Jewish Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Speak

From the Wisconsin Jewish Chronical

‘Grateful that I am alive’: Iraq war veterans reflect

By Andrea Waxman

of Chronicle Staff

Racine resident Tom Rodgers, a veteran of the Marine Corps and of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, would “absolutely” make the same decision and join the Marines again, if he had it to do over.

“It is such a big part of who I am. I wouldn’t change it for anything,” he said

Joshua Warren, 26, a Racine native and now a junior majoring in history at Seattle University, Wash., served in the U.S. Army for three tours of duty in Afghanistan and two in Iraq.

Though he decided to leave the Army after the death of a close friend and also to please his ex-wife, Warren said he too would not choose to undo his military experience.

Rodgers and Warren are two members of Wisconsin’s Jewish community who have served in the Iraq War and in Kuwait and Afghanistan, respectively. Both have ties to Kenosha’s Beth Hillel Temple.

Rodgers, 45, joined the Marine Corps in 1981 at the end of his freshman year of college.

“Being part of the military was part of my game plan for as long as I can remember,” he said. He would have joined right after high school if a girlfriend had not talked him into going to college instead.

Still, in the fall of his freshman year at Eastern Illinois University, the Homewood, Ill., native saw a fellow student wearing a Marine Officer Candidate School shirt and “interrogated the guy,” about the process of signing up.

It took until the following April to complete the process. Entering a platoon leaders course, in the Officer Candidate School, Rodgers said he liked the Marine Corps from the beginning.

Like Rodgers, Warren had also “always” wanted to serve in the military. “I spent a lot of time playing with cap guns as a kid,” he said.

My parents didn’t want me to play with [toy] guns, “but I turned everything I played with … into guns. And I painted my clothes and put tape on them to make them look like camouflage. [My parents] finally gave up [trying to discourage me,]” he said.

Warren enlisted right after graduating from high school in January 2001. After completing infantry and airborne training, he volunteered for the Ranger Indoctrination Program and joined an elite group of soldiers serving under the Special Operations Command.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coincided with Warren’s third day of Ranger training.

“I thought they were joking…. I thought it was another head game to get people to quit,” Warren said of the reports the Army was giving the trainees about the attacks.

In fact, many of his fellow trainees did quit when told they would most likely be going to war at some time in the near future, he said.

Conversely, Warren’s reaction was to get angry and excited, and that, he said, is why he stayed in Ranger training. “I thought, maybe there is a good reason for me to be here.”

After completing his training, Warren went to C Company, 2nd Battalion and was sent to Afghanistan in February 2002.

Reform backgrounds

Both Rodgers and Warren were raised attending synagogues with their families.

Rodgers’ mother was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in French Morocco. Her father, who died when she was 5, was a merchant and rabbi. She followed her sister, who had married an American soldier, to the U.S. after World War II, Rodgers said.

His father’s family came to this country from Rojawa, Poland, in the 1890s. Rodgers’ great-grandfather Rojeski was turned away at Ellis Island because he was a hunchback and his grandfather, then 13, was sent to Chicago alone and with a new, Anglicized name.

He eventually married a Polish Jew from Baraboo, Wis., and raised Tom’s father in a Reform congregation in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Tom and his two brothers grew up at Temple Anshe Sholom in Olympia Fields, south of Chicago, with the “famous German rabbi,” Frank Rosenthal.

Now a member of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Rodgers is married to Linda, a convert of Puerto Rican ancestry who is actively involved in the community, teaching in the synagogue religious school, among other activities. Rodgers has two daughters: Carolina, 7, and Simcha (Simi), 12, who will become a bat mitzvah this August.

Like Rodgers, Warren grew up attending a Reform synagogue. Though the Warrens resided in Racine, they drove to Congregation Sinai in Milwaukee for services.

Warren celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah there and credits his Sinai teacher, Adva Cowles, with providing the bulk of his Jewish education. She taught him, he said, that he was an American first and a Jew second. That may be why Warren did not consider joining the Israel Defense Forces, he said.

Calling himself “a pretty secular Jew,” he said he now celebrates Chanukah and Passover with his Catholic friends. He said his spiritual life has little to do with it. “I don’t see that God has a plan for us. Possibly war and divorce made me less believing.”

Jews in today’s military

Though part of a tiny minority of Jews in the American military, neither Rodgers nor Warren ever felt discrimination, either in the U.S. or abroad.

Rodgers said that the Marine Corp is small and he’s been in for a long time, but he’s only met six or seven Jews in his whole career.

Rodgers did experience one anti-Semitic incident early on but considered it a rare exception. Another trainee called him an anti-Jewish slur and they got into a fight.

But so many other Marines joined in to defend Rodgers, saying things like, “Ignore him; he’s stupid,” that the incident didn’t bother him much, he said.

There is little diversity of religion in the Marines, he said. The Marine Corps doesn’t care about race and religion, “It’s what you do and who you are that counts.”

“I didn’t carry my Jewish identity around as a chip on my shoulder and it hasn’t been an issue. I view everyone as equal and I expect them to view me that way too. I’ve been lucky enough to be judged on my own merits.”

Even in Iraq, where he was inclined to keep his Jewish identity quiet, Rodgers’ Iraqi counterpart learned after three weeks that he was Jewish. He had asked Rodgers a question about the Bible and when Rodgers answered, the Iraqi asked if he was a Christian.

When Rodgers revealed his Jewish identity, the Iraqi was “curious and inquisitive.” He later told Rodgers he had talked with his imam (Muslim spiritual leader) who told him he should treat Rodgers “special, like a brother or cousin.”

Rodgers said that he and his Iraqi counterpart had a good relationship, one of comrades in arms. “His opinion of me was mostly based on my skills as a leader. In a situation [a war] like that, certain differences no longer matter,” Rodgers said.

Warren, like Rodgers, did not encounter many Jews during his years in the Army. Though he said “there are probably more Jews in the Special Operations community than anywhere else [in the military],” he estimated that there were just 6 or 7 Jewish soldiers in his battalion of 900.

“The majority are white, rural and suburban kids, next [in number] are Hispanics and Asians and African Americans and [then] Jews.”

A bitter loss

Of his first tour in Afghanistan in 2002, Warren said, “most of the fighting was over. The Taliban and the ex-mujahadeen had moved into the mountains.”

Explaining that the Rangers’ “operational tempo is much higher” than that of other kinds of military units, because of the speed and intensity of the surprise attacks they specialize in, Warren said their tours ranged from just three to nine months in length.

He sometimes did “three, four, five raids a night for eight, nine, 10 days,” in which a four-man team would breach a door with explosives in search of a particular target. Much of the time, they did not have to fire their weapons, he said, as the enemy, stunned by the explosion, would simply give up.

Warren’s second and third tours to Afghanistan were each different. The second tour involved many vehicle-based raids including one stretch of “15 days straight with almost no sleep.” Warren described his third Afghanistan tour as “an enormous foot patrol” in the north, near the border with Uzbekistan.

During one of his domestic tours, Warren married a young woman he met while stationed at Ft. Lewis, Wash. After they married she also joined the Army, Warren said.

In 2004, Warren served two tours in Iraq, where he said the distances he traveled on raids were much shorter than in Afghanistan.

It was during his second Iraq tour, in September, when his team was ambushed and his friend, Nathan Stahl, a soldier under his command who Warren said, “was kind of like a younger brother to me” was fatally injured.

“He died while I was giving him first aid. And that led to me getting out,” Warren said. “I was a little scared and [my wife] wanted me to get out.”

Praying every day

Unlike Warren, who enlisted before earning his college degree, Rodgers graduated from Eastern Illinois in human resources management and was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1984.

He served on active duty in the Marine Corps until early 1989 and then joined the Marine Corps Reserve and was recalled in 1990 during Operation Desert Storm.

He served that tour in Honduras, but in 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, he was sent first to Kuwait and then Iraq. In Kuwait, he was stationed at a large military base, where he celebrated Passover with a Jewish chaplain and some 18 other Jewish service personnel from around the region, he said.

In May 2005, Rodgers returned to Iraq where he commanded a team of 11 Marines imbedded, as advisors, in an Iraqi infantry battalion. Originally planned as a seven-month tour, it was extended to more than 10 months.

Said Rodgers, “We engaged in combat and of the 11 Marines [in their 20s and 30s,] one was killed, three were wounded and two were relieved” due to combat stress.

This experience affected Rodgers’ spiritual life, he said.

“Needless to say, you get a whole new perspective on your relationship with God in a situation like that. I prayed every day and I pray every day, to this day. I always knew that I walked with God, but that experience makes me grateful that I am alive every day,” Rodgers said.

After his last tour of duty was completed in June 2006, Rodgers returned to his career as an executive in human resources. Still a colonel in the Marine Corp Reserve, Rodgers does not expect to be recalled to active duty unless “something big happens,” he said.

In the end, neither veteran of the war in Iraq expressed a wish to change his decision to serve in the military.

Besides the camaraderie that Rodgers enjoyed with his fellow Marines, something “that you don’t get in the civilian sector,” he said he is proud to be an American because of many of the things the U.S. is doing for less fortunate people.

“I’ve traveled [around the world], both as a civilian and as a Marine, and when I see the hardships, lack of freedom, poverty, and political challenges [that people in other countries experience] I’m proud to be American,” Rodgers said.

“We are [in the Middle East] to protect others and I’m proud of that. There is a lot of good that is being done there, medical treatment, building schools, supplying power…”

“We have made mistakes, but in the magnitude of the whole, we’re doing a lot of good,” Rodgers said.

He is concerned about the popular pressure in the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq.

“Whether we agree with the politics that got us there or not, … we are there and we own it now,” he said.

To leave would cause “a great injustice, not only to the Americans who have died, but also to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died. If we leave too suddenly there will be complete and total chaos and destabilization in the region,” Rodgers said.

Younger than Rodgers and not yet finished with his education, Warren struggled to find his place following his departure from the Army.

He wrestled with feelings of guilt that his friends were going back to Iraq without him, and loss of self-esteem that he was no longer a Ranger.

He tried counseling to help with his failing marriage, but he had difficulty connecting with the therapists. “There were huge communication gaps between me and these women with post-graduate degrees,” Warren said. His marriage ended in divorce.

Now, three years later, Warren has reconciled with civilian life and is planning his future. After graduating from college in summer 2009, he plans to go into the Army National Guard or Reserve and become a civilian fire fighter.

Later, he said, when he is older he would like to return to graduate school, earn a master’s degree in history and teach.

He said that the killing that his military job required does not bother him, from an ethical or moral standpoint. “I’m a soldier; they’re soldiers, whether they are wearing uniforms or not, and sometimes they die. I’m from a pretty liberal background, but it’s a war.”

2 comments

  • Terry Farrow

    THe American Jewish Community has some explaining to do. I surprised by the apparently low number of Jewish casualties, only 26 soldiers have received Jewish funerals to date from the data I can find.

    Additionally Israel has not sent troops to either war as near as I can tell, though no one doubts the security advantage the Afghanistan war may hold for Israel. Recall that the US aramaments in Israel used against Arabs was a principle motivator of 911 attacks as stated by the culprits themselves.

    I try to keep an open mind, but I’m curious why Jewish Americans haven’t seen this as a war that affects their community more than others and served? To quote one of the soldiers above: “The majority are white, rural and suburban kids, next [in number] are Hispanics and Asians and African Americans and [then] Jews.”

  • *rolls eyes*

    We’ll make sure to do a better job at dying to put your mind at ease. Or not so much. We’re serving in numbers proportionate to our community. I’m sure you’ve perhaps noticed that there are more rural Americans and urban Hispancis than there are Jews.

    Yeah, Israel entering a war, these ephemeral security gains you speak of notwithstanding, would be a wonderful idea, because other Arab states would be soooo happy about that. Iran, too, would be incredibly ecstatic about the involvement of Israel in two countries on their borders.

    The 9/11 terrorists were terrorists, pure and simple. If you think the casus belli for those toolbags is as simplistic as you’ve reduced it to (i.e. let’s ignore economics and the totalitarian nature of even the most democratic Arab governments and blame those Jews instead, because it’s easier), I should think you probably need to abandon reading just Stormfront.org for your sources.

    I don’t think you have an open mind any more than you have a shred of intelligence. Take your racist site trolling and go someplace else.