Young Associates Back From Iraq Struggle With Memories, Question War
By Anne K. McMillan, Texas Lawyer
Nightmares haunt Jason N. Thelen four times a week. When he's awake, he struggles with memory and concentration problems.
Allen R. Vaught still deals with pain from where his back snapped in four places. He, too, battles memory problems.
Both men -- former Army captains who returned home recently from fighting in Iraq -- not only share symptoms, they share the cause: They nearly were killed while together on a mission.
Thelen, an Andrews Kurth litigation associate in Dallas, and Vaught, an associate with Irving's Franklin Cardwell & Jones, first met in Judge Advocate General's Corps training back in 1999, when supervisors assigned them to the same team and they discovered they both practiced in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Over the next five years, their paths would cross again and again, from the day the Army assigned them to the same battalion bound for Baghdad to the morning bombs almost blew their Humvee off a road in Iraq.
Now the two young lawyers, both of whom took their military oaths years before taking their bar oaths, have become skeptical of the potential for success in Iraq.
In the long months they served in Iraq before the ambush, they dodged AK-47 fire, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades that came screaming out of minarets; endured endless days of 130-degree heat and months without showers; and drove Humvees through streets flooded with a foot-and-a-half of raw sewage. They say they waited in vain for Uncle Sam to provide radios so convoy vehicles could communicate; and they received body armor late — and then it was too small. The Army tasked them with teaching citizens of the former dictatorship about democracy, but many Iraqis just wanted them to leave. Their experiences left them deeply disillusioned about the possibility of successful societal transformation in the former dictatorship. "They [the Iraqis] will never be an American-style democracy," Thelen says.
Vaught adds, "I don't want another American to die for something that's probably not going to work."
By Anne K. McMillan, Texas Lawyer
Nightmares haunt Jason N. Thelen four times a week. When he's awake, he struggles with memory and concentration problems.
Allen R. Vaught still deals with pain from where his back snapped in four places. He, too, battles memory problems.
Both men -- former Army captains who returned home recently from fighting in Iraq -- not only share symptoms, they share the cause: They nearly were killed while together on a mission.
Thelen, an Andrews Kurth litigation associate in Dallas, and Vaught, an associate with Irving's Franklin Cardwell & Jones, first met in Judge Advocate General's Corps training back in 1999, when supervisors assigned them to the same team and they discovered they both practiced in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Over the next five years, their paths would cross again and again, from the day the Army assigned them to the same battalion bound for Baghdad to the morning bombs almost blew their Humvee off a road in Iraq.
Now the two young lawyers, both of whom took their military oaths years before taking their bar oaths, have become skeptical of the potential for success in Iraq.
In the long months they served in Iraq before the ambush, they dodged AK-47 fire, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades that came screaming out of minarets; endured endless days of 130-degree heat and months without showers; and drove Humvees through streets flooded with a foot-and-a-half of raw sewage. They say they waited in vain for Uncle Sam to provide radios so convoy vehicles could communicate; and they received body armor late — and then it was too small. The Army tasked them with teaching citizens of the former dictatorship about democracy, but many Iraqis just wanted them to leave. Their experiences left them deeply disillusioned about the possibility of successful societal transformation in the former dictatorship. "They [the Iraqis] will never be an American-style democracy," Thelen says.
Vaught adds, "I don't want another American to die for something that's probably not going to work."
posted by BLONDIE at 1:40 PM
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