Oral history: Iraq veteran ‘wouldn’t have missed’ it for $10 million

In the early-morning hours, a voice blared over a loudspeaker warning of incoming projectiles, possibly mortars or maybe rockets. Sleeping almost naked in the 110-degree heat, John Reed jolted awake, sat up and froze, his forgotten body armor and helmet lying just a few feet away in a little trailer.
This was his welcome to Baghdad, a place the liberal professor in his mid-50s never thought he would be. Never wanted to be. But now, looking back, it’s a place intertwined with his sense of self, his masculinity and even the coming of age of his daughter.
“It was one of the most important experiences in my life, perhaps the second most important after having a child,” said Reed, a retired lieutenant colonel who served 25 years in the Army Reserve. “The war was stupid, but I’m proud I was able to function in it.”

Reed understands that those who haven’t served in the military may have trouble relating to how he feels — how he can hate the war, but feel it was deeply important to be there.

He calls the nearly nine-year Iraq war, which ended in December, a war of aggression and a foreign-policy blunder that degraded the nation’s position in the world. But he also says it’s the only war he had.

“For that reason I’m proud, now, that I served in it and was able to return to my family basically the same man who had left them 11 months and 10 days previously,” he wrote as part of an oral-history project at the University of Utah, where he teaches history.

The project, Saving the Legacy, is being undertaken by the American West Center.

All of these complex and, at times, contradictory emotions stem from his childhood, worshipping his father’s World War II service and vehemently opposing the Vietnam War in his early 20s.

As a young man, Reed lived in California and participated in large anti-war protests in the San Francisco area. He was appalled at the military campaign and the casualties it was causing. He remembers jumping up and down when his draft number was improbably high, guaranteeing he would not be forced into the military.

When the war ended, he got a civil-service job helping Vietnam vets sign up for benefits. He got to know men who faced intense danger and had scars to prove it. He thought it didn’t make sense that they had to go, while he lucked out and stayed behind. He thought they had experienced “a quintessential masculine experience” that he had missed.

So at 30, he signed up for the Army Reserves. He immediately became an officer and fell in love with being a part-time warrior.

His unit never deployed to the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s. He didn’t think he would get called to Iraq or Afghanistan, either. But then another soldier, with the same rank and experience, broke his leg during training and, as Reed describes it, “the great computer in the sky plucked me out of my unit and sent me to Iraq.”

That was in April 2007. It stunned him and his wife, Gema Guevara. He was able to get a 30-day reprieve to get his life in order and prepare their nearly 10-year-old daughter, Camila, for his absence.

“We had to act as though it wasn’t a big deal so my daughter didn’t get panicked,” he said. “I referred to it as a long annual training.”

He flew to Fort Riley in Kansas for what turned out to be three months of drills and weapons practice. At first, he was angling to get to Iraq sooner, but as it turns out, the extra training allowed him to miss most of an extensive three-month shelling of the international zone, where he would be based. The key word: most.

His first 10 days in the country involved almost-daily early-morning barrages. At first, he just froze when the warning signals went off. But eventually, he got used to the drill and was able to get his body armor on, brace himself and just hope the projectile would hit elsewhere.

The shelling ultimately subsided and allowed him to focus exclusively on his job.

Reed was the lone man responsible for tracking the transfer of new buildings constructed by the U.S. government to the Iraqis. It involved overseeing a massive database and dealing with all kinds of problems, from basic looting to Iraqi police improperly using, and destroying, generators.

“It was completely futile,” he said. “To this day, we don’t have any idea what is where over there, even in some cases whether it was built at all. I would get yelled at a lot over stuff I didn’t have control over.”

The security situation made it too costly to monitor construction projects throughout the nation, so as much as 50 percent of each contract went to pay off locals to ensure the new building wasn’t bombed.

Reed spent 12 to 14 hours a day monitoring the list of projects, calling supervisors, trying to get local Iraqis to OK progress and take control of buildings.

He would make time each day to call his family, using a secure line transferred through Utah’s Hill Air Force Base. He would write his daughter a letter every few days.

The daily communications allowed him to stay involved in their lives, but he noticed they started to withdraw from him a bit, something he considered a healthy coping mechanism.

He says his daughter toughened up in his absence, finding a new self-confidence. He sees it as a happy, unexpected outcome from his service.

And his wife, Guevara, also a University of Utah professor, had only one demand when he returned home after 11 months. He had to retire from the Army, which he gladly did.

While he was in Baghdad, Guevara participated in anti-war rallies in Salt Lake City, something Reed wouldn’t consider doing now, despite his past experience. He figures he accepted the government’s money to be in the Reserve, so he needs to accept his deployment, too.

“It would have been incredibly undignified to do that,” he said.

And dignity is part of what he found in Baghdad. The troubled construction projects improved under his watch, even if he says it had little to do with his efforts. He received a Bronze Star for his service and a patch on the right shoulder of his uniform announcing that he served in the Iraq War.

He sometimes wonders what the Iraqis have turned his old office into, and tries to envision what it would look like to walk his old route to the U.S. embassy. In reality, he harbors no dream of returning to that place. Not now, not ever.

But he now understands this phrase from wartime veterans that he hadn’t understood before. “I wouldn’t do it again for a million dollars, but I wouldn’t have missed the chance for $10 million.”