Rodgers’ Long Trip Home Started Under Fire

By John Voket

This is the final part of an ongoing feature updating the activities of Newtown Legislative Council Chairman Will Rodgers, who recently returned from serving as a military liaison officer in Iraq.

It’s may be easier to look back at wartime experiences with the knowledge of what might have happened, realizing in hindsight that a healthy combination of luck and perhaps some divine intervention played a role in guiding a soldier to his or her safe return home. And this may have been the case for Newtown Legislative Council Chairman Will Rodgers, who arrived safe and sound back home late last week after more than six months serving as a Marine Reserve colonel in Iraq.

According to Mr Rodgers, after dozens of long trips and short jaunts via helicopter in the course of his duties, some of which were rougher than others, he faced his worst ride transferring between his immediate base and a Marine transfer outpost where he would be processed for his return to the States.

“I had been under fire before, but that last helo trip was the most intense,” Mr Rodgers said from the relative quiet of his Hattertown home earlier this week. Of course virtually any trip into, through, or over hostile territories or neighborhoods around his base of operations was risky, Mr Rodgers had conveyed in numerous emails over the course of his service time.

This final trip to the out-processing center he described was to be about an hour, and Mr Rodgers would be traveling in a large transport helicopter with just a crew and four other officers headed for home. About 20 minutes into the transfer, Mr Rodgers said the chopper began taking heavy small arms ground fire, which triggered both evasive action on the part of the pilot and aggressive defense from one of the gunners on board.

“All of a sudden we went into this sharp turn and dive, and the door gunner on my side opened up on the hostile on the ground,” Mr Rodgers recalled. “Suffice to say the threat was terminated.”

Upon arrival at the secondary base, Mr Rodgers said he first was told there would be a delay in obtaining military transportation home. But within a few hours it was determined that to expedite matters, he and his fellow soldiers on that transfer would be afforded a trip in comparative style via commercial air carriers versus the less accommodating confines of a military aircraft.

“It was certainly better than spending 20 hours in the jump seat of a C-130 cargo plane,” Mr Rodgers said.

Upon arriving stateside, he faced one final hurdle, however. Mr Rodgers arrived from overseas to Kennedy Airport in New York — less than two hours drive from home — only to find out his connecting flight to Hartford was delayed by three hours.

“It was both difficult and strange for me to go from the flat and wide open spaces in Iraq to having all these crowds of people right next to me, and the claustrophobic conditions at Kennedy,” he said. “But all-in-all, I was happy to enjoy meeting my wife and daughter in the relative quiet and solitude a few hours later at Bradley [Airport].”

The greatest physical shock to the discharged Marine colonel was the weather.

“I arrived back in New York on the coldest night of the year, record cold. A 20-below zero wind chill was a far cry from the coldest nights we saw in Iraq, where it got down probably into the low 40s,” Mr Rodgers said. He also admitted that for the first time, the jet lag from the global trip back took more of a toll than ever before.

“I always used to be fine jetting from one side of the country to the other, but it’s been a week and I’m still feeling a little off,” he said. The move back from desert climate and tightly-packed urban Middle Eastern architecture to the rolling hills and suburban sprawl of Connecticut was also somewhat unsettling.

“Everything here is so open, physically. And all these trees — they’re reaching out for me,” Mr Rodgers said laughing. “I don’t know what I would have done if I came home when all the leaves were on.”

Throughout his service, Mr Rodgers kept up to date on council and political matters in Newtown via email, phone calls home, and reports in The Bee, he said. And due to the nature of military communications, when his unit determined “something was going on outside the wire,” they simply flipped on the TV and tuned in to CNN.

Some of the stateside reports were frustrating to the personnel in Iraq, he said.

“I guess conflict makes news, and unfortunately to fill your news plate with conflict was pretty easy over there,” Mr Rodgers observed. “There weren’t too many good news stories, which was frustrating because we are making progress over there.”

He maintained that while the current perception might be that the US government was starting from ground zero to rebuild, in actuality it was “ground zero minus 30 years,” because the entire population was accustomed to living in a “social dictatorship” for so long.

“For example, you had a society that was used to public food distribution, and a society where until we arrived things like fuel and electricity were free,” he said. “Now you are telling these people that they are expected to pay for these services — which is a major shock to the culture. They don’t have any expectations about the benefits a democracy can bring them.”

In the end, Mr Rodgers said he was happy to have this tour of duty wrapped up so he could wade back into the political processes in Newtown, and the challenges of working through the current budget cycle. He also took the opportunity to directly thank his friends and Newtown neighbors for their outpourings of good wishes to all the military personnel in service who have been touched by the many donations, phone calling cards and letters from home.

“I’m especially grateful to my daughter Amelia for everything she has done, and especially stepping up to help her mom while I was away, as well as all our friends who called and kept in touch offering to help with things, cook dinner and little things like that. It made such a difference,” Mr Rodgers concluded. “It’s just great to be back. I’m happy to see Newtown again.”