'Elvis' returns from war in Iraq

On the homefront, by Michael Schwartz

This morning at 3 a.m. we received a call from our daughter-in-law in Tennessee. She said simply, "Elvis has landed!" With this we knew our son, the nut, the occasional Elvis impersonator, had returned from Iraq. This had been a long and painful separation for his young family but it was now over. David has been reunited with his wife Oxana, son Max, 4, and daughter Ilona, 18 months.

Our son, Army Specialist David W. Schwartz, is a combat medic in the 101st Airborne Division. A 1992 graduate of Palmer High School, he grew up at the Butte and first joined the Army between his junior and senior years. In those days he was Army Reserve and served several years before finally getting out. After trying in vain to complete his college education and support a family he reenlisted in the Army with the expectation this would be the best way to get his education back on track. After retraining as a medic (he had been working as an EMT for the borough) he was reassigned to Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 101st "Screaming Eagles." He had just settled into a stable family life and his education with some online courses when his unit went on alert.

That summer brought deployment to Afghanistan which was trouble enough. But the arrival of a daughter brought some further complications. Oxana became gravely ill just as she was nearly due to deliver. A group of officers and NCO's wives heard of her situation and contacted the Red Cross. Through their efforts David was given a compassionate reassignment and returned to the states to care for his wife. Ultimately a healthy baby girl arrived.

Later that summer, Max broke his femur in a freak accident at home. Once he was healed from that well enough to travel they all came back to Alaska for a family reunion. Max was fresh out of a body cast and learning to walk a little straighter each day. That winter, after their return to Tennessee, but before much could be done on the education front, David's unit was deployed to Iraq.

This was not (and of course it never is) a good time for him to be going off to war again. It was especially tough on little Max who couldn't understand why he could occasionally talk to his daddy on the phone but Daddy wouldn't come home. To make things worse, due to some clerical errors and a user-unfriendly bureaucracy, suddenly Oxana was in trouble with the INS. She had missed a meeting that she had requested because they sent the notice to the wrong address. Because she didn't show up for the interview she had requested they abruptly notified her she was considered an illegal alien and revoked her green card. Then her purse was stolen and she couldn't even get a replacement driver's license without the green card. This took weeks and a lot of help and support from friends and family to resolve. Before the summer was out she had someone breaking into her garage at night. Until they finally discovered it had been a runaway teen-age girl there were some scary nights there. All this time there was limited communication with David. Although he was able to call a few times from Kuwait before they went into Iraq it was very limited. And the mail was incredibly slow for a nation that had put men on the moon 30 years before.

David's unit was very soon in the thick of things. He was assigned as the only medic for a platoon of air-assault infantrymen. His unit, in the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Infantry "Rakkasans," are a subsidiary unit of the 101st Airborne. They were soon knocking on the door of Baghdad Airport. And, when they went into the terminal, David's platoon -- about 40 guys -- were the "breach element." That met with light resistance but a few days later when they took the Ministry of Defense things were considerably hotter. Ultimately Baghdad fell and the 101st moved out of the city to mop up pockets of opposition. David's unit spent most of the time afterward west and north of Mosul and did their job efficiently, effectively and aggressively.

When it came time for the 101st to rotate out of Iraq, David's last task was to drive an ambulance from the very northern tip of the country, by the Turkish border, all the way back to Kuwait. While waiting for his turn to fly home, David bumped into the Navy reservist husband of a female cousin. They stood staring at each other for a few seconds wondering why the other looked so familiar. It had been several years and a purely civilian context when they had last seen each other. That was a week ago. But today Elvis has landed.

Michael H. Schwartz is the facilities coordinator at the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District.