[jessefan]

Take into account the slant of the newspaper and whether their experiences are representative or not. But they do give a picture of some of the things going on.
Their photos are in the link.

http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,1122131,00.html

Ongoing Battles

Published in the Asbury Park Press 11/24/04
Editor's note: In March 2003, On the Run profiled Spc. Jennifer Kramer and Spc. Katie Meisenbacher of the Army National Guard's 253rd Transportation Company as they prepared to join the U.S. Army's 101st Corps Support Battalion in Iraq. Now, seven months after their homecoming from a yearlong tour of duty, the soldiers reflect on their experiences and life since they've returned to New Jersey.

Two women soldiers from Ocean County encounter major changes at home, discuss their war experiences and brace for a possible return to Iraq
By KARYN D. COLLINS
STAFF WRITER
Welcome to Iraq.

Jennifer Kramer's menstrual period kicked about the minute she arrived in the country and lasted, inexplicably, for 70 straight days. Because she was stuck in an undeveloped area of the desert without access to an OB-GYN, Army medics could only advise Kramer to double up on her birth control pills, take iron supplements and hope for a reprieve.



STAFF PHOTO: TIM MC CARTHY
Jennifer Kramer returned home to discover her husband had left her for another woman, sold the car she had been restoring, run up their credit cards and left her preschool-age son with Kramer's father.


PHOTO COURTESY OF JENNIFER KRAMER
Katie Meisenbacher voluntarily shaved her head to beat the desert heat, then watched as her already slight frame dropped to 90 pounds. She's still not sure why she lost the weight. Some Iraqis thought she was a little boy.

Now, seven months after returning home from the war front, Kramer and Meisenbacher, both specialists, recall such memories from their year in Iraq like it was yesterday. The two Ocean County women served with their Army National Guard unit, the 253rd Transportation Company, which was attached to the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

Their homecoming was tempered by the knowledge of a possible return trip; their unit is scheduled to leave at the end of next year or beginning of 2006. Both women are trying to get out of the Army Guard. If they are unsuccessful, they'll be right back in the desert squatting under trucks when nature calls in the middle of a mission.


A civilian again
But civilian life certainly has its downside and annoyances, too, the women say in separate interviews. Any Hallmark image of a soldier's welcome home was quickly supplanted by the reality of a world that had continued on without them.

Kramer's experiences both in Iraq and back home proved the more dramatic. The 27-year-old from Stafford returned home to discover her husband had left her for another woman, sold the car she'd been restoring, run up their credit cards and, worst of all, left her preschool-age son (from a previous relationship) with Kramer's father.

Meisenbacher, 23, of Brick, discovered in more subtle ways that everyone else's life back home had moved forward. Her father remarried and her best friend got engaged and planned the wedding without her.

The women are resolute about moving on with their lives. Kramer alternates between a job in a pharmacy, classes at Burlington County College and raising her son; Meisenbacher, who was promoted to specialist from private first class, is a part-time student at Ocean County College. Both women say school bills were one of the main reasons why they joined the National Guard.


No escape from war
But there's no escaping the war they left behind. Neighbors and co-workers ask questions and make unwittingly naive comments. Meisenbacher and Kramer watch television news accounts with wariness and cynicism; they lived the reality behind the sound bites.

"I had to stop watching the news for a while. I would get so mad because I knew what I was hearing from television didn't sound like the truth, not from what I knew over there," Meisenbacher says.



PHOTO COURTESY OF KATIE MEISENBACHER

Katie Meisenbacher discovered that everyone else's life back home had moved forward: Her father remarried and her best friend got engaged and planned the wedding without her.



STAFF PHOTO: STEVE SCHOLFIELD
Says Kramer: "People have no idea what it's really like. Unless you've been over there -- really been there -- you really shouldn't comment, and that goes for the politicians who just come for a couple of hours, too."

Kramer also brought home an unwelcome reminder of the war: chemical contamination rashes on her eyes and fingers.

"(The Army doctors) don't know how I got it and it won't go away, but I'm luckier than some people. A lot of people came back with parasites in their lungs," Kramer says. And, the women add, some soldiers didn't make it home at all.

For these women, Iraq was hell.

"It's such a mess over there. The U.S. is just so sucked in over there," Meisenbacher says.

Adds Kramer: "We have a huge mess on our hands and no one knows how to get out of it. It's really sad."

Trained as truck drivers to transport soldiers and supplies, the two women found themselves doing a little bit of everything, including minor maintenance on their trucks and duties around camp.


Fears and foes
In Iraq, there was no such thing as a simple job. As a Guard unit, the women say they soon discovered much of their equipment was outdated or, in the case of their night-vision goggles, almost useless.

"The infantry guys would look at our equipment like our flak jackets and laugh and say, 'Are you kidding? Is that what they sent you here with?' " Meisenbacher says. "We finally got proper flak jackets after about six months. Our night-vision goggles were so old we ended up driving without them. We were doing better without them.

"After a while, you could tell regular Army vs. the Reserves and the National Guard units by looking at the equipment. The Guard and the Reserves got the hand-me-downs."

Kramer, who was originally a medic for the unit before being transfered to truck driving, found herself doing both jobs (she earned a commendation for her work as a medic) as well as working as a dental assistant and supervising Iraqi workers. Meisenbacher also helped supervise workers and was even enlisted to help infantry soldiers do body searches on Iraqi women.

"The soldiers had heard that some of the women were hiding AK-47s under their dresses, so they wanted me to go with them and search the women," Meisenbacher says. "It was actually kind of cool. Of course you think, 'What if?' but I actually sort of enjoyed it. At least it was something different."

Finally, it was a job where there was an advantage to being a woman. Meisenbacher says men had more respect for her after the mission.

As truck drivers, physical combat was not part of the job description. Instead, the women fought to maintain their sanity and sense of humor.

Their foes weren't just the Iraqis who, according to Meisenbacher and Kramer, viewed them -- at best as easy marks to sell goods or to steal from, and at worst, as evil bullies who were ruining their country. Their foes also were the powdery sand that got into everything, the uncompromising heat and the odd normalcy of hearing nightly serenades of mortar rounds from rocket-propelled grenades aimed in their direction.

"I'll tell you one thing: I don't like fireworks anymore," Kramer says. "It was weird. The first night we got mortared, we all ran to the bunker, scared out of our minds. That was July 3 (2003).

"After a while, we kind of got used to it. They'd hit us every night -- one, two, three times a night, every night. One time there were 17 or 18 rounds shot in a night. Most of the time we just kept doing what we were doing. We started sleeping through them. If we didn't feel the ground shake or feel the impact, we didn't move."

The women say it was obvious the attackers were getting better information. Their chow hall and airfields were hit. Other camps next to theirs suffered direct hits, too. A couple of months after the women's unit left Iraq, their camp's PX was hit.

Perhaps the women's biggest foe was the constant feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing who, if anyone -- Iraqi or American -- could be trusted.

"We ended up talking to the Iraqis because we had to supervise them when they started working on the base," Kramer says. "But then you're also wondering: Are these the same people mortaring us at night? Is that why they were getting more accurate with their mortars?

Are these the people cutting through our barbed wire on the perimeter and going through our trash and then we're paying them to fix it during the day?

"You just never knew, and the not knowing was scary. You never could trust anyone."

The stories they'd hear from the Iraqis hired to work in the Army camp were eye-opening. Several told tales of suffering repercussions from other Iraqis for helping the Americans.

"One man said to me, 'Your president says you're here to get the terrorists. Aren't you terrorists for invading my country?' I just told him it wasn't up to me. I don't want to be here anymore than you do," Kramer says.

Some of the discussions were as comical as they were eye-opening. Kramer says one man, hired by the Army to be on the fire department, admitted he paid his relatives to set fires because he only got paid per fire.

Meisenbacher says she tried to avoid conversations with Iraqis altogether but ended up having her eyes opened, too.

"Sometimes it was weird. A lot of them spoke English very well. Many of the Iraqis I met were very highly educated," she says. "One guy called me Kate Hudson, when I told him my name was Katie. He would sit there and talk to me about anything and everything.

"I would say, 'Dude, you're an Iraqi. You shouldn't be talking to me about stuff like movies and just normal things.' It was weird."

As unsettling as it was to be drawn into a conversation with Iraqis, the women say some of their fellow soldiers also made them uneasy. Two soldiers died and 14 others sustained injuries when command tents of the 101st were attacked by grenades. An American soldier who is Muslim was charged in the case and is awaiting trial for court-martial that could lead to his execution.

"I was just as afraid of some of the soldiers in our unit as I was of the Iraqis, to be honest with you," Meisenbacher says. "A lot of these people really shouldn't have been carrying around a rifle, let alone have access to ammunition. It made you wonder."

Yet sometimes, there were moments of near normalcy, or at least what passed for normalcy in Iraq. Kramer spent free time knitting. Meisenbacher was able to hang out with her boyfriend, whom she first met in New Jersey. Kramer and other soldiers eagerly read the latest Harry Potter book as it was passed from tent to tent as part of an informal lending library. Meisenbacher was one of the first in line when the post opened an Internet cafe halfway through her deployment; she spent hours shopping on the Internet for "girl stuff" she could wear when she finally got home.


Surreal and terrifying
Most of the time, though, life in Iraq was an ever-changing mix of the surreal and the terrifying.

Surreal as when Iraqi men would smile at the female soldiers and say, "I love you."

"Eventually we found out that they did that because in the American movies they saw, right before a sex scene the actors would say, 'I love you,' " Meisenbacher says. "Our interpreter told us that these Iraqi guys thought 'I love you' means 'OK, let's have sex.' "

Terrifying as when Iraqi children and adults swarmed Kramer's truck trying to either sell her items or steal from her. She says the experience left an emotional scar: She's still afraid to be in large crowds.

"I sat in the truck with my gun and kept pointing it at them and shouting, 'Get back, get off the truck,' " she says. "I guess I insulted someone because they spat inside my truck."

And surreal as when the two women, already encountering contempt from Iraqi men, were routinely hit on by male soldiers on base.

"They used to call us queen for a year. It didn't matter what you looked like. You're a female and they haven't seen their wives or girlfriends for over six months," Meisenbacher says.

Terrifying as when an explosive device went off on the side of Meisenbacher's truck as it was going down an Iraqi road.

"We were lucky. It was cold, so our windows were up. That's what saved us. If the windows had been down, someone would have been hurt," Meisenbacher says. "We were lucky; we got out of there. But I've never screamed so loud in my life."

Sitting in their homes in Ocean County, the two women say it's impossible not to wonder if this taste of civilian life will last or if it's just a temporary reprieve. Even as they left Iraq in April, their unit was told it was on the list to return.

"At least we got to go home. There were units waiting with us in Kuwait for a flight home that got turned around and told to go back into Iraq," Kramer says. "We thought we'd get turned around, too, but somehow we were allowed to come home."

Kramer's six-year commitment to the Guard should have ended in April 2003, but she marked her anniversary by driving into Iraq. She's hoping the Army will let her out next April. She will have served eight years.

"I just want out. Everyone is trying to jump ship. Everyone has had enough. My Guard unit went for training this past weekend and we had 70 people. We had 150 when our unit went to Iraq," Kramer says.

Meisenbacher, who joined the Army Guard right out of high school -- "I was young and stupid," she says -- is supposed to be done with her enlistment, too. She's hoping to transfer to a less strenuous assignment with the Air National Guard, where she might at least have an option of serving for a month or two instead of an entire year.

"They're not letting people out of the military right now," Meisenbacher says.

"Even if I was to get out, I'd be placed on that inactive active reserve list. Those are the people doing the checks at the bridges and tunnels. I don't want to put my life on hold again."