Editor’s note: This is the final profile of Marching Orders, season 1. Read previous profiles at ThisWeekNEWS.com/MarchingOrders. Craig Morin, 30, of Columbus was a U.S. Army officer in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, advising the Afghan National Army during Operation Enduring Freedom.Morin was born in Cincinnati and grew up in the nearby suburban village of Evendale – what he called “typical suburban life growing up” – as the youngest of three brothers. While growing up during the military deployments of the century’s first decade, Morin said, he developed a “desire to serve and participate in what I thought was going to be the defining event of my generation.”“I was looking for an adventure, and I had a strong desire to do something physical. I wasn’t ready at 22 years old to sit behind a desk,” he said.After attending Princeton High School, he attended Ohio State University, graduating in 2011 with a degree in philosophy, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant through the Army ROTC program.He said he chose a philosophy major because he was interested in studying ethical decision-making, which would be important for a role in the military.Morin quenched some of that thirst for adventure during airborne school, part of his training for becoming an Army Ranger. His first parachute jump was the easiest, he said.“I think you’re so excited, yet the adrenaline is going so hard that you’re not particularly aware of all the things that could potentially go wrong. By the time my last jump came around, I was very much aware of those things,” he said.Although he and the soldiers carried no military gear during their first jumps, Morin was loaded with equipment when he made his final jump, which was at night.That jump was a little scarier by comparison, he said, but he enjoyed the experience, watching the silhouettes of other parachutes around him.On active duty as a platoon leader, he wasn’t expecting to be deployed to Afghanistan – until he saw most of his battalion had been deployed.Morin was in the part of the battalion that had deployed three months later, he said. He was told he would ship out in seven days and had four days to visit his family.In Afghanistan, he was stationed at Forward Operating Base Tagab in Kapisa Province, with the 2nd Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division. “I worked on a small advising team that was responsible for mentoring, training and coaching the Afghan National Army,” he said.Partnering with host-nation forces comes with a host of struggles, such as building and maintaining relationships, he said.“My primary counterpart was an Afghan company commander. This man was a hero to his men and had spent his adolescent and adult life fighting the Taliban,” Morin said. “I was a young lieutenant from another country with no combat experience. Navigating that credibility gap was vital, and maintaining rapport with him was the most important thing I would do while I was there.“Together, we would plan and execute various patrols. It was my job to help with the command and control of those patrols and also help integrate U.S. assets – air support, medical evacuation, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,” he said.The Afghan company commander was an aggressive fighter, Morin said.“In the Afghan culture, the idea of pride is a lot more important. So there were times he’d seek out the opportunity to kind of go toe to toe with the Taliban and assume some risks that, if I was commanding forces on the ground, I would not have necessarily done that,” he said.Maintaining the right relationship with the Afghan commander was vital, Morin said.They had disagreements, he said, adding that he occasionally had to use motivational tactics. He also had to accept some of the risks, he said, because if he didn’t have a good relationship with the commander, the U.S. unit that succeeded him wouldn’t either. The Afghan commander’s approach, Morin said, was tailored to a longer, broader war, and his subordinates followed his example.The terrain surrounding the base was a flat plain next to steep, high peaks, Morin said. It was brutally hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter.“Christmas was actually a day I look back on pretty fondly,” he said.Bad weather had grounded air support, so no patrols were underway. He played Monopoly and watched movies all day. It was the first time he watched “It’s a Wonderful Life.”As the U.S. footprint was downsized in Afghanistan, Morin’s unit was transferred to Bagram Airfield, a facility so large it had a bus line running from one side to another.One day when his team’s lead operations adviser, a captain, was out for a run, he spotted two Afghans trying to break into a fenced-in motor pool, Morin said.The captain noticed bomb-making materials when he confronted the pair, resulting in a hand-to-hand fight in which he killed one of the men, injured the other’s throat and sustained wounds.The second would-be bomber was apprehended at the base gate, identified by his throat injury.Morin’s own unit left Afghanistan without sustaining any casualties, he said.Morin said he had a feeling of isolation when adjusting to civilian life. After years of training and the Army, he was given a week of training on the transition to being a civilian, most of it focusing on job coaching and building a resume.Several of the men who were in his company in Afghanistan since have committed suicide, he said.Morin said he has been in therapy for three years and “couldn’t recommend it more.”“I’m only now seeing the real benefit of that process,” he said.Adjusting to civilian life requires finding a way to take care of oneself in a meaningful way, he said.Morin is a project manager for Hot Chicken Takeover, a Columbus-based restaurant chain specializing in Nashville-style hot chicken.The company has a “fair chance” policy and employs people who have been homeless or incarcerated or who have had drug problems – “people who in other environments might feel a sense of isolation,” Morin said.Working with others who are trying to move beyond their past has been helpful to his own transition, he said.Morin’s decorations include the U.S. Army’s Ranger Tab, Expert Infantryman Badge, Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, Army Commendation Medal (with oak-leaf cluster), Army Achievement Medal (with three oak-leaf clusters), National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon and NATO Medal. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

ThisWeek Community News: Marching Orders

Craig Morin of Columbus, Ohio: U.S. Army, Operation Enduring Freedom

Michael Pohorilla, 95, of New Albany flew 35 combat missions over German-held territory as a first lieutenant and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress navigator in World War II.He was based in Great Britain as a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Eighth Air Force. The 10-man crew on his bomber ranged from 18 to 22 years old, “barely out of high school,” he said.“When you’re young, you think you’re invincible. ... Just a few microseconds in combat and you become very, very humble,” he said. “God was my co-pilot, no question about it.”Pohorilla was born in eastern Pennsylvania and graduated from Girard College, a 12-grade school in Philadelphia that had about 1,600 students when he attended.“I got a first-class education there,” he said, consisting of college-preparatory classes in the mornings and vocational classes in the afternoons.The vocational classes covered such topics as carpentry, electrical work and printing.“The philosophy was, when you left the school, you could earn a living,” he said. “It was a school far ahead of its time.”A fellow Girard student who was a year behind Pohorilla was Russell Johnson, who also became a bomber crewman. A bombardier and navigator in a B-25 Mitchell bomber, Johnson flew 44 combat missions in the Pacific.Long after the war, Johnson became famous portraying Professor Roy Hinkley in the TV comedy “Gilligan’s Island.”“He was a nice guy,” Pohorilla said.Pohorilla was a 17-year-old listening to a football game on the radio when he learned the Japanese had attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.The New York Giants were playing a Sunday afternoon home game at the Polo Grounds when Pohorilla heard background voices on the radio mentioning an unnamed general and the mayor.“You knew something was going on,” he said.An announcer soon told listeners the news that Japan had attacked Hawaii, Pohorilla said, “and that was it.”His father was a World War I veteran, injured during a poisonous-gas attack in France, and his two brothers served in the Navy in World War II.At age 18, Pohorilla said, “I saw everybody around me was going” into the military.Pohorilla wanted to be a pilot, he said.“Flying was the thing to do back in those days. ... I was interested in flying,” he said.First came Army basic training in Miami.“Basic training was tough,” he said.After training in Florida, he next was posted at several locations in the south.“The south was a bit of culture shock,” he said, because of a level of segregation he had not seen in Pennsylvania.“Separate drinking fountains and the like were kind of alien to you growing up and what you were used to,” he said.Next came the military’s aviation cadet program, designed to produce at least 100,000 pilots a year.“The future, of course, meant invading Europe. We also had a lot of air crews required for the Pacific area, as well,” Pohorilla said.The training was patterned after the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and “the discipline was pretty harsh. ... We had to toe the mark until we finally started to get into airplanes and start flying a bit,” he said.He made his first solo flight at Souther Field near Americus, Georgia, and in May 1944 received orders to ship out for England.He was based with the 385th Bombardment Group, stationed about 40 miles east of Cambridge. He and seven other men lived in a Quonset hut, a prefabricated structure made of corrugated steel. It was equipped with a pot-bellied stove, which, he said, “never got us warm in England.”Using a 30-gallon oil drum, some copper tubing and used motor oil, the men improvised a drip system to feed oil into the stove. After that, “the pot-bellied stove was red hot at times,” he said. Not long after his arrival in England, the Germans began sending V-1 flying bombs across the channel.The “buzz bombs,” as they were known, carried 1,000 pounds of explosives powered by a crude jet engine, Pohorilla said.The V-1 wasn’t very accurate, he said. The Germans’ goal was to “hopefully, knock out something but (mostly) to frighten the population.”Although buzz bombs hit his base once or twice, he said, the Americans’ morale was unaffected.“They sounded like a real freight train coming by, real loud,” he said. “As long as you could hear that noise, you knew we were safe. ... When the noise stopped, then it headed for the earth. ... Loud boom afterwards.” A typical bombing mission started at 5 a.m., Pohorilla said.While the Royal Air Force bombed cities at night, “we bombed specific targets. Our mission was to destroy the industrial complex, and we did a pretty good number on that,” he said.The Americans made daylight raids, concentrating on such targets as German railroad yards and Germany’s synthetic-oil industry. At the time, Pohorilla weighed 135 pounds, he said.His flying gear included four or five layers of clothing, an armored flak jacket, a heated suit and flight coveralls. After he put it all on, he said, he weighed about 160 pounds. “I looked like the Michelin Man (and) waddled around,” he said. Flying at 25,000 feet, he said, was a challenge.“We were fighting Mother Nature as much as we were fighting the enemy,” he said.At that altitude, the temperature was 40 degrees below zero, he said.The crew wore oxygen masks and were told that without the masks, their life expectancy would drop to about two minutes at high altitude.”Every five minutes, the plane did a crew check. Crewmen responded by saying, “Tail gunner, OK. Waist gunner, OK. Ball turret, OK,” etc., he said.During one crew check, Pohorilla failed to respond because his oxygen mask had frozen and he passed out.The bombardier rushed over and turned Pohorilla’s oxygen flow to 100%, and Pohorilla regained consciousness.Pohorilla’s unit made repeated attacks on plants where the Germans had converted coal to synthetic fuel.One of the larger such plants was near Leipzig, Germany.The plant was protected by about 500 anti-aircraft cannons when Pohorilla’s unit bombed it in September 1944. When his unit returned in November, he said, the Germans had 1,000 such guns at the site.“So it’s inevitable on the bomb run that you’re going to get hit. And we did get hit,” he said.The right starboard engine – one of four on the plane – was disabled, he said, but the plane stayed in formation.Pohorilla said the B-17s usually flew in formations of 32 to 36 planes, providing two significant advantages.One, he said, is the formation could bring to bear a total of 420 .50-caliber machine guns against any attacking fighter planes.The second is it allowed the planes to place their bombs in a circle only 1,000 feet wide.Along with the formation, Pohorilla’s plane completed its attack. But because it was flying on only three engines, it was burning its fuel at a high rate.The formation next headed west, with plans to turn north over the Ardennes forest – along the Belgium-German border – to return to base.Because of its low fuel, Pohorilla and his crewmen threw everything out of the plane “that wasn’t nailed down,” he said. The pilot decided to head west, with hopes of making it to Dover, England.They didn’t make it.When it was clear the plane couldn’t cross the English Channel, the pilot ordered the crew to prepare to bail out. By that point, the plane was only 1,000 feet above the ground, making a parachute escape a risky proposition.When the crewmen refused to jump, Pohorilla told the pilot he’d have to land the plane.Without lowering the landing gear, the pilot crash-landed in a freshly plowed beet field in Belgium, with “dirt flying all over the place,” Pohorilla said.With its fuel exhausted, the plane landed without a fire breaking out, and the crew jumped clear with no injuries.Picked up by a British truck, the crew was taken to Allied-controlled Brussels, where they were billeted in a hotel.“We were there for three days. I can’t remember a damned thing, but I know we had a hell of a good time,” Pohorilla said.The crash occurred on the plane’s 18th mission, which meant the crew was only halfway through its 35-mission tour.The Eighth Air Force originally sent airmen home after 25 bombing missions. When long-range U.S. fighter planes became available to protect the bombers, that limit was increased to 30 and then 35 missions, Pohorilla said.Because of his success, he was part of a group known as the Lucky Bastard Club – an informal group based on the statistic that the average life expectancy of a bomber-crew member’s life was 15 missions.His crew was given a week off back in England, making several sight-seeing stops, including a night at an old manor house outside Oxford.“I stayed in Lady Evelyn’s room that night,” Pohorilla said. “Lady Evelyn wasn’t there, though, unfortunately.”If his plane had crash-landed three weeks later, he said, it would have had to fly over the Battle of the Bulge, which by then was in full swing.With one exception, the crew on Pohorilla’s plane survived the war. One gunner, 18 years old, was flying as a substitute on another B-17 that had gone down with its crew.Pohorilla completed 35 missions and returned to the United States in February 1945.“It was big relief, of course,” he said, but he still was qualified to fly, and Germany and Japan were not yet defeated.The Germans’ surrender was announced in May 1945 and the Japanese surrender in August.Pohorilla earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, married Ellen in 1947 and had two sons. His wife died in December 2000.Among his postwar employers was Rohm and Haas Co., a chemical company founded in Germany.Pohorilla is a VFW member and on the board of directors of the Motts Military Museum in Groveport, which, he said, helps educate visiting groups of school students about history.His decorations include the Air Medal with silver cluster, the Army Good Conduct Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three battle stars, the Presidential Unit Citation and the World War II Victory Medal. His advice to veterans is to “marry a good person. I married a great person. Keep your mind busy, your body busy. ... Just stay active and be a good citizen. Love the country.” This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Michael Pohorilla of New Albany, Ohio: Army Air Corps, World War II

Wally Cash, 93, of Hilliard is among the ever-shrinking ranks of World War II veterans in the United States.Cash spent two years and 10 months in the U.S. Navy and concluded his active service before he was 21 years old.He was a 17-year-old senior at Grandview Heights High School when he enlisted in the Navy in August 1943. He later earned his high school diploma after his military discharge.“My parents encouraged me to (join the military), but when I brought home the papers for them to sign, they didn’t want to, (but) they reluctantly signed,” Cash said.Cash said he was motivated to enlist after hearing stories from some of his classmates who had graduated several years earlier, as well as from neighbors who had returned home after service.“(Grandview Heights was) a close community,” he said.After enlisting, Cash was sent to the Naval Station Great Lakes near Chicago.“The first thing they told us was to shave every day, and I thought, ‘Why do I need to shave? I wasn’t growing hair yet,’ ” said Cash, adding that he and other recruits also had to work around a Hollywood film shoot while they completed basic training.After eight weeks at the training station, Cash was sent to sonar school in San Diego.“I took tests (at the training center), and the Navy determined I was best suited for sonar school, he said. “You didn’t have a choice; you go.”Although Cash might have been well-suited for hunting submarines, he soon learned he was not so well-suited for the sea.“I got seasick,” he said.Cash spent five weeks in sonar school in November and December 1943.“We hunted a World War I submarine the Navy still had,” he said.Cash said he had learned how to recognize submarines from other underwater objects and how submarines were moving but missed too many maneuvers.“But I missed (some training) because I was seasick (and) was dropped,” Cash said.In lieu of tracking submarines, Cash was sent to a naval ship-repair station, also in San Diego, where he spent most of 1944.“Because I already had security clearance from my time in sonar school, I worked with electronics,” filling orders for parts and delivering them to ships that made the request, he said.In November 1944, Cash was assigned to the U.S. Naval Advance Base Personnel Depot in San Bruno, California, for a one-month stint.The Navy crafted the base from a former horse racetrack, he said.For the ensuing five months, Cash participated in combat training.“We drilled, (ran) an obstacle course (and learned to) strip a rifle,” Cash said.In December 1944, Cash was sent to a naval repair base on the island of Guam.By then, Allied forces had advanced west far enough across the Pacific Ocean to make it a challenge to get damaged ships to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii for repair.To that end, the Navy had sent through the Panama Canal the material to build a naval repair base on Guam.It was an arduous five-week journey from San Bruno to Guam (via Pearl Harbor), Cash recalled. It was a troop ship to Guam without air-conditioning, and the bunks were five decks below, he said.“So we would go up at night and sleep on the (top). ... It was a lot cooler up there than it was five decks below,” said Cash, adding that sometimes passing Marines on board would startle them with orders to put on life belts.While on Guam, when Cash wasn’t working at the naval repair base, he would work in the galley. But he also found time to explore the island and make friends, including, to some extent, Japanese prisoners of war.“It was frowned upon” to do so, but Cash said he still mingled with Japanese POWs.“They weren’t trying to run away,” he said. “They had three meals a day.”Cash said he had learned to speak a little Japanese, including how to count, for the purpose of bartering.“I would trade things with them and even buy a few things,” including drawings and artwork that Cash said he wished he had kept. He still has one drawing, he said.The POWs recognized him, Cash said, and even raised the eyebrows of guards when on his approach one day, the POWs bowed their heads and said to him, “Kon’nichiwa, changey boy.”Kon’nichiwa means “good afternoon.”“Changey boy” was the name the POWs gave him for trading and bartering, Cash said.Although he was stationed in a remote expanse of the South Pacific Ocean, a radio station on Guam kept Navy personnel up to date with news from the war, he said.In June, on what would become V-E Day (Victory in Europe), when the war in the European theater ended, Cash recalled the commissary officers ordered the cooks to prepare steaks for everyone who had worked in the galley.Cash was sent home in July 1946, a little earlier than he had expected.“I thought I was in until I was 21 (because I had enlisted as a minor), but someone realized that I should have (already) been discharged and I was sent home,” said Cash, who arrived back in the United States via San Francisco. Five weeks later, he was in Columbus via a train.But his time in the U.S. Navy wasn’t quite finished, he said.Cash subsequently served 44 years in the U.S. Navy Reserve, achieving the rank of master chief petty officer, the highest possible rank among enlisted personnel.His decorations include the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the Naval Reserve Meritorious Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal.As a civilian, Cash and his wife, Barbara, a U.S. Navy Reserve veteran, operated the Hilliard Food Pantry for 20 years.Cash is a member of the Hilliard Kiwanis Club, American Legion Memorial Post 614 and the Hilliard United Methodist Church. This podcast was guest-hosted by ThisWeek staff writer Kevin Corvo, who also wrote this profile. This podcast was produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek assistant managing editor, digital.

Wally Cash of Hilliard, Ohio: U.S. Navy, World War II

Edward Taylor III, 49, of Pickerington is an Ohio Army National Guard veteran of the 1990-91 Gulf War and served during the 2003-11 Iraq War with the Ohio Air National Guard, for which he still serves as a chief master sergeant.A Canton native, Taylor graduated from McKinley Senior High School and attended the University of Akron and Grantham University.He has been in the Ohio Air National Guard since 1999. He was promoted to senior master sergeant in 2012 and to chief master sergeant in May.He enlisted with the idea of becoming a pilot.“(My) family didn’t have a huge background in the military, ... but I do remember specifically both my grandfathers and my father back in the time, during World War II, black men were stereotyped as having flat feet,” he said. “If you had flat feet, some recruiters did not allow you to get in.”Both his grandfathers wanted to serve but weren’t able to, he said. His father also wanted to enlist but didn’t, he said.“Both my brothers and I – all three of us served, (as did) a couple cousins. ... Not a huge military family, but definitely, it’s been a big part of the Taylor family.”Taylor said he admired the Tuskegee Airmen, African American military pilots who had fought during WWII.He said he had taken an African American studies class at Akron, and he learned about such notable African American military pioneers as Eugene Bullard, a pilot who had served in the French military during World War I because he wasn’t allowed to serve in the U.S. military. He knew of Benjamin O. Davis Jr., a West Point graduate and son of a brigadier general who became the first African American general in the U.S. Air Force. And he was well aware of Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., who became the first African American four-star general in 1975.“Once I became familiar with their names and their stories, (I) definitely became a huge fan of their careers and wanted to emulate them,” he said.He didn’t get his pilot license, but he said he found that he really enjoyed the maintenance side of aviation more.“I enjoyed thoroughly aircraft maintenance,” he said. “I still had the chance to fly, you know, on the aircraft ... which was still a wonderful thing – a huge treat, not something everybody can say that they do. ... Being an 18-, 19-year-old kid learning how to fix and maintain a $60 million aircraft is not something that everybody does every day.”He was an armament mechanic on Bell AH-1 Cobra helicopters during Gulf War operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991.Before shipping out, he said, “I really wasn’t worried because I didn’t know what to expect.”He was on duty with the Air National Guard, working in a hangar, the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.Even before the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Taylor said he and his fellow airmen knew it was a deliberate attack. They knew jet aircraft were equipped with a terrain-collision-avoidance system, which keeps aircraft clear of ground obstacles, and the crash could not have been by chance. “We all kind of stopped in our tracks” to watch the news coverage, he recalled, and one airman said, “That’s it. We’re going to war, boys.”Camaraderie is a necessity for military personnel during a deployment, he said.“We have to foster that camaraderie so that we can make it because we’re all human beings. ... I’ve seen young men get their ‘Dear John’ letters. I’ve seen young ladies who just gave birth two months prior and now they’re (deployed) for six months,” he said.Members of the military get very close, he said, and he knows he always will maintain contact with those he served beside.Taylor served overseas in Bahrain, Qatar, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates and Turkey.In those countries, he saw happy reunions of the local population at airports and realized “they’re just the same as you and I. ... They’re still human beings with emotion. ... All they want to do is love their people and be left alone, similar to the way a lot of us are. ... We’re all just people.”He said he particularly enjoyed being a customer in small shops in Turkey, where the locals wanted to socialize with tea before getting down to business. But once they got to know you, they were ready to sell their goods, he said.Conversely, he said, Bahrain wasn’t as welcoming.“When the king or prince would fly on their jet, we had to go in the house ... go into the hangars or the buildings or whatever because he didn’t want to see us,” he said.Taylor described the Air National Guard as a peacetime organization that effectively accomplished a wartime mission, he said. In all of the guard’s missions, he said, the troops ultimately are serving their own communities.“Whatever our role is, we’re taking care of home,” he said.Taylor suggested veterans adjusting to civilian life “use the foundation of your military training and experience to look at a new challenge. ... Civilian life can be a new challenge.”“If you’re having a struggle, go find other folks who have been out for a while,” he said, like veterans in the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Take the time to find your purpose in life.” Taylor was the avionics superintendent of the 121st Air Refueling Wing at the Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base in Columbus before being promoted to aircraft-maintenance-squadron branch chief. His team maintains avionics on Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers, aerial-refueling aircraft.Taylor said most of the aircraft are at least 50 years old and have to be retrofitted with modern technology.“It becomes real stressful when you think that the majority of the aircraft that we fly – the KC-135 – were developed in the ’50s and built in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he said. “Think about having an aircraft that’s already 56 years old, putting 2019 technology inside of that and expecting it to fly a mission – and it does eloquently ... thanks to the young men and women that are able to train, maintain that aircraft on a daily basis.”Married and a father of four, his decorations include the Meritorious Service Medal Air Force Commendation Medal with one device, the Air Force Achievement Medal with two devices and a Meritorious Unit Award. State awards include the Ohio Commendation Medal with one device and the Ohio National Guard Special Service Ribbon.Taylor gave the keynote address for the Canal Winchester Veterans Day observance in November. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock and Hummel.

Edward Taylor III of Pickerington: National Guard, Gulf War

Dr. Dana Robinson-Street, 50, of Columbus is a 26-year veteran of the U.S. Navy who served on the destroyer tender, USS Samuel Gompers, during the Gulf War of 1991, including the combat phase of Operation Desert Storm.She was inducted into the Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame in 2018.Born and raised in Chicago, Robinson-Street was the youngest daughter in a blended family of 13 children, she said.After graduating, she would start jobs and find a reason for disliking them, she said. So she selected the Navy as a job she couldn’t quit, enlisting in 1988. Her father, however, was apprehensive and didn’t want her to join.When she shipped out for Desert Storm aboard the Gompers, “I really didn’t know what to expect or what we would be facing,” she said.“You heard about the tragedies of war. I had family members that had been to war in Vietnam, so honestly, I was very afraid,” she said. “The thought that I left home against my father’s wishes was really something that was becoming real to me, and I worried and I wondered if we would come back.”The Gompers was one of the first Navy ships to add women to its crew. The ship wasn’t too bad, she recalled, with single-person rooms with a TV. Many of the men aboard had not worked alongside women, she said, but life on a ship developed a camaraderie unlike land-based duty stations.She served on the Gompers as an enlisted radioman specialist, maintaining communication with other military vessels and units.During shore visits, female sailors conformed to local customs, she said, always wearing long-sleeved and long-legged attire and never traveling alone.The Gompers meant a lot to her.When it was decommissioned, the Gompers was sunk with missiles and bombs during a Navy fleet exercise in 2003.When the ship was destroyed, “I felt like a huge part of history was going away. ... I really hated that that happened,” she said.She also served in Guam and spent 11 years in Japan. The Japanese were friendly, she said, and it was “interesting to get to learn about living in a foreign country.”Part of military life, she said, involves developing pseudo families with fellow personnel and growing accustomed to people coming and going as they are assigned to different locations.After leaving the military, she said, the change in lifestyles can be challenging.“Transitioning from the military for me was very hard,” Robinson-Street said. “As military members, we are less than 1% of society. ... When we leave the military and were returned back to the 99% of people who haven’t served, we’re ... strangers in a familiar land. ... It’s a strange feeling because ... you’re very happy to be with those you love and those you miss (and had) all these thoughts about ... while you were gone. But then for you, you feel out of place, and so that’s pretty hard.”She tells the story of one man she calls “an example of an everyday veteran ... an example of what we do as military members.”He survived combat that killed multiple members of his platoon during one deployment, she said. Another man that he had considered a father figure was killed. During a third deployment, he almost died several times when a femoral artery was severed in combat. Then the man who was transferred to take his place also was killed.Although the man was a survivor, she said, he felt “it was his fault that all of these deaths occurred. ... He had so much to be thankful for, but in his mind, it was very hard for him to be thankful.”He is typical of those in the military, who swear to support and defend the U.S. Constitution and “support and defend it with every aspect of us,” she said.“We leave our children behind. We leave our family members behind, our spouses behind, our history. We leave it behind to support and defend this country,” she said. “That is what inspires me every single day. ... The people I served with are some of the greatest people that you’ll ever meet in this world, and those are the same people walking around Columbus, Ohio, and the state of Ohio. They are people that will sacrifice everything for us and for one another and for those that we don’t even know.“For me, advocating for veterans just means that I’m continuing to give back to those that I know are sacrificing their lives for us in this country. ... It bothers me, and it saddens me to know after serving, some veterans are faced with so many tragedies, like suicide, homelessness, unemployment. ... I definitely feel that as a society, we have to find a way to make sure that we are doing those things for those who have risked the most.”She is active in a number of veterans organizations, including Women Veterans Rock, the Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, Dog Tag Inc. Alumni and the Scooters for Veterans campaign.Women Veterans Rock is a coalition of women’s veteran organizations and advocates supporting female veterans and military families in terms of housing, employment, education and financial status, she said.Her Scooters for Veterans campaign provides motorized chairs for mobility-impaired veterans.Dog Tag Inc. educates disabled veterans on all aspects of running a business.Robinson-Street has made annual visits to Washington, D.C., in support of veterans, she said.Ohio has only two veterans homes, she said, and she believes a third should be developed in central Ohio.The state has 867,000 veterans, she said, and the two veterans homes can house only 888.Sixty percent of Ohio’s veterans are over age 60, “so we’re at a time where there is a need. ... It’s been proven that veterans’ – who live in veterans homes – lives are improved because they give them veterans-centered care,” she said.Veterans benefit from contact with other veterans who can understand their experiences, she said.“All you have to do is go into any VA (hospital) in any state and just look around. ... You’ll see veterans that are sitting there, talking to one another, having lunch with one another and just spending time with one another,” she said. “The only thing they have in common is the fact they are veterans. .... I can walk into any grocery store or gas station, and if there’s a veteran there and I identify that I’m a veteran, it’s almost like an instant friendship.“If we take veterans and bring them back to veterans, then they can talk about their experiences to people who know what it means. ... At the most crucial part of our lives ... we would have the opportunity to be comfortable at a place we find comfort,” she said.Being a member of the Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame is an honor, she said.“It’s hard to convey in words how special it is to be honored for those things you would do without any recognition as a veteran. I am so honored to serve veterans,” she said. “I have stated I would serve veterans for the rest of my life, and to be inducted into the Hall of Fame and to be acknowledged for those things that I’ve done, for me it’s just such an honor and a privilege.”Her advice for struggling veterans is, “You’re not alone. There are people out there just like you and ... you can make it. Just give it a day at a time, just like you did when you were on active duty. ... Hold your head high and reach out if you need a helping hand. We are here, and we love you and we support you.”Robinson-Street retired from the Navy as a lieutenant and has a doctorate in nursing practice, among other degrees.Her decorations include two National Defense Service Medals with six overseas service ribbons, five Navy Good Conduct Medals, the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, the Southwest Asia Service Medal with Bronze Star, the Navy Unit Commendation, the Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation, the Joint Service Achievement Medal, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal, the Navy/Marine Corps Overseas Service Ribbon, Kuwait Liberation Medals from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Dana Robinson-Street, Columbus, Ohio: Navy, Gulf War

Roberta “Bobbie” Jean Mershon, 71, of Canal Winchester treated some of the most badly wounded soldiers of the Vietnam War after she arrived in the country as a 22-year-old Army nurse in 1969. Those severely injured and burned soldiers typically were 19 or 20 years old, she said. “It was just like, ‘Oh, my God. I just don’t know how they could ... have the strength to want to go on,’ but a lot of these guys did,” she said. “A lot of these guys were just very grateful for everything you did for them and took care of them, even though you knew when you looked at them that their lives were never going to be the same again. Never. There was no way they could be.” A native of Indianapolis, Mershon graduated from high school in 1965. At the time, she said, women had four basic choices for a career – teacher, secretary, hairstylist and nurse. Mershon chose to become a nurse. She was attending St. Vincent School of Nursing in Indianapolis when she learned of an Army program to increase its number of registered nurses. If students would agree to serve two years, those joining the program would have Army private-first-class rank during their senior year, when they would be paid at that grade, she said. They would be commissioned as second lieutenants upon graduating. Twelve members of her nursing class signed up. Upon graduating, they reported to the Army and had “five minutes between discharge (as a private) and commission,” she said.“Why we didn’t all get up and walk out the door, I don’t know,” she said. The new lieutenants knew they would travel, and “everybody pretty much went across the country,” she said.An early assignment was at Fort Ord, a former Army post on Monterey Bay in California, about an hour from San Francisco.“I couldn’t have asked for more,” she said. Training and turmoil in TexasHer most extensive Army training was at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where, “I was not a G.I. Jane,” she said. The nurses’ basic training was more relaxed than that of enlisted personnel, she said.”You could party every night if you wanted,” she said, but nurses quickly learned “the right way of doing things and the Army way of doing things.” On a long walk during a map-reading course, a helicopter arrived and hovered above the nurses, and the pilot announced on a bullhorn, “You are completely off the map-reading course. Please return to the beginning,” she said.About this time, she met her future husband and then Army captain, Dan Mershon. He shipped out for Vietnam in August 1969, and his future wife recalled, “Oh, my gosh. My heart was broken.” In September, she telephoned the Department of the Army in Washington, D.C., and asked the soldier answering the phone to pull her name for orders to Vietnam.“Why in the world would you want to leave sunny California for Vietnam?” he asked her before granting her request. She arrived at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh, near Saigon. At the time, the U.S. military had a rule that two family members could not be in the same battle zone. So her brother, David, a Marine lance corporal, was sent back to the United States. She was assigned to a ward that specialized in surgical critical care, with an intensive-care area and a recovery room. The hospital also was the U.S military’s burn center for all of Vietnam. “Unless you’re in a war zone, you don’t see wounds” like Mershon saw at Long Binh, she said. Immediate acclimation to hospital in VietnamThe first day she was there – “in my bright green uniform and shiny black boots” – she was being introduced to hospital staff members, she said. Sitting nearby was a wounded helicopter pilot. A graft had been used to treat a bullet wound that nicked his iliac artery, and “the graft that they had put on blew.”“I watched while all of my soon-to-be co-workers transfused about 30 units of O-positive blood into this guy – because it was just pouring out of him – and brought him back to the (operating room) to have that repaired. ... I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, what have I gotten myself into? ... Am I going to be able to do this?’“You don’t really have time to think about those things when you’re working in a surgical ICU setting,” she said. “Within a week, because we didn’t keep him that long, that patient was my patient, and I was almost afraid to touch him because I did not want that graft to blow again. So you learn. “You realize what has to be done and you do it. It’s just that simple. You let your instincts take over and you start working.” ‘Mass cal’ incident for small, tired staffThree nurses and three corpsmen were on duty one night when what the Army called a mass-casualty incident, commonly called a “mass cal,” occurred. A mass cal is when more than 50 patients arrive at once, she said. “I expected the recovery room to be filled. What I didn’t expect was that so many of those guys would meet the criteria for staying in ICU,” she said. “Generally, you didn’t ask the next shift to come in and help you because you knew that they were going to (need) their strength and wits about them to carry on after you left. So you just learn to work with the corpsmen, and I can’t tell you enough good things about the corpsmen that I worked with. They were fantastic. “Their role was to help us, assist us in vital signs, and some of them did some of the blood draws; some helped get the patients up; ... some did respiratory therapy. You name it, they did it.” She continued: “We ended up with so many patients by the time morning shift came that we had filled all 38 regular ICU beds. Plus we had some in recovery-roombeds that could not be discharged. You just simply had to work smarter, faster and more efficiently, and that’s simply what you did.” It was the kind of scenario for which the nurses couldn’t really train in advance, she said. “There was no place to get that kind of training, if you think about it,” she said. “This is a wartime situation. Even if it was some kind of mass cal with (an) accident or something like that, these wounds were not the same. The ammunition that they used didn’t just penetrate. It was designed to stop the enemy, and that’s just exactly what it did.“So instead of going through the arm or whatever, it would take your arm off, and it would bounce around inside your guts ... and hit in as many organs as you could possibly imagine. I was used to a diagnosis of cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal). Well, when you got these patients, the list of their diagnoses was half the page. Because the shrapnel, the bullets – whatever – would hit all of these organs. So you just didn’t have a one-system injury. It was usually multisystem – everywhere,” she said. The nurses worked 12-hour shifts six days a week. “You don’t even know you’re exhausted,” she said. “I’m going to tell you: You’ve got the adrenaline pumping. You call back to the OR, let the doc know what’s going on here.”One patient began to bleed badly after surgery.“You start getting blood in to replace the blood because ... there were four patients already on that operating table,” she said. “There was no place to send this guy back to be repaired again. So the blood flowed, let me tell you. We transfused and transfused, keeping his blood pressure up, monitoring, but that took one nurse and one corpsman just to take care of that particular patient and make sure he did OK.“So the rest of us had to then step up again and start assessing and making sure everybody that we had taken care of was stable and in good shape. ... It was quite the night.” Burns ‘beyond the third-degree category’The burn injuries at the hospital were “probably the worst of the worst,” she said. The patients were anywhere from “75% burned to 90% burned, and you’re talking 6-foot-3 guys.”“The exposed areas would be the worst, so you would have facial burns, hands that went well beyond the third-degree category,” she said. “It was almost like well-done meat on some of these patients.” Burn patients were treated with sulfodene, which resembles a cold cream, she said. “Once a shift, you would take tongue (depressors) and start scraping off all of that sulfodene, debriding as you went,” she said. “It was OK if you had 100% third-degree burns. You didn’t feel anything. But there were a lot of people who were not third-degree burns and you would have to medicate them.” Patients being flown to U.S. hospitals in Japan were heavily bandaged before the trip to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam. It was not an easy thing for them to go through, she said. Napalm caused most of the burn cases, she said. U.S. soldiers were hit by napalm in friendly-fire incidents, she said. Others were injured while riding in tanks hit by enemy fire. In a tank, “there’s no place for the compression of a round to go except on that patient,” she said.“They would come in with limbs missing, all kinds of injuries, in addition to being burned,” she said. Napalm also hit “a lot of Vietnamese who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was very sad,” she said. Humor, laughter as medicineAmid the human suffering, Mershon said, she didn’t have time to cry. “You don’t think about it,” she said. “You compartmentalize it. ... There were 38 tragedies just about every day I went in, just because of the fact I was in ICU. If you thought about those, you would be in a heap on the floor, crying. So you simply had to put that in a place in your mind where you didn’t think about it and just go and do the things you needed to do to get them in the best possible shape so that they could go home and continue their lives.” Those working in the hospital bonded as a family, she said. “They were your family because those were the people you interacted with 12 hours a day,” she said. “And a lot of times after your shift was over, we’d go out to one of the clubs and have a steak because there was more steak at Long Bihn that you could possibly imagine. And then you go home and go to bed because you were so tired. ...“I actually went home after a shift. I got off at 7 and overslept till 7 the next morning,” she said. “Those guys were your family. They were totally your family. In the middle of the night, if there wasn’t anything going on – and sometimes there wasn’t – ... we would play slapjack, and it was usually the corpsmen and us, and I was a slapjack queen, I have to tell you. Mershon recalled a particular patient whose injury wasn’t quite as severe as he had thought, and she used humor to comfort him.“Most of (the patients) were younger than I was,” she said. “I had this one guy who came in. He had some sort of abdominal injury, and they put a drainage tube in his incision. During the night, it had slipped out. Oh my gosh, he thought he was going to die. No matter what I said – ‘You’re going to be fine’ – it was in his mind that he was going to die because he lost that drainage tube on the first night, post-op.“Finally, I looked at him. I said, ‘Look soldier, that was property of the United States Army. You don’t get to keep it.’ And even he had to laugh at that,” she said. At Christmas, she flew to Phu Loi Base Camp, where boyfriend Dan was a security officer. During an R&R, “we just decided we were going to Hawaii to get married, and that’s what we did,” she said.“We went on R&R to Hong Kong and vacation to Hawaii,” she said. They were married by a justice of the peace, with his secretary acting as maid of honor and a janitor as best man, she said. Struggles upon return to United StatesWhen she returned to the U.S. at Travis Air Force Base in California, the military there suggested they change into civilian clothes so they wouldn’t be harassed by civilians in San Francisco. She had sat next to “a young college kid” on a plane ride to Denver, and he told her, “You took care of those baby killers,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, things have changed.’ “ She began working at a civilian hospital and was asked if she “knew how to start an IV, properly suction the patient,” the things she had been doing “nonstop for the last year. It was demeaning. It truly was demeaning,” she said. “The person who really suffered that the most was my husband,” she said. “I believe there were times he was considered one of those crazy Vietnam vets and was held back in his job because of it. ... It was not unusual then for that to happen.”She said she would think about the patients from time to time, wondering whatever became of them.“Because we only kept the patients four days just to stabilize them,” she said. “In most of my nursing, when you discharge someone, we’re good to go. (Many of the patients in Vietnam) had the most struggling yet to come when they left us. So that has always been a hard thing, I think, for all of us nurses to try to live with.” Because Dan Mershon grew up in Groveport, the couple decided to settle in Canal Winchester, where they stayed. She served on Canal Winchester City Council for 28 years and worked at Grant Medical Center for 40 years. She is a member of the Franklin County Veterans Service Commission and participates in several veterans organizations. Her decorations include the National Defense Service Medal, a Vietnam Campaign Medal with two bronze stars and an overseas bar.Her advice to struggling veterans is this: “Your time in the military should not be the high point of your life. That is something that occurred. You did your best. You did what you were supposed to do, but that doesn’t mean that’s the last thing you can do. ... Too many people, their claim to fame is their time in the service. “You need to use that as a basis to move on, to use what you learned in the military, to exceed in other areas of your interest and use that knowledge to help you get where you want to be. Because there’s a whole heck of a lot of life ... For two or three years that you served in the military, don’t let that be the highlight of your life. ... Keep moving up.” This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Bobbie Mershon of Canal Winchester, Ohio: U.S. Army, Vietnam War

Vietnam War veteran and retired U.S. Air Force Major Gen. Edward Mechenbier, 76, of Columbus was held as a prisoner of war from 1967 to 1973 in North Vietnam, where he was beaten and tortured but survived on as little as 600 to 800 calories a day. The nearly 600 Americans who survived captivity in North Vietnam “weren’t special. We were just products of the American society,” Mechenbier said. “Some people say, ‘I couldn’t take the torture. I couldn’t take the isolation,’ ” he said. “People always sell themselves short, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I could never do that.’ Yes, you could.“I mean, you just think about things in everybody’s life. We all face challenges. We all face hardships. We all face things that are going on and we say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’“Well, I couldn’t do what I did in my own mind ... but you know, you look around at all the other guys who were in there with you. There were no supermen there. We were just ordinary guys doing our job, and we just never gave up.” Mechenbier was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and graduated from high school in Dayton. His father, a welder and steamfitter, had told him he would need a scholarship to go to college, and bet his son $5 he couldn’t get an appointment to a federal military academy. Mechenbier won that bet, he said, and graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1964. By 1967, he was flying a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II interceptor and fighter-bomber in Vietnam. On June 14, Mechenbier, who was with his crewman – Kevin McManus, who operated the plane’s radar, among other tasks – was on his 113th combat mission and 80th mission over North Vietnam.They weren’t required to conduct another mission that day, but they did.Their unit lacked enough qualified crews for a mission to Hanoi. Mechenbier and McManus were asked to join the mission, he said. Mechenbier said, “Well, let me check with Kevin,” who answered, “Why not? Let’s go.” First, they had a breakfast of pork chops, he said. Mechenbier remembered thinking, “This is a heck of a last meal.”“I’d never had that thought before,” he said. Normally, the F-4s flew as protection for Republic F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers. As a result, 54 planes in Mechenbier’s unit took off at 10 a.m. on a mission to attack a railroad yard, he said. Mechenbier’s plane had been hit on another mission five days earlier but appeared to be in good shape, he said. While executing a maneuver over the target, he had one engine on idle while the second was using its afterburner. When he fired the first engine’s afterburner, the engine exploded, he said. Just before the explosion, he said, the plane was flying at 700 mph. Mechenbier and McManus ejected, and the plane hit the ground before Mechenbier’s parachute opened. He and McManus were under parachutes while “over 6 million people with 6 million guns (were) shooting at us.” Mechenbier carried a .38-caliber revolver but knew he was in no position to put up a fight, he said. He threw the pistol away before he landed on a roof in a village and rolled to the ground, where he immediately was surrounded. The North Vietnamese used machetes to cut away his gear and uniform, leaving him in his shorts and a T-shirt, he said. His captors threw rocks at him and jabbed him with bamboo sticks before leading him to an air-raid trench, where the North Vietnamese acted as if they would execute him before a laughing crowd. His introduction to ‘Hanoi Hilton’Mechenbier’s next stop was at what the POWs called “New Guy Village” at Hoa Lo Prison, which the Americans called the Hanoi Hilton. The North Vietnamese goal at New Guy Village, he said, was to torture and beat the Americans into submission for two or three weeks. The North Vietnamese “just wanted to hurt you. They were mad. ... no doubt about that.”In addition to beatings, they would “tie your arms behind your back and then rotate them up over your head, dislocating one or both of your shoulders,” he said.“All the traditional things, you know, ... kicking you, burning you with cigarettes and things like that,” he said. North Vietnamese guards were “trying to beat you to the point you would do anything, say anything that they told you to do. It was not an intellectual discussion. It was not a rational thought process and no dialogue. They were just trying to get you to sign a confession and trying to intimidate you physically, and they did a pretty good job,” he said. Art of avoiding continued beatingsAccording to the military code of conduct, prisoners of war should give only their name, rank, serial number and date of birth, he said. It also “goes on to say, ‘I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability,’ ” he said.“When they’re trying to get you to admit to crimes, of course, you wouldn’t do that,” he said. One strategy for a POW, he said, was “you don’t answer ... or you lie, you cheat, you make up answers and things like that,” he said.“For the most part, they didn’t understand you,” he said. “They wanted you to ... tell them things about your airplane, your missions and things like that, which you wouldn’t do, and their only resort was to beat the crap out of you.” The Americans made sure they endured “some days of abuse because you didn’t want to be an easy patsy,” he said. The POWs took advantage of the fact the North Vietnamese generally didn’t understand much English beyond a few key words, he said. The Americans could stop torture by giving the North Vietnamese a “confession” of obvious lies, mispronounced words and near-gibberish, he said. The North Vietnamese would be satisfied if words like crime, criminal and guilty were used. For example, Mechenbier said, a POW could say he flew for the Germans in World War II and was in a unit with Superman (in his secret identity) and a dead U.S. president and get away with it: “I, ... fumerly (made-up word), a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, ... am guilty ... of bombing churches, dams, pikes, pagodas, cesspools, outhouses and other ill houses of repute. I and my squadron mates, Clark Kent, Jimmy Doolittle, Abraham Lincoln ... have committed heinous crimes.” Any English-speaking person “obviously would know, ‘Hey, here’s a joke,’ ” he said, but the North Vietnamese were satisfied because they recognized the words they wanted to hear. After his time at New Guy Village, Mechenbier was put in a 9-by-9-foot cell with his crewman, McManus, and spent “23 hours, 59 minutes and 45 seconds a day” there for four years. Meals were about a quart of soup made from seaweed, turnip tops or pumpkins, with moldy bread and rice that contained bits of rock.The door was opened for meals twice a day and to empty a chamber pot, he said. The door also might be opened for more beatings and torture. A frightening sound, he said, was “a jailer with keys. ... He was getting somebody for interrogation. That was scary.” By this point, the North Vietnamese goal was only to get POWs to participate in propaganda, Mechenbier said. One example is when American anti-war delegations visiting North Vietnam unwittingly caused the POWs to suffer more beatings, he said. The North Vietnamese wanted the POWs to meet the war protesters.“You don’t want to do that,” Mechenbier said.The North Vietnamese always had the same response – “beat the crap out of you” – whether they wanted the POWs to talk to U.S. protesters, issue an anti-war statement or record a tape to be played on radio. “You just never wanted to go outside your cell,” he said. The POWs coped, he said, by supporting each other. He and McManus got to know each other very well and would tell each other stories about everything they could think of. POWs in adjacent cells could communicate in code by tapping on the cell walls or by placing an ear next to a cup held against a wall, he said. Beginning of change for the betterWith the death of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Mihn in 1969, the Hanoi Hilton guards eased up on beatings and torture for a time, he said. In November 1970, the U.S. military launched a raid on the Son Tay POW camp 23 miles from Hanoi. The effort to rescue U.S. POWs failed because the camp recently had been emptied of prisoners. The raid was criticized in the U.S., but it created a boon for the POWs. Fearing another raid, the North Vietnamese moved all the POWs in other camps to the Hanoi Hilton, creating a communal living area know as “Camp Unity.”That was quite a morale booster, Mechenbier said. “And now we had 39 guys in one room. ... That was wonderful,” he said.One group of POWs fashioned a deck of cards from scrap paper and played bridge nonstop for three days, he said.“The chatter was unbelievable,” he said. The Americans still had more than two years of captivity left, and Mechenbier was held for a time at a camp near the border with China. February 1973: prisoners’ releaseAfter the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, the North Vietnamese told the POWs they would go home. The POWs thought that was a propaganda trick until a uniformed U.S. officer visited them and confirmed the news. “This is a dream,” Mechenbier thought at the time.It wasn’t a dream. He was released in February 1973 after nearly six years of captivity.He was flown to the Philippines, where he had 13 root canals on his long-neglected teeth. He weighed 198 pounds when his F-4 went down and 133 pounds by the time he had arrived in the Philippines, he said. Upon returning to the U.S., most POWs decided, “This is the first day in the rest of your life,” he said. The POWs were given a book on what had occurred in the United States while they were gone – such as the Watergate scandal, for example.Mechenbier stayed in the Air Force.“Putting on a blue uniform every day was a little bit of a security blanket,” he said. He left the Air Force in 2004 and has been a consultant to defense contractors and serves on several public and private boards. He also has been a technical consultant to air-show broadcasts and was the subject of a book called “Life on a $5 Bet,” by Linda D. Swink. The title is a reference to the bet he had made with his father prior to joining the service.Mechenbier is highly decorated. The short list includes the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star Medal with oak-leaf cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak-leaf cluster, the Bronze Star Medal with V device and Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster.His advice to struggling veterans is, “Don’t be alone. ... Friends don’t let friends be alone. ... (Otherwise) they don’t have a beacon to look forward. They’re not being told how important they are.” This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Edward Mechenbier of Columbus: Air Force, Vietnam POW

Mike Schad, 91, of Grove City is a U.S. Air Force veteran who served during the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.The oldest of 11 children, he grew up and graduated from high school in Plainview, Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota for a year. Motivated by a love of airplanes, he said, he joined the Air Force in 1948.He had wanted to become an Air Force pilot but was told, “We’ve got pilots sitting around here with nothing to do from World War II, and we need other people doing other jobs,” he said.Trained as an air-traffic and radar controller, he worked at towers, mobile radar facilities and air-traffic centers during 22 years in the Air Force, typically serving at a base from one to three years before being assigned to a new location.His assignments included Newfoundland and Bermuda, which were refueling stops for aircraft flying to Germany during the Berlin Blockade and Berlin Airlift. The airlift began in June 1948, when the Soviet Union blocked all ground and water traffic to the people of West Berlin and prevented food shipments from reaching them. The United States and Britain had to transport food and fuel to them by air until May 1949, when the Soviet Union ended the blockade.Schad met his wife, Marge, in Nova Scotia. They married there and traveled by car from Canada to his new assignment in California, he said.He served as a tower chief at an air base in Korea during the Korean War, working alongside U.S. and South Korean controllers. U.S. Air Force, Marine and Navy aircraft used the base, as did South Koreans.Marine and Navy planes landed at the base if they were carrying bombs they were unable to drop or had a maintenance problem. In those cases, Schad said, they weren’t allowed to land on their aircraft carriers.That resulted in “some tragic landings” at the airfield, he said.Schad worked in the control tower with six American and six South Korean controllers, he said. South Korean pilots flew North American Aviation P-51 Mustangs (later designated F-51, referencing the change from pursuit plane to fighter) and often returned to the base low on fuel.When that occurred, the pilots would be “ranting and raving on the radio. ... They did a good job, but we saw a few mid-air collisions while I was there.” If the South Korean pilots didn’t like the controllers’ instructions, the pilots would land their planes and climb up the tower for an angry confrontation with their countrymen – a practice that came to a stop when Schad started locking the tower doors, he said. With landing wheels on only the wings and tail, the Mustangs’ noses were pointed upward as they taxied onto the runway, limiting the Korean pilots’ vision. If a landing plane stopped too soon on the runway, Schad said, the propeller of a following Mustang sometimes clipped its tail.Kimchi, a dish made with fermented vegetables and especially Napa cabbage, was a favorite of the Korean controllers, but the Americans found the odor too much to bear in the cramped tower, Schad said. Kimchi was kept out of the tower after the Koreans were allowed to eat in the U.S. mess hall.Schad later served in Germany from 1955 to 1958 and began working as a radar controller.During the Vietnam War, he was assigned to Japan’s Okinawa Island, working as a chief of a mobile radar-control approach. Both military and civilian aircraft used the base there, he said.“I had never forgot I wanted to be a pilot,” he said, so he earned a private pilot’s license in Okinawa, flying out of a former Japanese fighter base.In addition to adjusting to the geography and weather patterns at each new assignment, Schad helped train recently graduated controllers arriving from the U.S., he said.In Okinawa, his base was in a typhoon’s 120-mph winds for two days, and it was “so noisy you couldn’t hear each other’s talk in the building.”In the U.S., he served at bases in California, Florida, New Mexico and Virginia.After leaving the Air Force in 1970 as a senior master sergeant, he managed the control tower at the new Bolton Field airport in southwest Columbus.He also attended flight school at Bolton, mostly financed by the GI Bill.“I was very fortunate to be able to use that money,” he said, to earn a commercial pilot’s license with multi-engine, instrument, flight-instructor and air-transport ratings. In 50 years of flying, he said, he has spent 17,000 hours in the air. That’s an equivalent of almost two years.“I walked away from three accidents without getting hurt. I was very fortunate there,” he said. “One of them was my fault; the other two weren’t.” In one mishap caused by weather conditions, his aircraft rolled off the end of a runway, “through a fence, through a ditch, across a road and into a guy’s backyard.”“It didn’t help the airplane any,” he said.Schad said he still enjoys flying locally.He and his wife have four children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.His decorations include the United Nations Service Medal for Korea, the Distinguished Service Medal with oak-leaf cluster, the Air Force Commendation Medal with oak-leaf cluster and the Good Conduct Medal.His advice to veterans is, “Take care of the family and be a good patriot, a good citizen and take care of your health.” This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Mike Schad of Grove City, Air Force, Korea, Vietnam

Husband and wife Richard T. Curry and Christine Curry of Pickerington are U.S. Army veterans who served in Iraq and Kuwait during the War on Terror. Richard Curry grew up in Cincinnati and attended Youngstown State University, New York University and the American Military University. He earned his master’s degree in military history in December from AMU. He enlisted in 1975 and retired as a colonel.Christine Curry grew up in Logan and Sciotoville, attended Shawnee State University and joined the Army National Guard in 1982. She retired as a sergeant first class. Richard Curry’s first tour to Iraq began in 2004 as commander of a unit in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.“It was a completeArmy Cavalry Regiment – tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Strykers,” he said.It also had artillery units, he said.“We were tasked originally to help out with the elections, and then we were told we were going to go into a major offensive,” he said.That offensive was at Tal Afar, launched in September 2005. Curry was to lead his unit and act as a forward-operating-base commander. Forward operating bases are used to support strategic goals and tactical objectives.The offensive was launched, he said, “because what had been happening at the Syrian border was basically a mess.” The plan was to “secure the border and secure Tal Afar, which is the small town near the border area and was being used as a major logistics-type base for the insurgents.”His unit “had a lot of activity in the area, meaning we had a lot of mortars against our base, a lot of rockets against our base. There were a lot of insurgents in the area.”When Tal Afar was secure, Curry received a visit from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Multi-National Force-Iraq commander. Curry said he thought the four-star general might share some “pearls of wisdom,” but Casey instead said he was placing Curry in charge of a former airfield his unit had occupied.“I want that airfield put back into operation,” he recalled Casey telling him.When Curry informed Casey that as a tank commander, he had no experience in running an airfield, Casey replied, “Well, now you’re an airfield commander also. You call my staff. They’ll help you get what you need to put it back in operation.”Before that job ended, Curry was commanding 5,000 military personnel, he said.At first, when pilots radioed that they were ready to land, Curry said he answered, “ ‘Well, you see the airfield. ... Godspeed.’ That’s about all I could say to them because I had no idea what I was doing.”Later, an aviation team arrived to provide air-traffic control, he said.Christine Curry’s first tour was with a unit handling casualty operations and statistics.The unit compiled detailed reports, including “an extensive description of the injuries” that was used when the U.S. Department of Defense notified the next of kin. Compiling that information, she said, was “a job not just anybody could do.”“What was hard for most people was ... the description of each and every injury (and) killed in action,” she said. “Very detailed. ... In our case, the more detailed the better because the family’s going to want to know, even though it sounds gory.”Not all families wanted details, she said, “but those that do, they want to know everything.” “It was rough because ... you try to make sense of rollovers or IEDs, improvised explosive devices, that hit a convoy,” Curry said. “There’s no rhyme or reason how the injuries happen or anything like that. And you go to bed at night and think, ‘Oh my God, that was my kid’s age. He was my kid’s age; she was my kid’s age. ... The realization like, ‘This is real. This isn’t a book I’m reading. This is really happening.”Members of the unit were required to take counseling, she said, “whether we thought we needed it or not.”“We were good about not taking a lot of it personal, but it does play on you after a while,” she said.Members of her unit turned to exercise as an outlet, Curry said, “and they all were powerlifting by the time we left.”Six months into her tour, she received a new assignment – scanning reports for trends, “how many snipers, how many IEDs, how many small-arms fire, how many rocket-propelled (grenades).”That’s when she noticed an alarming trend. Suicide bombers were luring U.S. troops into buildings with sniper fire. When Americans entered a building to silence the sniper, the insurgent would detonate the bomb “and take out a whole squad instead of one person. ... So I immediately went down and talked to my deputy chief of staff (saying), ‘Hey, we’ve got a serious trend here.’ ” Army intelligence officers didn’t notice the trend, she said, because they weren’t seeing casualty data. That happened, in part, she said, because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 privacy laws.Within 48 hours of her report, she said, the Army in the entire theater of operations modified its response to such sniper attacks.“It was kind of like an afterthought by the time I got home that I actually probably saved lives there,” she said.At one point in Richard Curry’s Army career, he served with his daughter.Christine Curry served with her father and, later, Richard’s daughter.Then in their final tour, they served together.“At the time, I was a brigade commander. She was working in the admin shop,” Richard Curry said.Prior to that tour, they were at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, and began talking a lot, he said.They both remembered Richard’s reputation as a “cowboy.”“It was interesting at times,” Christine Curry said.Richard Curry said veterans learned to adapt to their environment in the military, and that’s good advice for returning to civilian life.“Respect what you accomplished,” he said. “But that’s not what you should be all about. ... Get involved in other things.”“Don’t be afraid to seek counseling,” Christine Curry said, “no matter how minute you think your problems are. ... Find a group where you have that commonality and talk about it ... with your fellow soldiers.” The couple are active in Whitehall Memorial VFW Post 8794, where Christine is commander and Richard is past commander. Richard Curry’s decorations include the Combat Action Badge, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal (two), Meritorious Service Medal (three oak leaf clusters), Army Commendation Medal (with silver oak leaf cluster), Army Achievement Medal (with two oak-leaf clusters) and Iraq Campaign Medal (with two combat campaign stars).He is a retired director of security and emergency services at Defense Supply Center Columbus.Christine Curry’s decorations include the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal (with three oak leaf clusters), Army Achievement Medal (with two oak leaf clusters) and Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal.She is a communication coordinator for Defense Finance and Accounting Services in Columbus. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Richard and Christine Curry of Pickerington, Ohio: U.S. Army, Global War on Terrorism

Mike Strahle, 34, of Westerville served in the Iraq War in 2005 with the Marine Corps' Columbus-based Company L (known as Lima Company), 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, as part of Regimental Combat Team 2. Strahle was with the unit when it conducted anti-insurgency operations in Iraq's Al Anbar province along the Syrian border and later helped launch Operation Matador (the Battle of Al Qaim) on May 8, 2005. Strahle returned to the United States with injuries he had sustained when the vehicle he was riding in was hit by a roadside bomb May 11, 2005. He is the executive director of the Eyes of Freedom, a traveling exhibit of portraits, painted by then-Ohio artist Anita Miller, depicting the 22 Marines and one Navy corpsman who died in Iraq with Lima Company. The exhibit also includes a bronze sculpture, "The Silent Battle," which characterizes the struggle of veterans adapting to civilian life. Strahle said he knew those who died in Iraq while serving with Lima. He was born and raised in Bryan and graduated from Bryan High School in 2003. His interest in the military was motivated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and "the gut feeling of helplessness when you're seeing the United States attacked in a way that hadn't happened in my lifetime." He said he was interested in becoming an officer and joined the ROTC program at Ohio State University. "They made it sound like my ... officer career would be ... much better suited if I had some enlistment time under my belt first," he said. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve when he was "young and still pretty angry about 9/11." Lima preceded its Iraq deployment with two months in California, training in security, surveillance and urban operations and getting used to a hot climate. Upon arriving in Iraq, the unit conducted a number of missions in cities, he said. "We were getting intelligence from any number of sources over there where these insurgents were moving," he said. "An insurgent tactic at the time was to take over part of a city or a few houses on a block" while trying to avoid the Marines, he said. During Lima's operations -- many conducted at night -- insurgents would engage the Marines or flee and then would be engaged or rounded up, he said. "That was the pace early on. ... We were always busy," he said. "But Operation Matador was completely different." The Marines had intelligence about major strongholds in certain cities, and Matador would be a large offensive task force, he said. Lima was prepared "for pretty much the whole city to be angry with us ... or to be prepared for our arrival." The unit began mobilizing before sunrise May 8, "engaging in fairly heavy combat most of the day," with a few men injured by machine guns or hand grenades, he said. During what probably would have been the last house clearing of the day, Cpl. Dustin Derga and Sgt. Anthony Goodwin were killed. Lance Cpl. Nicholas Erdy, who was killed later in the deployment, "performed amazingly" and pulled several wounded men from the house before it was hit by an Air Force bomb, Strahle said. Derga, Strahle said, was a team leader. "He was a very close friend of mine and one of the funniest guys in the platoon," he said. But "when things would go wrong, he had this uncanny ability to flip a switch" and change from "the class clown" to a "damn fine Marine," he said. Derga was killed by machine-gun fire while approaching the house, Strahle said. Several tank rounds were fired into the house before Goodwin took a team inside, Strahle said. The insurgents had prepared a dug-in fortified area inside, Strahle said, and while the tank rounds probably left the insurgents "blind, deaf and dumb," they were still alive. From a lower level, he said, "they opened up fire right through the floor," killing Goodwin and injuring two or three others. Goodwin was a veteran of the Marines' 1st Force Reconnaissance Company, Strahle said, and was "the one to teach us we really didn't know anything and we needed to listen up." Goodwin's capability and effectiveness as a leader led officers to give his unit several offensive tasks, Strahle said. "We had the intelligence, and we knew that this whole city was basically bad guys," Strahle said. "We were ordered to protect the civilian population there as best we could, and we did. We did a phenomenal job." On May 11, Strahle was riding in an assault amphibious vehicle second or third in line in a convoy. The AAVs, which were fully tracked amphibious landing vehicles, had no windows, so a ceiling hatch was opened to allow three or four Marines to stand on a bench with their heads and chests outside the hatch to improve observation of the surrounding area. Strahle was standing in the open hatch when an improvised explosive device "blew up right under my feet," he said. The blast killed six of the 16 or 17 on board and threw Strahle into the air. He landed face first in a ditch and began to bandage his injured stomach after failing to find his missing gun. The unit's Navy corpsmen, "who were asked to do a lot with very little, ... hands down, they saved my life," he said. With chest, leg and intestinal injuries, Strahle was put on an Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter 20 minutes after the explosion. He underwent surgeries in Germany before being transferred to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where his family was waiting for him. On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 men with Lima were killed by a roadside bomb. The effect of that incident, Strahle said, "rang all the way up to military generals and the president." The Marines' AAVs had no protection from explosions beneath the vehicle, he said, but the already-developed MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) vehicles did. The military expanded its use of MRAPs and began to rely more on helicopters to move troops between cities, despite the higher costs, he said. "Fourteen guys had to pass to just to kind of put an exclamation point on the problem," he said. Upon Lima's return to Columbus in October 2005, the unit received an enthusiastic welcome. Thousands of residents lined Hamilton Road, waving rain-dampened signs and cheering as Lima's motorcade traveled from what was then Port Columbus International Airport to Rickenbacker International Airport. Strahle said he received a communitywide welcome home when he returned to Bryan. He had a coaching job and later worked at JPMorgan Chase & Co. but soon realized he was drinking too much. Miller debuted her Eyes of Freedom exhibit -- life-size portraits of Lima's fallen -- in 2008 at the Ohio Statehouse. In 2011, Strahle asked her if the portraits could be displayed at a Pickerington fundraiser honoring Derga. Previously, the exhibit was on display for several months at a time, each at a different site. With Strahle's involvement after the Pickerington event, the Eyes of Freedom became a traveling display that since has made nearly 300 stops around the U.S. The display has a healing effect on all veterans, he said, including those from the Vietnam War. "The Silent Battle" sculpture depicts the postservice struggles of veterans and honors those lost to suicide, he said. Otherwise, "they're not treated the same way. They're not memorialized the same way," he said. Strahle, who retired from the Marines in 2007, said veterans who are struggling to adjust to civilian life should reach out to other veterans for support. "As soon as I got involved with Eyes of Freedom, it just kind of made it better," he said. Strahle's decorations include the Purple Heart, the Combat Action Ribbon, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary and Service Medals and the Armed Services Reserve Medal. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Mike Strahle of Westerville: U.S. Marines' Lima Company, Iraq War

Joseph A. Machado of Baltimore is an 80-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served in the Vietnam War in 1966 and 1967 during his 24-year military career.A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Machado grew up there and graduated from high school in 1956.He joined ROTC before graduating from Harvard University and was commissioned an Army lieutenant in 1964.After a time at Fort Lewis in Washington, he was preparing for a transfer to Germany when he received a change in orders sending him to Vietnam.There he worked with some of the earliest satellite communications systems used by the United States. It was one of the first operational uses of satellite communications in a tactical environment in wartime.Communications were made via the Syncom satellite and Interim Defense Communication Satellite Program. Syncom is an abbreviation for synchronous communication.Machado’s assignments included the 1st Signal Brigade, a Phu Lam communications facility, Buu Dien Ba Queo and Nha Trang satellite communications stations and a Long Binh receiver station.His unit handled communications that included battle-damage assessments sent to the United States. Similar installations were in Thailand and the Philippines, which Machado sometimes visited on errands that included trading spare parts.The main communications satellite was in orbit, providing four to six hours of contact at a time, he said.The stations had permission to do what Machado called “voice testing,” which allowed military personnel to make telephone calls of about 10 to 15 minutes to their families.“We had the opportunity to get lots of people there” for such calls, he said. “I had a lot of people lined up to come in to do that, ... talking voice to voice with their family. Way before the internet, this was a huge, huge benefit.”For a time his unit was stationed near the perimeter of Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon.There his unit was “literally at the wire” surrounding the base and was “constantly on alert at night,” when communist sappers a few times crossed the wire, creating damage elsewhere on the base.Members of his unit served 13-month tours and knew in advance when they would leave Vietnam.Most of the time, he said, “we lived in relative comfort and weren’t going out on missions. ... We still had to be careful moving around.” In some areas, his unit was “less than secure, but we didn’t think about that at the time. ... You never knew where a threat would be coming from.”The most difficult aspect of deployments, he said, is in being away from family. He had a new daughter and two other children when he was in Vietnam, he said.Worrying about his family “and them worrying about me and trying to keep them informed and assured that I was as safe as I could be ... that worry was always there. You never get rid of that,” he said.Returning to the United States was an easy transition for him, he said, because he still was in the Army.He retired from the Army in 1988 as a lieutenant colonel. He also was both a student and instructor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.He was inducted into the Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame in 1988. The honor, he said, “is not about military service. It’s about community service and what you did after you retired honorably from the military service.”He also has spent time looking for others worthy of the recognition. He has nominated four people to the Hall of Fame, and all were inducted, he said. About 200 individuals are recommended annually, he said, with 20 inducted.He is active as a board member for Honor Flight Columbus and is active in the Military Officers Association of America, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign War, Vietnam Veterans of America and the Korean War Veterans Association Inc.He also is involved in a veterans ministry at Violet Baptist Church in Pickerington.Machado’s decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, Legion of Merit, Meritorious Service Medal, Korea Defense Service Medal and Vietnam Campaign Medal.He and his partner, Sarah, have three children and seven grandchildren.Asked for his advice to veterans readjusting to civilian life, he said, “Be very grateful for living in a free country purchased and guaranteed by those who serve, continue to serve, have shed their blood or are willing to shed their blood to protect and provide for our freedom.“I believe satisfaction and success is rooted in serving others. Jesus was the perfect and ultimate example of a servant leader, and I am committed to follow his example.” This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Joseph Machado of Baltimore, Ohio: U.S. Army, Vietnam War

Robert Sotak of Upper Arlington is a 91-year-old U.S. Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War. Sotak was raised in St. Ann’s Infants Home and St. Vincent Orphanage, both in Columbus, after his father died of cancer and his mother of tuberculosis. He graduated from East High School in 1945 and enlisted in the Navy at age 17 that June. His two brothers already were in the Navy, and a sister’s husband died during a B-29 bomber mission over Japan. He first went to a naval training center in New York, where  he served in the regimental headquarters. He next was shipped to a Staten Island berthing facility in New York City. He recalled that a ride on the Staten Island Ferry and New York subways cost a nickel each, and he was able to visit such spots as the Statue of Liberty and Times Square. Once in New York, he said, “I had a buddy from Cleveland I ran around with, and I only had $2.50 in my pocket and wouldn’t receive reimbursement for travel for two weeks. “I might add that I had the same job later and reimbursed personnel in two days,” he said. “I tried to be careful with the short funds. However, there was a gentleman who said he was a veteran and asked for a dime to get a cup of coffee. I gave him a dime, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins and placed the dime with them. “On another occasion, two women came up to us, and each asked for a quarter. We obliged. We just couldn’t resist in either case.” In June 1946, Sotak put his name in for re-enlistment and was about to be promoted to storekeeper second class when he learned he instead would be discharged in July. A month from his 19th birthday, he left active duty and entered the Navy Reserve. “While in New York, my buddy was a dancer, and I was a roller skater. We alternated dancing and skating,” he said. “When we went to the ballroom, I sat out while my buddy danced. We both roller-skated. “When I returned home, I got a job at $23 per week,” he said. “A few weeks later, I was informed that the government was looking for veterans. I went to the personnel office and was hired the same day at $75 every two weeks.” Swing and big band still were popular, and back in Columbus, Sotak began taking dance lessons at the Jimmy Rawlins Dance Studio, which operated for decades, mostly in Clintonville. “After finishing the advanced class, Jimmy offered me a teaching job, which I accepted,” Sotak said. “Eventually, we did weekly exhibitions in front of big-named bands, such as Kay Keyser, Sammy Kaye, Harry James, etc., at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel at Broad and High. I kept my government job while teaching, but I made more money teaching.” After the outbreak of the Korean War in July 1950, Sotak was called to active duty in September. After two weeks of disbursement training at Bayonne, New Jersey, he was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Lake County, Illinois. He was assigned to a disbursing office, and his work environment changed as an indirect result of a party held at Waukegan’s Veterans of Foreign War post. “The next morning, the disbursing office burned down,” he said. “One of the party members fell asleep on a cot in the ladies restroom while smoking. ... A temporary office was set up in the gymnasium. We worked seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. until about March 1951.” From there, he said, he was assigned to the special pay counter at the disbursing office’s new location in a gym. “This was my job until I was discharged in July 1952,” he said. “Gym life wasn’t very comfortable for us. We began standing guard duty, and for liberty, we were divided into (two groups) and alternated Sunday afternoons for liberty while working in the gym. “At Great Lakes, my responsibility was the special pay counter. One day a person came in all dressed in civilian clothes and asked for money. After getting his name, I went to the officer’s file but couldn’t find his pay account. I went to my commanding officer, and he looked up and said, ‘That’s the commander of the base.’ His file was kept in the very front by itself.” Sotak was allowed to return home to Columbus, but only married men were granted leave on Christmas. He had thought of staying in the Navy, and had sent all of his civilian clothes to his sister, who had a young friend who didn’t own many clothes. But he changed his mind about the Navy after learning that his rank would have been reduced from DK2 (disbursing clerk) to DK3 if he had stayed in. As a result, he had to spend all of his muster-out pay to buy new civilian clothes. When asked for his advice to veterans adjusting to a return to civilian life, Sotak said he had no problem adjusting because of being young when he served in both wars. “I learned you will have to leave your friends and meet new ones,” the Good Conduct Medal recipient said. “That’s what service was all about.” Sotak and his wife, Jane, have two children and four grandchildren. He retired from the Department of Defense in 1986 and is a member of the Knights of Columbus and the Society of St Vincent de Paul. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Robert Sotak of Upper Arlington, Ohio: U.S. Navy, WWII, Korea

Ernest C. Massie of Gahanna is a 50-year-old U.S. Navy veteran who served during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991.His father, an Army military policeman during World War II, traveled in his work for defense contractors when Massie was growing up.As a result, Massie, who was born in Michigan, lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Fullerton, California, before graduating from high school in Fairfield, Ohio.He attended college in Kentucky when he joined the U.S. Army Reserve. After two years, he left the Reserve and joined the Navy, becoming a gunner’s mate working on cannons and small arms.He first went to sea on the USS Spartanburg County (LST-1192), which served in the Mediterranean as part of an amphibious readiness group of several ships carrying a total of 3,000 Marines.The ship’s next assignment was to assist the U.S. Coast Guard during anti-drug-smuggling patrols in the Caribbean.“That was pretty interesting because of people trying to think they can outrun helicopters, ships, etc., etc., and it was mostly drunks coming out of Key West ... in pleasure boats, thinking it would be fun to try to outrun the Navy and the Coast Guard,” Massie said.Later, he applied for a gunner’s-mate opening on the USS Truett (FF-1095), a Knox-class frigate designed for anti-submarine warfare.After serving a year on the Truett, he was on a fishing trip in Canada and received a phone call to return to the Truett on Aug. 4, 1990, two days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.The United States formed an international coalition that launched Operation Desert Shield to prevent further Iraqi aggression. It was followed by Operation Desert Storm, an offensive to retake Kuwait after Hussein failed to meet a Jan. 15, 1991, deadline to withdraw from the country.Upon returning to the Truett, Massie was asked if he wanted to be assigned to one of the ships being deployed to the Persian Gulf that were short on personnel.“The next day,” he said, “I packed my stuff, and I was on the USS Mississippi (CGN-40),” a nuclear-powered guided-missile cruiser.The contrast between the Mississippi and Truett “was like night and day,” he said.The Mississippi was a large ship with a crew of nearly 600. It sailed to Sicily, where it took on Tomahawk cruise missiles, and it deployed to the Gulf of Aqaba to enforce an embargo against Iraq during Desert Shield.Massie was stationed in a room of about 12 by 20 feet that housed controls for the ship’s cannon. He didn’t see daylight for two days at a time, he said.The Mississippi’s crew boarded about 80 ships, looking for contraband from Iraq and finding it on two.One, Massie said, “was full of everything you could think of that could be stolen,” including a car that bore bullet holes. The items were taken from Kuwait and were being sold to customers for cash, mostly in Africa, he said.The other was a Russian ship that carried no manifest but was full of small arms, he said.After a maintenance stop at Naples, Italy, the Mississippi continued ship inspections and performed escort duty in the Red Sea.When it sailed past Yemen, radar and anti-ship batteries on shore were trained on the ship.Massie said the Yemenis shut down the radar after the Mississippi launched some aircraft, swung its guns toward shore and turned on its firing radar.During Desert Storm, Massie said, the Mississippi fired six cruise missiles at Iraq on two dates.The missiles had a range of about 1,000 miles. At the time, the missiles would emerge from their launches “kind of relatively slow – slow enough that you can actually snap a picture” – before the fins deployed and the missile’s engine ignited, he said.The ship also fired its guns at targets in Iraq, he said, to trick the Iraqis into thinking the coalition forces would stage an amphibious landing.When Massie left the Navy, he had saved $12,000 and knew he wanted to finish his bachelor’s degree.Looking back on his Navy service, he said, “Glad I did what I did when I did. Glad I served when I did.”He received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Akron.Massie is the administrator of the Tax Analysis Division of the Ohio Department of Taxation.He and his wife, Jodi Miller, have a son, Michael Miller.Massie is the commander of Tri-Community VFW Post 4719 and second vice commander of American Legion Post 797, both in Gahanna.He’s also a member of La Societe des Quarante Hommes et Huit Chevaux – known as the Forty and Eight – an honor society of American veterans and service members.According to fortyandeight.org, the name is derived from the experiences of U.S. troops during World War I. Soldiers were transported to the front on the French rail system, and each boxcar had the capacity to hold either 40 men or eight horses. The organization was founded in 1920 by American veterans returning from France and initially was part of the American Legion before becoming independent in 1960, according to the site. Membership is by invitation only.Massie’s decorations include Sea Service Ribbon (with bronze star); Coast Guard’s Special Operations Service Ribbon; National Defense Service Medal; Battle Effectiveness Award; Southwest Asia Service Medal (with two bronze stars); Kuwait Liberation Medal (Saudi Arabia); Kuwait Liberation Medal (Kuwait); and Navy Unit Commendation. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Ernest Massie of Gahanna, Ohio: U.S. Navy, Desert Shield, Desert Storm

Jeffrey D. Noble, 74, of Dublin flew an Army helicopter gunship during the Vietnam War with Company B, 9th Aviation Battalion, 9th Infantry Division, and went on to have a 25-year career in the Army.“I wouldn’t trade one day of the 25 years for anything in the world,” he said.After graduating from high school in Florida in the early 1960s and taking courses at the College of Wooster, Noble tried to join the Navy as an aviator. He was told if he wanted to be a pilot, he had to get a college degree first.After a brief return to college and getting a private pilot’s license, he joined the Army in 1966 and became a helicopter pilot.In 1968, he was flying a UH-1 Huey helicopter gunship in South Vietnam, based at Bear Cat and Dong Tam.“Getting shot (at), first time, always exciting,” Noble said. “You look down; you see a little green dot. By the time that baby gets close to your helicopter, it’s about the size of a medicine ball.”Unlike the two-man AH-1 Cobra gunships that came into widespread use later, the UH-1 had a four-man crew. The extra eyes on board, he said, were handy in spotting enemy fire from the ground.Noble’s missions during the war included locating and targeting sites that were sending mortar or rocket fire toward U.S. or allied ground troops or bases.Other missions included supporting U.S. boats working to stop communist supplies moving in rivers and canals.Communist troops were adept at avoiding trouble, he said. They could sink their boats intentionally, hide on shore and raise the boat after the coast had cleared.River operations might involve Navy boats, Air Force planes and Army helicopters and artillery, Noble said, thereby creating challenges in coordinating the different elements.Because the Army and Navy used different radio systems, Army soldiers would ride the boats to communicate with helicopters and artillery, he said. During one engagement, he asked a soldier on a boat if he had called for other support. Apparently reluctant to see the gunship leave, the soldier said no. Then U.S. artillery began to land nearby, unexpected by Noble and his crew.The soldier on the boat knew about the artillery “but wasn’t telling us,” Noble recalled with a laugh.Noble returned to the scene when artillery subsided, asking the soldier if any other support had been called. Again the soldier said no, just before a B-57 Canberra bomber arrived carrying what Noble called “the biggest bomb I’ve ever seen.”Noble’s unit operated in the southern part of the country, where the enemy was the Viet Cong (local guerrilla fighters), while the North Vietnamese Army was more active in the north.That was the situation until the Tet Offensive broke out in January 1968, when the communists launched surprise attacks against towns and bases all across South Vietnam.An immediate effect for Noble was that he was operating in urban areas for the first time. Cho Lon, an area of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, was a hotbed of combat with “Viet Cong all over the place.” Noble’s helicopter flew missions in Cho Lon for two weeks.About 80 percent of Noble’s missions were flown at night. In a Third World country like South Vietnam at the time, there is no ambient light at night in rural areas, he said. It was “a big black field out there.”By abandoning hit-and-run tactics used earlier, communist forces were overwhelmed during Tet by the Americans and South Vietnamese, along with allies from Australia and Thailand.“We won Tet,” Noble said. “There were no more North Vietnamese soldiers in South Vietnam after Tet, nor were there any Viet Cong. They were literally decimated.”North Vietnamese literature admitted, he said, “militarily, they had no ability to respond anymore.”American troops at the time believed putting military pressure on North Vietnam after the Tet Offensive could have forced the communists into talks to end the war.It was not until he had returned to the United States, Noble said, that he learned the American public saw the Tet Offensive as a failure of U.S. policy, increasing erosion of public support.Depleted Viet Cong forces eventually would be replaced by the North Vietnamese Army. Toward the end of his tour, Noble said, the NVA attacked the base where he was stationed. A year earlier, he said, the enemy would have been “nothing but Viet Cong.”When his time in Vietnam ended, Noble said, “they told you, when you got to the states, take your uniform off (because of growing public opposition to the military). Which we did.”Back in the United States, Noble completed his college education and served at locations that include Fort Benning, Fort Knox and Fort Hood. He also was stationed at Baumholder in then-West Germany and at Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico. He performed a variety of duties, including leading an armored unit and working as an inspector general and in military finance.Noble worked for Huntington Bank for 15 years after leaving the Army. He serves on the Franklin County Veterans Service Commission and is active in several veterans organizations.At the veterans service commission, “we see the issues every week,” he said of former military personnel readjusting to civilian life.“When they get out of the service, if you can get them into a career or a job that they enjoy and are interested in and give them enough money to live on,” he said, “you’ve got a good answer.”Noble’s decorations include the Defense Superior Service Medal, Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal (10th award), Army Commendation Medal (three oak leaf clusters), Joint Service Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal (4 bronze stars), Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal, Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross Unit Citation with Palm, Overseas Service Bars (two), Army Service Ribbon and Overseas Service Ribbon (two).He and his wife, Jane, have been married 47 years. They have two sons, Dr. Gregory Noble and Kevin Noble, and 10 grandchildren. This podcast was hosted and produced by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek Community News assistant managing editor, digital. This profile was written by Paul Comstock.

Jeffrey Noble of Dublin, Ohio: U.S. Army, Vietnam War

Angela Beltz of Reynoldsburg is a 49-year-old Ohio National Guard veteran who served in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991. Beltz’ military career started after her junior year in high school, having joined the North Dakota Army National Guard in 1986. She grew up primarily on the Spirit Lake Nation reservation and wanted to experience life away from it, she said. She also was looking for a way to pay for college. Military service might be in Beltz’ blood, as her ancestry is rich in it. “My great-grandfather was a scout for the U.S. Cavalry, (and) my relatives on this side have served in every conflict,” she said. “My grandpa served in World War I before he was officially a U.S. citizen and allowed to vote.” On her father’s side, military service can be traced back to the Civil War, she said. Beltz also recently submitted an application to become a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Beltz’ basic training began at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1986, during the summer between her junior and senior year, when she was only 17. She recalled a drill sergeant who was particularly challenging – frequently barking at her to do pushups. “He picked on me. Every time he saw me, he made me do pushups,” she said. “I hated going to eat because -- if he was marching us -- because I was guaranteed at least 100 pushups (during) that three-block (trek).” She said she had asked him at the end of basic training why he was so tough on her. He told her it was because she was so young and that he wanted to make sure she would make it. After basic training, Beltz returned to high school for her senior year. She recalled the students all thinking about homecoming and prom and how their hair would look. “Those things were no longer important to me,” she said. During a nine-month break, she said, she took part in an 11-day stint with the Marines but re-enlisted with the National Guard in North Dakota and attended refueling school at Fort Lee, Virginia. Beltz said the equipment for fuel was mostly the same as that used for water distribution. Beltz was deployed to Saudi Arabia in September 1990 and eventually was moved to Log Base Charlie near Rafha, a town in northern Saudi Arabia near the Iraq border, as part of the 134th Quartermaster detachment. The unit comprised 24 people ages 18-23, with the exception of three staff sergeants. Many of the soldiers had attended high school together, including her cousin. “We all basically grew up together, so it was really kinda weird,” she said. “It was like the Brady Bunch going to war.” While in Saudi Arabia, Beltz had to endure the threat of not only scud missiles but also chemical alerts. In one incident, a chemical plant had been bombed and the wind was blowing chemicals in the direction of her unit, prompting MOPP 4 – a mission-oriented protective posture that required all protection to be worn, including suit, boots, mask and gloves. She also described the stigma of being an American woman in Saudi Arabia, where women weren’t even permitted to drive. “You would see the strange looks of people … and you were a female and you were driving, they’re just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you know, what is this woman doing driving?’” she said. “Some of the police and border people weren’t real happy to have us there.” After six months in Saudi Arabia, her unit came home and was invited to participate in a ticker-tape parade in New York City that “didn’t work out.” Her plane had developed a fuel leak and had to land at an Air Force base and wait for several hours to have the plane dug out of a snow bank. They had missed the parade. Upon returning home, her Dakota tribal elders honored her with two Indian names because she was an “Akicita” – meaning “warrior,” she said. One was Kowakapi-Sni-Winyan, which is translated to “I Am Not Afraid Woman.” The other is Tasunka-Na-Kan, which is translated to “She Rides Her Horse.” Beltz had met her husband, Daryl Beltz of Ohio, overseas during Operation Desert Storm and transferred to the Ohio National Guard upon her return. Beltz’ next deployment was to Stennis International Airport near Kiln, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She said numerous units from all branches of military and most of the states had arrived there, even a North Dakota unit she had recognized – a water-purification unit. The flooding was devastating, she said, but the looting was widespread. Military personnel and police were under fire on occasion while trying to secure areas from being looted, she said. “It just gives you a glimpse of the breakdown of society when there is no law and order,” she said. In some areas, however, local residents were more welcoming, she said, even inviting military personnel to cookouts. Following her retirement from service, Beltz was hired by DFAS-Columbus and continues to take care of soldiers and their families. She’s also an advocate for women serving in the military and for female veterans. She is the chairperson of the Ohio Women Veterans Advisory Committee, under the director of the Ohio Department of Veterans Services. Her decorations include the Army Achievement Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the National Defense Service Medal with Star, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Armed Forces Reserve Medal, the Humanitarian Service Medal, the NCO Professional Development Ribbon, the Army Service Ribbon, two Kuwait Liberation Medals, a Driver Mechanic Badge, the Ohio Commendation Medal and the Ohio Defense Service Medal. Her husband, Daryl, also a Desert Storm and Afghanistan veteran, is a lieutenant colonel in the Ohio Army National guard. They have two sons, Wyatt and Garett. Wyatt is now an airman in the U.S. Air Force. “So the legacy continues,” she said. This podcast was produced and hosted by Scott Hummel, ThisWeek assistant managing editor, digital.

Angela Beltz of Reynoldsburg, Ohio: Ohio Army National Guard, Gulf War

Central Ohio military veterans, ranging from World War II to the most recent conflicts and battles even in Yemen, share their war stories with ThisWeek Community News host Scott Hummel.

hubhopper

ThisWeek Community News: Marching Orders

hubhopper