Illinois town symbolizes Iraq sacrifice

Every day Heather Gill looks into her infant daughter’s eyes and sees the sparkle of new life.

Most days, Gill can push aside the image of another pair of eyes: those of her best friend, Sgt. Shawna Morrison, “looking to God” as she lay dying after a mortar attack in Iraq in 2004.

Five years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Staff Sgt. Gill and others connected to the 1544th Transportation Company are struggling with the war’s place in their lives. Residents of Paris, Ill., speak little of it; the yellow ribbons and posters have been taken off the light poles and the war is noted by few monuments.

“It’s old news now,” Gill said softly, sitting in her farmhouse, not far from the cemetery where her friend is buried. “It’s history, the past. It’s OK to let it go.”

Yet as long as the fighting continues, this rural community that became an emblem of the nation’s sacrifice cannot let go completely.

“In a small town, the worst thing that could ever happen is that we would forget,” said Craig Smith, mayor of the town of 9,100, an hour south of Champaign. “You don’t want the parents of the kids who were over there to ever think we have forgotten.”

The war began on March 20, 2003. Later that year, Paris residents lined the streets to say goodbye to 169 soldiers from the hometown 1544th, ordered to Kuwait and then Iraq.

Many in town figured the 1544th was not in harm’s way because it was a transportation unit, not combat infantry. But within a day of arriving in Iraq, the unit lost Sgt. Ivory Phipps of Chicago to a mortar attack on base. The illusion of safety was shattered.

In September 2004, townsfolk again lined the streets, this time as part of a somber procession to bury Morrison, a hometown soldier who died in a mortar attack along with Spec. Charles Lamb of nearby Martinsville, Ill.

Paris had become a town of nervous families wondering if their loved ones would come home safe. A phone and e-mail tree volleyed the latest news from Iraq from house to house, every day.

Residents lobbied legislators and the government for armored plating for 1544th vehicles while the troops were overseas. They raised their own funds for the plating until the Pentagon, in a mushrooming controversy over troop safety across Iraq, began the upgrades itself.

By the time the 1544th returned in February 2005, five soldiers had been killed in attacks and several dozen wounded.

Today residents recall their efforts with weariness.

“It changed my life,” said Jim Cooper, who directed a family support network and whose son served in the unit in Iraq. “You don’t sleep well for a long time. I’m still catching up. I try to forget a lot of it.”

“It’s almost like, ‘Thank God my kids aren’t there now,’ ” Smith said. “Thank goodness that it’s affecting another family. It’s a selfish way to look at it . . . but it’s another town’s war to fight now.”

After their return home, surviving soldiers in the 1544th scattered across Illinois and Indiana, many returning to pursue college degrees. Some left the Guard when their enlistment requirements ended. Others transferred.

Today, 125 soldiers serve in the unit, including new recruits, guard commanders say. Units rotate through Iraq and, so far, the 1544th is not in line to return. The Pentagon tries to give Guard troops months of advance notice before deployment.

The years home provided healing for injured soldiers, perspective for the psychologically troubled, and distance for the families still grieving.

In Normal, Ill., a two-hour drive northwest of Paris, former Capt. A. Troy O’Donley, 35, still shows a noticeable limp as he walks through the State Farm Insurance complex, where he works in technical support systems.

The commander of the 1544th, O’Donley saw his duty abruptly cut short when he was injured in a crash during a gun ambush south of Baghdad in April 2004. He broke both legs and injured his hip, requiring nearly three years of surgeries and rehabilitation.

As time passes, O’Donley knows that, like scarred Vietnam-era veterans, he has become one of the walking wounded. His personal war has included fighting the military medical system for the specific treatments he desired.

“The war goes on every day,” O’Donley said of his recovery. “I choose to fight it with a positive attitude and look forward.”

Civilian life sometimes pushes the war into the subconscious, veterans say, but never erases it.

For years, Gill, 30, has been riddled by guilt because she couldn’t revive her friend, Morrison, after the 2004 mortar attack. Gill wonders, too, why she survived with only a cut to the ear while others were seriously wounded or killed.

In the end, Gill said, she found comfort by talking to fellow soldiers in the unit. She found purpose by joining Guard troops in helping with Hurricane Katrina relief. That bond spurred Gill to reenlist, something she thought she’d never do.

For now, consumed with family obligations, Gill fights off any thoughts that if the war goes on, the 1544th could be redeployed. She was divorced before the war and left behind a daughter, Macy, who was 6 when Gill deployed.

Now remarried, Gill wants to be remembered for more than her service in the 1544th. That’s why she bristles when her mother introduces Gill as one who fought in Iraq.

“It’s laid to rest now,” she said of the war. “It doesn’t define me.”

But in the next breath Gill acknowledges, “It’ll never be over. Something will always spark it back up.”

Most recently, that painful resurrection came when Morrison’s mother, Cindy, stopped by with a present for Gill’s new baby.

“I’m so happy for her,” Cindy Morrison said of Gill. “I’m sad for me.”

Sitting on the family’s living room couch, where she and her daughter watched the start of the war five years ago on television, Cindy Morrison says she misses not just her only daughter, but all that could have been.

“You have weddings, you have births. . . . Shawna would have graduated. She would have been a psychologist by now,” Morrison said of her daughter, who died at 26. “Life goes on, but it doesn’t for us.”

Slowly, the Morrisons have put together a bookcase housing their daughter’s service memorabilia: her uniform, letters of commendation from top American officials, and messages of condolence after her funeral.

Unlike many in Paris who refuse to get into political discussions about the war, Morrison and her husband Rick are outspoken critics.

“Why are we still there?” she asked. “Why can’t we come home?”

To the Morrisons, it would be horror to see any more local soldiers in the 1544th lose their lives in Iraq.

But to some of Paris’ young people, the tradition of the 1544th and the lure of service are irresistible.

Josh Harris was a high school sophomore playing tuba in the school band that welcomed home the 1544th in 2005. Seeing the emotions that day, Harris made up his mind to sign up. He followed through last fall, knowing that in a war with no certain end, the unit’s past also could be its future.

“It touched me in the heart and I decided to go for it,” said Harris, 19, who will attend basic training after he graduates this spring. “I wanted to become one of them.”

Standing in front of the town’s war memorial, which lists the names of locals who served in all wars, Harris says it would make him proud to join the list someday.

“I hope to everything they put my name here,” he said.

Most days, though, the big gym at the 1544th armory on the north side of town is eerily quiet, staffed by a few full-time enlisted troops.

In February, on the anniversary of the unit’s return, an inscripted boulder in front of the armory was dedicated as a tribute to those who served in Iraq.

It reads: “All gave some . . . some gave all.”