Battle Scars : The Gulf War Changed the Lives of 4 Valley Soldiers Forever

Five years ago this week, as American-led forces began an aerial bombing campaign against Iraq, four San Fernando Valley soldiers prepared for combat.

Soon they were on the march in Saudi Arabia, waging a bloody ground war against the forces of Saddam Hussein, who had invaded the oil-rich nation of Kuwait.

One worked as a military policeman, guarding prisoners of war. Another picked out Iraqi targets and verified enemy casualties. Two held administrative posts.

Like thousands of soldiers from across the nation, these Valley vets came home in triumph when the ground war ended after just four days.

They were heroes, feted in ticker-tape parades, asked to speak at area schools. They are still asked about the war--by youngsters who know of their military service, by friends and relatives. And they say it was just fine. But the hellish days and nights in the desert took their toll.

One soldier’s wife says he “has a stare to him” now, his big, brown eyes glazing over sometimes as he seems to daydream. Another saw his marriage fall apart. A third fights the skin rashes and constant infections that some veterans have dubbed “Gulf War syndrome.”

They view their troubles, though, as casualties of war and say they’d do it again if called. Here are the stories of four sergeants: Elizabeth Proenza, Christopher Franklin, Russell North and Theodore Wood.

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Elizabeth Proenza shipped out for Saudi Arabia on the very day in mid-October that her mother and brother--whom she hadn’t seen in 20 years--finally made it to the United States from Cuba.

“I left at 6 a.m. and they arrived at 8 a.m.,” Proenza, an administrator in the Army’s Reserve Center in Sherman Oaks, said ruefully.

Foremost in her mind on the long trip over was Luis, her brother, and the road that finally brought him to freedom. Luis had been imprisoned by Fidel Castro for political reasons when he was just 15, and the family had sent Elizabeth away in 1971 to Miami because they thought she might be next.

As she faced going to war for her adopted country, she felt that she was doing it for Luis.

“It was a scary feeling, but deep down a good feeling that my family was free at last,” she said. “I was going to protect my country and our freedom.”

When she returned from Desert Storm, however, Proenza didn’t feel so well.

She began to develop skin rashes and contracted constant colds and ear and fungal infections. She goes frequently to the Veterans Affairs clinic in North Hills, where doctors treat her symptoms even though the Army has not officially recognized the collection of illnesses known as Gulf War syndrome.

Now 48 years old, Proenza hopes she won’t die of her maladies. To her, it seems that politics is what’s keeping the government from saying publicly that something happened in the Gulf to damage the health of so many.

But her loyalty hasn’t wavered, she said. She continues to work for the Army as a civilian and serves in the Reserves.

“I went there for a purpose, and I don’t blame the government if I got sick,” Proenza said. “I would do it again a million times.”

*

Christopher Franklin thinks about the war every day.

As a field artilleryman, his job was to pick out enemy targets for his men to attack. After the target was hit, he had to go out and see if the Iraqi soldiers manning the targeted sites were dead.

“My job basically was mass destruction,” he said with a nervous smile--”rolling through and blowing stuff up.”

He got through it, he said, by reading his Bible and pushing the ugliness of what he’d seen and done out of his mind.

He told himself that since he’d only fingered the targets, and not pulled the trigger, that Iraqi blood could not be on his hands.

He doesn’t talk about it much.

“A lot of people ask me about Desert Storm,” he said, “but I say I didn’t do much.”

Franklin, 32, left his wife, Andrea, and their two children behind in Germany when he shipped out to the desert a couple of days before Christmas. The family didn’t know it then, but he would be gone for much of the next 18 months--first to Desert Storm, then to Panama, then to police the unrest and famine in Somalia.

Andrea Franklin, who met her husband when both were in training for the Army in Georgia, was working full time, but she took on the household chores that her husband had previously performed. She managed the family’s finances and tried to be both Mommy and Daddy to Christle, who was 2 when the war broke out, and to William, who was 7.

“We were afraid,” Andrea said. Christopher had trained for his position for 10 years, but Desert Storm was his first real combat experience.

When he came back, she said, he had “a stare to him,” as if he were daydreaming all the time.

After the war, the family moved to New York. They settled in just in time for Christopher to be sent to Somalia, where he caught malaria.

The separation never threatened their marriage, the Franklins said, but it took some work to integrate Christopher back into the household.

“I had to allow him space to fit back into the family,” Andrea said.

After Somalia, the Army offered Christopher a job as a recruiter at the federal building in Van Nuys. They promised a three-year stint with an opportunity to renew, and the family jumped at the opportunity to settle down.

The Franklins bought a home in Saugus, and the children attend neighborhood schools. Andrea works two jobs, one as bill collector and the other as a hairdresser.

“He learned to appreciate the things that are of value,” Andrea said. Now, she said, her husband always wants to know where she and the children are, and he’s become very frugal.

“I’m sure he’s always loved us, but now we’re very rich in family,” Andrea said. “We’re very close. Home is his priority.”

*

Theodore Wood is a little ticked off.

Why, the veteran wants to know, is Saddam Hussein still in power five years after the war in the Persian Gulf ended?

Why especially, he asks, when so many veterans he knows are still struggling to rebuild their lives?

“I think my life is back on track,” said Wood, who returned from the desert to face a broken marriage and unexplained health problems. “But I’m a little bit disgusted. Why didn’t we finish the job?”

The Army had transferred Wood to California early in 1990 from Oklahoma, and his family had remained behind. Wood, a career military man who had served in Vietnam, was called to what was initially dubbed “Operation Desert Shield,” the prewar buildup in the Saudi desert meant to intimidate Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.

The tour of duty in the desert meant that Wood and his wife would be apart for a year. The separation proved to be the fatal blow to their marriage.

“When I came home, there was this situation where she had fallen out of love with me,” he said.

To make matters worse, Wood started having health problems. Luckily, he said, his symptoms were not as bad as those faced by some people he knows.

“I did have one medical problem they still can’t explain,” he said. “I had to have a cataract operation and I was only 45 years old. They told me I was real young to have cataract problems.”

It all added up to a hard time getting adjusted, Wood said.

“I’m not one to talk to a lot of people,” he said. “I keep a lot of things to myself.”

Bit by bit, Wood has been rebuilding his life. He finds California much less daunting than when he first arrived from a town of 3,000. He lives in Northridge and is engaged to be married again.

“She’s my best friend,” he said. “She’s been my psychoanalyst and my listening partner.”

*

Russell North’s unit wasn’t selected to go to the Gulf. But the Santa Clarita man volunteered anyway, risking his life and his marriage.

He wound up serving as a military policeman in a unit charged with taking Iraqi soldiers prisoner and guarding them in tent cities.

The worst part, he said, was the long march to Kuwait City. The soldiers passed through what they called the Valley of Death, miles and miles of bombed-out artillery installations and tanks littered with the bodies of Iraqi soldiers.

“The destruction that was involved there was incredible,” the 29-year-old North said.

Oil wells in the petroleum-rich region had been set afire by retreating Iraqi troops, and the air was thick with the smell of burning oil.

“You could feel it on your skin,” he said, passing his hands over his face as if recalling the sensation. “Your skin became oily. It was supposed to be day, but it was like night.”

His health, he said, is still good. But he wonders what became of his fellow soldiers. People in the Army move around so much that many in his combat unit have lost touch.

On a personal level, things were tough when he came back. His wife, Cynthia, was not happy that he had volunteered to go to the Gulf.

Still, the couple made a go of it, and have had a third daughter. North works as a recruiter for the Army.

The war, he said, changed him.

“It made me appreciate life.”