Battle Behind Them, 4 Soldiers Push Ahead With Life

After the horror of war, some soldiers confront a purgatory of nagging memories and uncertainty. As troops return home from the war that ousted Saddam Hussein, the Associated Press looked at one unit from the Persian Gulf War and how a few of its members have adjusted in the last dozen years.

The four men shared a unit: the “2/2” -- the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment’s 2nd Squadron.

They also shared a date: Feb. 26, 1991, Day Three of the ground campaign in the Gulf War.

Together, they fought a furious armored cavalry clash deep in the desert that devastated the Iraqi enemy and is studied closely in military circles today: the Battle of 73 Easting.

But when it was over and the four went their separate ways, their experiences were not shared but varied -- and that may suggest what awaits a new group of soldiers returning from combat in Iraq. Like the troops of 2/2, some will struggle, some will flourish; some will hunger to go back, some will wish that they’d never gone.

*

First Lt. John Mecca, 25, a loud, rambunctious New Jersey native, spent the early morning hours of Feb. 23, 1991, curled up on the floor of his Bradley turret reciting the Hail Mary. G-day wasn’t for another 24 hours, but the 2nd Squadron was going in early.

Mecca was the executive officer of 2/2’s Ghost Troop and soon would be leading 120 men into combat for the first time.

Ghost, along with Fox and Eagle, were the squadron’s cavalry units, equipped with M1 Abrams tanks and lighter, more mobile Bradley Fighting Vehicles. They would meet the enemy first.

Among those also steeling themselves were 1st Lt. John Hillen, Mecca’s closest friend and assistant to the squadron’s operational commander; Sgt. Russell Holloway, the gunner in Hillen’s Bradley, and Sgt. Rodney Abercrombie, a gung-ho tanker from Georgia.

They crossed the berm that afternoon and sped north across the desert, at first encountering little resistance.

On the second day, a group of Iraqis scurried from cover and Holloway fired. He remembers watching through his thermal sight as an armor-piercing round struck one soldier. The man’s foot exploded in a puff of pink.

Holloway, 22, was an atypical soldier. Yes, he could be foul-mouthed and belligerent, but he also wrote poetry. He’d enlisted after losing his football scholarship in Kansas. He and Hillen idled away time talking books and politics.

Hillen, 25, was also unusual. The son of a Vietnam veteran, he saw himself as carrying on a warrior tradition, but he also won a Fulbright scholarship his senior year at Duke. His goal was to become assistant secretary of defense.

For now, his job was to work the map board and radios in the Bradley, turning tactics into orders.

Around 4 p.m. Feb. 26, forward scouts began picking up heat signatures. The blowing sand made it hard to see. Abercrombie, manning a machine gun in his tank, sprayed a truck 150 yards ahead. Holloway’s Bradley roared up on the left and fired a TOW missile.

They had run straight into the Tawakalna Division of Iraq’s Republican Guard, Saddam Hussein’s best.

The U.S. military uses north-south grid lines, called eastings, to fix locations. As Hillen reported their progress, regimental commanders ordered 2/2 to go no further than the 70 Easting.

But the troopers rumbled ahead, blasting away. Holloway fired into an armored personnel carrier; Abercrombie riddled four soldiers sprawled in the sand.

By the time Eagle halted at the 73.8 Easting, the squadron had destroyed a brigade’s worth of armored vehicles in less than half an hour: 30 tanks, 16 BMP infantry fighting vehicles and 39 trucks.

As dusk settled in and Holloway and Abercrombie scanned for fresh targets, the burning carcasses of Iraqi vehicles littered the desert.

But it wasn’t over. The Tawakalna counterattack came directly at Ghost, sitting to Eagle’s north. For more than an hour, Mecca and his gunner fired furiously.

About 5:40 p.m., word came that the gunner in “Ghost 1-6” was dead. The casualty was Sgt. Andy Moller from Idaho. Holloway, a friend, resolved to show no mercy. When an Iraqi personnel carrier disgorged a group of infantry, he cut down one soldier, then picked off the next two as they got up to run.

By 9:30 p.m., it was over.

The next day, a cease-fire was declared. Hillen and Mecca were awarded Bronze Stars. Holloway and Abercrombie got Army Commendation Medals with V-device for valor.

The Battle of 73 Easting, as it was later called, became a much-studied engagement -- a textbook case of battlefield initiative.

The men of 2/2 were hailed as heroes.

*

But after heroic combat, after war is over, then what?

Still in the Army but now stationed in Germany, the two sergeants, Holloway and Abercrombie, became roommates and best friends. The war ended Abercrombie’s marriage, and he hit the pubs nightly, dragging Holloway along whenever he could. But a transfer to a support unit that Abercrombie had requested before the war, trying to save his marriage, finally went through.

He arrived for Army finance school in Indianapolis with “a huge chip on my shoulder,” he says now. He saw his classmates as rear-echelon losers.

And the assignment that followed, in the payroll section of the 10th Mountain Division, further drained his old zeal for the Army. After striking up a relationship with a former porn star he met at a strip club, he decided to get out.

His tour was almost over when the 10th Mountain was sent to Somalia as part of the U.N.’s peacekeeping force. Some of his soldiers were sent to keep track of payroll and Abercrombie, wanting the adrenaline rush of combat again, volunteered to extend his tour to go with them. That ended his new relationship.

In Somalia, he got his favorite parts of combat -- the camaraderie and sense of purpose -- but without the danger. Unlike others, he never came under fire.

In 1993, after eight years of active duty, Abercrombie finally got out. He earned a degree and got a job selling office equipment in Atlanta, becoming a top salesman.

But he missed the Army. He scoured the Internet for old Cav buddies and set up two bookshelves in his apartment as trophy cases of his former life. Among the items on display: an Iraqi bayonet, his Desert Storm dog tags and a glowing letter from his old commander. He never should have gotten out, he told friends. What was he doing with his life now?

At age 35, he decided to try to return to active duty. Army officials told him that he was too old. He wrote letters, begged and pestered. Finally, he learned that he could get a commission through the Georgia National Guard. He enrolled in Officer Candidate School this year at age 37, driving an hour on weekends to attend class and training.

Abercrombie struggled at first in OCS, where everyone starts at basic training level. They wouldn’t even let him wear his combat patch as he low-crawled across fields and stumbled through drills. But he performed well during a recent exercise, leading 24 men on patrol.

As he put it, “old Sgt. Abercrombie came out.”

When the new war in Iraq began, Abercrombie watched TV constantly, hungry for any details about the fighting.

For the first time in years, many in the squadron sought each other out. Abercrombie called up Holloway, who was married to a doctor and earning an MBA in Daytona Beach. Abercrombie told him how badly he wanted to be there.

Holloway listened to his friend’s obsession with bemusement. He felt nothing like him.

*

A month after Abercrombie’s transfer, Holloway got out of the military. His tour was up, and he’d had enough. He chose to stay in Germany to be with his girlfriend and found work as a tour guide in Berlin. He was out, but he didn’t feel like it. He still saluted. He still wore his dog tags. He still dwelled on 73 Easting.

His misgivings had begun the day after the battle. While other soldiers backslapped and boasted, Holloway withdrew. The death and destruction bothered him.

With Hillen’s urging, he went back to college. One day while studying at a German university, he struck up a conversation with an elderly man who’d joined the German army as a teenager in World War II. They talked about how people can sometimes be swept up by circumstances.

Holloway told him that he didn’t hate the people he killed. Then, he broke down and wept. Even after he moved back to the United States, Holloway still got emotional at times. At a hockey game, a friend mentioned to a fan that Holloway had been in Desert Storm. The man thanked him. Holloway blew up. He deserved no thanks, he said in an expletive-filled tirade. That just glorified war.

Unlike Abercrombie, he kept no mementos of Desert Storm on display; he packed them away in a box.

When the war in Iraq began, Holloway decided to oppose it. He called radio stations to express his views. Sending soldiers off to the trauma of an unnecessary war, he said, was “a helluva way to support the troops.”

He avoided the news, but one day he caught some footage of a group of Marines firing a TOW missile into a building. That night, he had trouble sleeping.

He realized then that 73 Easting would never leave him.

*

Mecca chose to stay in the Army. He hoped that the battle would help his career. After marrying another Desert Storm veteran, Mecca chose placement with the 10th Mountain Division’s cavalry unit in upstate New York.

While other Cav colleagues found the peacetime Army a letdown, Mecca headed back into combat. In February 1993, he joined Abercrombie in Somalia.

For Mecca, Somalia was as hairy as anything he’d experienced in the Gulf. Escorting food shipments in a Humvee meant getting shot at every day. Each trip, Mecca recited the 23rd Psalm.

Less than a year after returning from Somalia, he packed up again -- this time for peacekeeping duty in Haiti.

The day after he arrived, he sat down at a makeshift desk of 2-by-4s and plywood for radio watch. Suddenly, he felt weary, as he confided to his wife on the phone. He was made troop commander, but less than a year later, in December 1995, he retired as a captain.

It was a matter of priorities. He now had a wife and daughter. He couldn’t be jetting off to global hotspots anymore.

Through his father-in-law, he interviewed at a credit card company in Wilmington, Del. He started out overseeing a group of 15 custodians and eventually moved to purchasing.

Office politics confused him at first, and what he saw as the selfishness of the private sector disgusted him. But he had a new focus, shaped by his experiences with war: finding happiness, no matter what. He went about it with the same aggressiveness that he showed in the Army, buying a motorboat and a sailboat, then a summer home on Chesapeake Bay with a 100-foot dock. Why wait? he said.

He still kept a picture of the squadron on a wall at home, but he stashed his souvenirs and medals from the Cav in a basement storage room and a chest. His office cubicle bore no trace of Desert Storm.

*

More than anyone else, Mecca’s old friend, Hillen, capitalized on his war experience. Hillen left the squadron in June 1992, part of a group of talented lieutenants who got out together. The opportunities in the civilian world were great. Hillen was accepted in a master’s degree program in war studies at Kings College in England.

After his master’s, Hillen completed a PhD in international relations at Oxford. He wrote his dissertation on U.N. peacekeeping, turning it into a successful book, “Blue Helmets: The Strategy of U.N. Military Operations.” Next up were Washington think-tank postings: at the Heritage Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Meanwhile, Hillen stayed active in the Army reserve. He began doing defense commentary for MSNBC. The network liked his policy credentials but were sold by his Bronze Star.

In 1998, he became the youngest member of the Hart-Rudman Commission, a congressional committee examining national security in the 21st century.

A year later, a staffer in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign spotted an article that Hillen wrote and recruited him to join the campaign as a speechwriter on defense issues.

With a wife and kids, life could hardly get better.

For him, 73 Easting amounted to a noisy 23-minute ride in the back of a Bradley, but it yielded a lifetime of dividends.

Hillen became chief operating officer at a Wall Street trading firm. He had no finance experience, but he knew how to lead people. He increased profit margins 30-fold, and his company was sold in 2001 for $500 million. Afterward, Hillen joined a global consulting firm, dealing in defense and intelligence issues.

During the war in Iraq, Hillen worked as a commentator for ABC News. On the first day of the ground war, anchor Peter Jennings turned to Hillen and asked him what he remembered from crossing the berm 12 years ago. Were the soldiers scared?

Maybe some, he said. More likely, they were excited by what lay ahead. By now, Hillen had mostly lost touch with his squadron mates. They’d long ago stopped calling each other on the anniversary of the battle as they’d promised.

But he still kept a framed picture of his old Bradley crew on his office wall. He would never take it down, he said. That part of his life was too important.