William Gentry
“I remember one night pretty vividly. This was the first time I almost died,” said William Gentry.
The sky was black with a few faint stars, Gentry said. He said he was in his Kevlar jacket and helmet with his mortar tube pointed in the direction of a patrol squad. He could see the muzzle flashes of the firefight. He said he had been waiting for coordinates so he could provide effective fire and not risk hitting his own men.
Gentry said he heard a three-round burst and saw tracer rounds buzz above his head. The shots came from behind him. The thought that their compound was over-run and they were surrounded raced in his head.
He said he hugged the ground of his one-foot-deep mortar pit and rotated his mortar tube. He said he prepared to fire back when his radio clicked on. A voice said, “sorry, don’t fire back.”
Gentry is a junior at UI. He’s studying conservation science to become a conservation officer with Idaho Fish and Game. He lives on campus with his wife and daughter.
He considers some negative social connotations of being a non-traditional student, and feels like he fits in more than he should at UI.
Seventeen-year-old Gentry went to an army recruiter a week after Sept. 11, 2001. He had never fired a gun before. He’d never been on an airplane before. Within a year he was in army boot camp.
Gentry said he spent a good portion of his deployment digging from sunrise to sunset to fortify bases, eating Meals Ready to Eat, drinking warm water, sleeping in a tent with a broken zipper and occasional missions to apprehend known enemies.
They were traveling in a convoy returning from an uneventful mission, Gentry said. There were six unarmored humvees and Gentry was in the fourth from the front. The humvees bunched up as they turned a corner around a wall.
This is a common place for an improvised explosive device, Gentry said.
Gentry said the tactic is to take out the middle humvee, creating chaos, killing and then escaping before the soldiers can regroup. An IED was triggered. The massive explosion missed its target do to some accident or a time delay so there wasn’t an ambush.
Gentry said he was tasked with guarding the gate while a superficial injury in his leg healed. He knew enough Pashto to handle most situations at the gate. His job was to intercept people, make sure they didn’t have any bombs and to ask what they wanted.
The situations were natives mostly looking for medical treatment or supplies that the base didn’t have or couldn’t provide them. They were turned away.
One day, two men approached the gate. Gentry said he stopped them at a comfortable distance away and asked them basic questions in Pashto. One of the men started begging for a doctor. The man had something in his arms that Gentry couldn’t quite make out.
Gentry said he gradually walked closer telling the man to leave, then noticed the man was holding a child in his arms. The child was in poor condition. The man tried begging for a doctor again and he peeled the sheet back that was covering the child.
There was a lot of blood. The man kept pulling the sheet away.
“He pulls away enough of it and I see intestines and organs and stuff,” Gentry said.
Gentry called in a helicopter for medical evacuation. “I spent like two minutes or whatever telling the guy to get lost and the kid ended up dying in route. But, you know, who knows, maybe the kid would have died, maybe not. I don’t know.”
Matt Roth
They didn’t have the proper equip- ment to destroy the hard drives from the broken top secret computers outside the perimeter of the military base. The hard drives possibly con- tained sensitive information about the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan.
Senior Airman Matt Roth and the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Technicians had to get their job done though. They had plastic explosives — C-4 and plenty of it, Roth said.
The large explosion likely set off an incoming rocket alarm at the nearby military base, but their job was done.
Roth studies horticulture and aquaculture at UI. He works at UI’s Veteran Services Office helping management with certifications for the V.A., keeping files in order, organizing different things, keeping this room clean and just helping out with whatever he can.
As he takes calls in the office though, he provides emotional support for veterans and any other type of support needed.
He said many of the men and woman who come through the office have been in worse situations than he has. He considers his service in the U.S. Air Force relatively easy and mostly uneventful.
Roth feels his time in Afghanistan was typical and his experience there may have been easier than most veteran experiences.
During his six months in Afghanistan, he said he was shot at with rockets about every other day on a military base.
“But with rockets it’s more impersonal it’s just kind of like they’re just trying to do as much damage and shut down the base for as long as they can,” Roth said. “After a while it’s just like, these guys are trying to make me late for something, like dinner, you know?”
Roth started learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute. He met his future wife in the program and they got married when he returned from Afghanistan. He decided to pursue communications and computers instead of language studies in the Air Force.
He moved to Idaho with his wife who studies geology at UI. Roth spends his free time volunteering at the student farm. He’s developing an aquaponic system, combining aquaculture and hydroponics using goldfish and various small herbs and vegetables.
Roth said he was lucky not to see disturbing scenes while he was in Afghanistan, and understands veterans who have been through traumatic experiences, and he does what he can to help.
Leonard Smith
They had just dug in for the night and the sky was fading to a darker blue gray color when they heard the thump, thump, thump of mortars being dropped in tubes.
“We knew what it was so we got in our holes,” Leonard Smith said while describing his service in the Vietnam War.
Smith stuck his head out of his hole and a mortar struck the ground behind him. He said a piece of shrapnel hit his helmet and sent him back into his hole, but that wasn’t the first close call. He doesn’t describe the others.
Smith is a creative writing student at University of Idaho. He earned a Business Administration degree in 1986 but didn’t find it fitting. He tried studying literature and writing but was emotionally withdrawn after the war and was unable to express himself. He mostly worked jobs where he could be alone or work at night. He picked oranges in Florida. He worked on a farm in Idaho. He worked the night shift driving a truck in San Diego.
At 17-years-old, Smith joined the U.S. Marine Corps in the summer of 1966. He joined the Marine Corps before getting drafted because he wanted to serve with men who wanted to be there.
He met Lynell Neblett in a Richmond, Virginia on the way to boot camp.
Smith said he hasn’t seen Neblett’s level of courage in anyone else, and he hopes to meet Neblett’s daughter one day to talk about her father.
Smith said he and Neblett ended up on the same fire team in Vietnam, and — after everything they went through together — were brothers.
In the Marine Corps, a fire team is a group of four marines and they run patrols in a squad made of three fire teams, Smith said. Neblett’s job was to be in the front scouting for danger.
Their squad was hiking in a column formation on a steep and narrow trail. Smith was the leader of the fire team at the tail of the column, and Neblett was at the front. Smith said he heard a bang and popping sounds coming from up ahead. He could tell from the sound that a grenade went off and the pops were from an automatic weapon.
Smith reached the source of the noise. Neblett had been brought up from the steep grade that he rolled down and he was laying on the narrow trail.
The enemy quickly disappeared into the jungle and Smith stood by Neblett’s body observing the wounds that killed his best friend, his brother and he felt drained of energy. He said he sat on the nearby embankment and wept. He wept as quietly has he could, he said.
Smith said Neblett should have received the Medal of Honor for his actions, the highest military decoration awarded. Neblett received the Silver Star Medal for his bravery at the front of the columns, the third highest decoration awarded.
Smith has spent many years working through post-traumatic stress disorder and analyzing his symptoms. He said he’s allowing himself to reconnect with people, and express his ideas and emotions through writing and art.
He admits that some stories he may never be able to share, but he won’t be giving up. He lightens the mood with a comment about his own disorder.
“I was afraid,” Smith said about the common night patrols he did as a marine. “And that’s healthy. To be afraid is healthy. I didn’t want to be around anyone who wasn’t afraid because that’ll get you killed.”
In the darkness and in the silence, Smith said he prayed for his life, his limbs, his eyes. “I prayed for everything except my mind,” he said. “That’s the one thing I left out.”
Christopher Dempsey can be reached at [email protected]