his face and carries on his shoulders that comes from parachuting into a war zone, from living on constant alert, from learning of the death of your best friend.

Sitting in our dining room amid familiar holiday smells of turkey and mashed potatoes, Brendan, a member of the Middlebury class of 1999, regales my family with tales of his seven months in Iraq, where, among other things, he found himself, at 26, the assistant mayor of the Free Northern Governance of Kirkuk, an area with a transitory population of 30,000 to 50,000 people. An Army Ranger, Brendan faced the dual challenges of fighting a war and helping calm the nerves of a restless country. As usual with my brother, many of the stories are filled with humorous anecdotes, but when he discusses friends he has lost and people he has left in Iraq, the laughter fades, and I realize that his scars go deeper than the surface of his skin. There is a darkness and melancholy in his eyes that I've never seen before, and since he last sat at our Thanksgiving table four years ago, he's changed in ways that I simply cannot understand.

Brendan joined the Army after spending four years at Middlebury studying English literature and molecular biology. He was the only one in his class to enter the armed forces after graduation, but Brendan had always been atypical. He has a thirst for action, an innate need for adventure, and, after debating whether to attend medical school or law school, he says he found himself at a crossroad, tormented by a lack of enthusiasm to begin a career in either of the fields. It may sound trite, but he says that he wanted to be challenged in ways that he had never been challenged before. So after spending countless hours at Proctor Dining Hall listening to two of his fellow classmates, Matt '02 and Joe '01 Napiltonia, weave exotic tales of their pre-Middlebury days as Navy Seals, Brendan decided that the Army could offer him the type of experience that he was looking for.

Not everyone thought his analytical nature would be best served in the Army. Terry Aldrich, the head coach of the Middlebury cross-country team, recalls Brendan as a "nonconformist," and remembers trying to persuade him not to join the Army. "Brendan is his own man," Aldrich explains. "He was the last person I thought would make it in the Army. I tried to discourage him from joining. I told him, 'I'm not so sure you're destined for this. They are going to try and break you down and make you a different person.' I didn't have any doubt that he could do it physically; I just thought that mentally he wouldn't be able to adapt."

Brendan tested Aldrich's doubts in January 2001 when he enrolled in Army Ranger School, an elite training camp where applicants face three months of starvation, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme weather conditions. Long, sleepless nights filled with unending marches through rugged terrain were the norm; for the soldiers, hallucinations were a constant; the desire for food, ubiquitous; sleep and warmth, a luxury.

"In Ranger School, the Army breaks you down so you are at your weakest, and then sees how far they can make you go once you're at this point," Brendan explains. "There's no doubt it's physically challenging, but I think it is more mentally rigorous. The ones who make it aren't the best athletes, they don't fit a certain type. In the end, the ones who have the sheer will to endure everything are the ones who make it through."

In a class of 247 candidates, Brendan was one of 21 people not to be "recycled," a euphemism for those who do not pass on their first attempt. On graduation day, a mere 137 pounds instead of his usual 197, Brendan realized that all the doubts he had subconsciously harbored since joining the Army, private doubts that silently echoed Aldrich's, had dissipated.

English professor David Price, Brendan's adviser at Middlebury and a former member of the Marine Corps, says he always believed Brendan was destined for military service and was not surprised by his training success. "Brendan reminded me of some of the best people I knew in the service," Price says. "He had that aggressiveness, that leadership quality, that edge about him -- a kind of sullen, smoldering sort of energy that really would not have been served very well if he had gotten one of the jobs people get when they leave Middlebury."

Sitting at the dining room table, I find it hard to contain my curiosity. I want to know so much: What was it like in Iraq? What kinds of things did he see? What were the people like? The conditions? What was he feeling?

Brendan tries to tell the rest of us what the last seven months have been like, but it seems hard for him to put his experience into words. "It's so difficult to distill into one anecdote, or one experience," he explains. "You can't really distill an experience like that, because there are so many different things that you see that assault your senses and open your mind to how different things can be, how terrible things can be."

I ask him if he was constantly nervous. After thinking about it for a moment, he explains, "It wasn't really nervousness. When I think of nervous, I think of running a cross-country race at Middlebury. That's probably the most nerve-racking thing I've ever done. For some reason, even jumping out of a plane doesn't faze me as much. It wasn't really nervousness; it was more like being constantly alert.

"You'd walk down the street, and you'd always be looking around. You'd notice slight movements in windows; you'd see every flicker of a shadow. You'd always walk down the middle of a street, because bullets trace down the sides. And then you'd do little things, like always park your car tactically, so you could get out quickly if you needed to. Things like that."

* * *

After Ranger School, Brendan was stationed in Vicenza, Italy, with the 173rd ABD, a unit that is responsible for areas in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. As the leader of the 1/508th Scout Platoon, Brendan was deployed several times to Kosovo for peacekeeping missions between the Serbs and Albanians, and he was responsible for conducting patrols and interdicting the illegal movement of goods in the fractured region.

When he returned to Italy, Brendan trained with the Italian Special Forces, and as the buildup to the war in Iraq began in the late months of 2002, the 173rd was put on alert. As the only forward airborne unit in the Army, the unit has only a two-hour window between notification and deployment; once an alert is sounded, they must be prepared to go by land, sea, or air to their target destination. As an executive officer, Brendan was responsible for the movement of the entire detachment's equipment into Iraq, a job that proved challenging, since no one seemed to know when the alert would be coming.

In the days leading up to the war, I was filled with anticipation and anxiety. During my last few phone calls with Brendan, I noticed that he seemed preoccupied, almost giddy. My entire family was filled with a sense of angst that soon became a way of life. As the media began to cover the events in Iraq with more intensity, it seemed to at once heighten and stifle our anxiety.

I remember listening to the broadcast of Operation Shock and Awe in my room at school, as if it were a hockey game. I couldn't turn it off, for fear that it would be disloyal to ignore what was happening. I remember thinking, I don't know where he is, but I can't pretend he's not there. The least I can do is listen.

My parents remained strong and resilient during a time my mother best describes as "nightmarish." They attended Support Our Troops rallies and always returned home to my younger siblings with dry eyes; any tears of worry were quickly wiped away by the time they walked through the door. My mother found solace amid other soldiers' parents, because only they understood what it was like to be paralyzed with fear every time they watched the news, to catch one's breath every time another soldier was killed in combat.

As if my parents' limits had not been tested enough, they soon faced another trial—my father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The emotional energy invested in doctors' appointments, surgery consultations, and trips to Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore battled with their anxious thoughts about Brendan; peace of mind was a luxury they didn't have.

While my family watched reports from the Persian Gulf on CNN, Brendan's unit jumped into northern Iraq on March 26, 2003, in the largest combat parachute operation since World War II. After establishing a foothold to bring in heavier combat power and supplies, his unit expanded outward. Conditions at the first site, Bashur airfield, were austere; ripped parachutes were used to construct makeshift shelters for protection from the blistering sun, and the unit quickly adapted to digging subsurface hide sites and working out of modified Humvees as communication shelters for the first few weeks.

The 173rd soon moved on to attack Kirkuk, seizing the military air complex and opening crucial aerial supply delivery routes. "You could see all the oil fields burning at night," Brendan says. "It was very difficult to get lost in Kirkuk, because all you had to do was look for the flames."

After seizing the city, Brendan's smaller detachment, the 74th LRS (Long Range Surveillance),  the "front runners" of the unit, pushed farther north to Dibis, a town centrally located among Iraq's richest oil fields. The 74th took over the Baath Party headquarters, located on a small cliff overlooking the Little Zab river, and set up security perimeters around electrical substations and gas-oil separation plants. As a first lieutenant, Brendan was tapped to establish a multiethnic police force, a tough assignment in a region where animosity ran high between Kurds and Arabs.

"It seemed like all the people in the region were protesting the fact that I was allowing Arabs to be a part of the police force," Brendan says. "I felt that many Kurds wanted to enact a certain amount of retribution, but that wasn't part of our agenda. So on the day that we announced the formation of the new police force, a large demonstration ensued. Since I was the police commissioner at the time, I guess they were protesting me, more than anything else." He laughs. "Well, just when the potential for danger seemed to be increasing, the new police recruits—the Kurds and Arabs, together—linked arms to form a protective circle around me and my men. I had only been working with them for two weeks, but they were still able to come together as a cohesive force."

Brendan's tour in Iraq ended on September 29, seven months after parachuting into Kirkuk. As a rapid-reaction contingency force, his unit is trained for 30- to 90-day missions, and while the seven-month stay was emotionally draining ("We were no longer a rapid reaction force," Brendan says), he left Iraq largely unscathed.

However, Brendan was to discover that others close to him were not as fortunate: one of his closest friends had been killed in combat. When Brendan talks about his friend, someone he personally trained, he breaks eye contact and looks into the distance, rubbing his head with both hands. His eyes mist over, and he whispers, "He was like a little brother to me. He risked his life to pick a guy up who had fallen out of a Humvee, and that sounds exactly like something he'd do. He got out of a truck when bullets were whizzing by and picked that guy up, trying to save his life. For him, I'm sure it was never a choice."

* * *

Back in the States, Brendan learns about events in Iraq just like the rest of us, and he's somewhat angered by what he sees and reads. "There is a huge disparity between what I'm seeing on TV now and what I experienced over there," he says. "I can't help but feel that a lot of the good things, normal-life things, are being left out."

Sitting across the table from me, it's clear that frustration is Brendan's greatest enemy now. "There is a psychological burden that you bring back with you," he admits. "Over there, things are bad, but you're in a place where you can deal with it. To be back here, there's nothing you can do, and you feel completely impotent. There, you just absorb the knowledge that something emotionally destructive has just happened to you, but you don't have time to think about it.  You put it away."

A back injury may cut short Brendan's Army career. Though he talks about joining the Special Forces, he says that if his back adversely affects his ability to deal with the physical rigors of being a soldier, he's not sure his place will be in the Army.

As we settle into our Thanksgiving feast, the doorbell rings, and my mom rises to answer it. She calls Brendan to the door—a few neighborhood girls have come by with a plate of brownies to welcome him home. As he chats idly with them about former high school teachers, I notice my mom dart into the bathroom and emerge, blotting her eyes with a tissue. Now that everyone is home—healthy and safe—she can shed her tears.

Nuala O'Donohoe '04 is a senior from Needham, Massachusetts.