St. Joseph-Ogden graduate Josh Townsend joined the Marines after 9/11 and served in the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and helped evacuate 15,000 Americans from the 2006 Lebanon War. He also did a tour in Fallujah, Iraq during the two deadliest years of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
SJO bus driver Leonard Winchester was drafted into the army in 1967, year out of high school, and served in Vietnam.
Chris Hinen, father of SJO student Zoe Hinen, signed up to join the army because they would pay for his education and served four tours in Iraq.
Nicole Chamber’s Advanced English 2 Class heard from those three veterans, plus 12 more, during their Veterans panel held at the end of October.
The class read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, which details the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War. The students wanted to talk to actual veterans about their experiences in the military instead of assuming they knew how veterans felt.
The panel discussion was wide-ranging with questions regarding how and why they joined the military, what active duty was like, how their family felt with their deployments and what it was like to come home from being deployed.
Hinen told students that when he was first deployed to Iraq he was just starting his family and he has regularly been away from his wife and children since he has been deployed a total of four times. In July he will go to Fort Bragg in North Carolina and by October he will be deployed again.
“Your situation always seems worse to other people,” he told the students.
Nate Price, a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps served in Fallujah, Iraq from 2007 to 2008 and the Helmand Province in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010.
Price said that being deployed is not as hard on the soldiers as it is on their family back home.
“The hardest job in the Marine Corps is being a mom or a wife,” he said. “The deployments cause more stress for those at home.”
St. Joseph resident Bruce Rape told students how he was drafted. Rape was attending the University of Illinois and worked to keep his grades high.
“You studied really hard because if you kept your grades up they wouldn’t come get you,” he said.
Rape graduated and planned on becoming a history teacher.
Instead, he was drafted.
His number was 12 out of 365.
He joined the Air Force before he could be assigned to a different branch of the military. He served from 1970-1978 and served in Vietnam from 1972-1973.
“At the time I did not want to be in the military,” he said. “But it changed my life. It worked out OK.”
Hinen told students that he signed up to receive money for college. He said he never thought he would be deployed.
“The last conflict we were in was in 1991,” he said. “I was nine. Then 9/11 happened and I thought ‘What did I do?’”
Townsend told the students that he was one semester away from graduating college when he decided to enlist and was motivated by 9/11.
“I felt compelled to join,” he said. “It was my generations war.”
The students asked the veterans what it was like to come back from deployment.
Some veterans said they had certain things they did for six to seven months upon returning such as when they left a room, checking for their weapon.
“I put y hand on my hip and my heart is in my throat,” Hinen said. “I don’t have my pistol on me. Oh wait, Im in my living room and don’t need it.”
Larry Nitzke, a Vietnam veteran, told students that adjusting to life after deployment can be difficult.
“Loud noises cause you to jump, someone taps you on the shoulder and you come around swinging, you sit with your back against the wall and face the door and you look for what you can use as a weapon,” he said.
Townsend asked his mother, Terri Herbst, to tell students about the changes she had seen in him since he returned from deployment.
Herbst said her son was a happy teenager and a football player. After his deployment, she saw changes in him.
Herbst said Townsend has weapons hidden in his home in case someone breaks in and sits with his back to the wall and watches the door no matter where they are at.
“Every time I talk to him I learn something else that he has gone through that was unpleasant,” she said.
Townsend told students he survived three Improvised explosive device attacks and was shot at daily.
“I was in the thick of it,” he said.
“He really wanted to join,” Herbst said. “But it wasn’t like they said it would be. It does something to your head but I am glad he is here.”
The students also asked the veterans what the public’s reaction is once they learned they served.
Winchester said in the last 10 years or so people have started to thank veterans for their service.
“It wasn’t always like that,” he said.
Rape said when he originally returned from Vietnam he didn’t tell people he had served because the reactions were not positive.
“It got to the point you didn’t want people to know you were in the military,” he said.
Nitzke agreed.
“I didn’t tell anyone I had been overseas,” he said.
Bill McLane, who served in the Navy on two aircraft carries off the coast of Vietnam, told students that the way people react to veterans has changed over the years.
“Now people constantly thank you,” he said. “It has been a pleasant change. Every person who serves put their life on the line.”
