Page 8 - Aerotech News and Review, July 21 2017

Four unlikely friends, a wedding, and no funeral
by Dennis Anderson
Special to Aerotech News and Review
It had to be hot in Baghdad on May 29, 2007, with summer temperatures rising into the 120s.
It was hot in many other ways.
Army Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq, was flooding the Iraqi capital with a fresh surge of American troops, aimed at quelling fratricidal violence that was killing any chance for a tran- sition to peace. Petraeus secured the green light from President George W. Bush to pour tens of thousands of ad- ditional American combat troops into Baghdad to damp the civil war raging between Shia and Sunni militias.
Iran, through its surrogate special operations troops, the Quds Force, was running a surge of its own in Baghdad, bolstering the Shiite militia forces in the slum areas of Baghdad called Sadr City. The Iranians were helping Shi- ite militias to wage urban war on the Americans under the leadership of a charismatic imam, Muqtada Al-Sadr. That area of Baghdad was named for Al-Sadr’s father, an even more revered imam.
These were where the forces of America and its extremist enemies collided — with Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army using a horrifyingly effective Iranian munition, an Explosively Formed Penetrator, to disable Ameri- can armored vehicles and kill and maim the Americans inside.
Our Antelope Valley neighbor, re- tired Army Spec. Jerral Hancock, was one of those Americans. He proved to be too tough to kill.
***
May 29, 2007, was Memorial Day in America, an eight time-zone dis- tance from the East Coast to Baghdad. It was also Hancock’s 21st birthday, and like most Army troopers, he was
working — both on a national holi- day, and his birthday entry into full adulthood.
As part of the surge, Hancock, a tanker with the 1st Cavalry Division, was driving a 70-ton monster, the world’s foremost Main Battle Tank, down the mean streets of Baghdad as part of a counter-terror mission.
The terror of urban warfare in Baghdad struck home for Han- cock with the detonation of the EFP.
In author David Finkel’s authorita- tive book about the surge titled “The Good Soldiers,” facts about the EFP were shared. Finkel wrote that by 2007, the door of a Humvee, with its armor and ballistic glass, weighed 400 pounds. But EFPs didn’t pen- etrate doors. Buried beneath garbage and dirt on Baghdad’s gritty streets, the EFPs launched through the thinly armored floor of military rolling stock, and tore through the thin steel “as if it were lace.” The copper shaped-charge penetrate;, then, burning white hot, it transforms the vehicle interior into a massive shower of red-hot shrapnel.
Soldiers riding on Humvee patrols, Finkel noted, placed one booted foot on top of the other, so they might only lose one foot, or leg, in a detonation.
Only a few American tanks were lost during the Iraq War. They are nearly invulnerable to rockets or ord- nance.
But Hancock’s tank was one of them.
The other crew members evacuated the tank, blasted, and jumping free. Hancock was trapped inside, passing in and out of consciousness.
“I could hear them outside, working on it,” Hancock told me. “One lieuten- ant thought I was dead, but my lieu- tenant wouldn’t let them stop trying to get me out.”
Hancock regained consciousness from a medically induced coma weeks later at Brooke Army Medical Center near San Antonio, Texas. He returned home with a spinal cord severed by
shrapnel, his left arm severed above the shoulder. “I call it my chicken wing,” he will tell you, with a laugh.
Hancock makes no claims to hero status. Just a soldier, he will tell you. “I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” he said. “It could have happened to anybody, but it happened to me.” The Antelope Valley Council of the Boy Scouts of America pre- sented him an American Hero Award anyway.
***
We met when he came home to Lancaster, in the care of his mother, Stacie, and stepfather, Dirrick Benja- min.
The Version 1.5 American family was living in two adjoining mobile homes on Avenue I — Hancock, with his first wife, his newborn daughter Anastasia, and toddler son Julius. That was in the summer of 2007.
His survival, by itself, was a re- markable story. So much has hap- pened since then.
Among the things that hap- pened was a casual encounter by a vet- eran buddy and his filmmaker partner, my son Garrett, and his co-producer, Antonio De La Torre. They went out to the mobile home park on a holiday visit in December 2012, and observed that quality of life was not what it should be.
The catastrophically injured soldier could not make it to appointments at the VA Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif., because a contractor who was supposed to make repairs on a special handicapped-access vehicle had kept the van for months on end.
***
Another veteran recovering from Iraq War injuries was Marine J.D. Kennedy, who worked in Rep. How- ard P. “Buck” McKeon’s office when McKeon was Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Kennedy accompanied me to the Hancock residence, and he took a lot of notes on what Hancock was not re- ceiving as a severely disabled veteran.
Another guy who showed up about the same time was an Air Force vet- eran of the long Cold War, Bob Alvis. Bob is a history buff, a writer, and a heating and air-conditioning man. Mostly he’s a veteran, and if there is someone who served and has a need, Bob will show up. In this case, the need was A/C, and Bob got it up and running.
With J.D. and Bob, others showed up. Ed Cox, a carpeting exec, plus the arbiters of media taste in the Antelope Valley, the sisters Patricia Fregoso- Cox, and Phyllis Fregoso. Kennedy, with McKeon’s clout as Chairman of House Armed Services, got the van returned.
What to do next?
“If it helps Jerral, we support it,” Ed Cox said. “If it does not help Jerral, we are against it.”
An air conditioning and heating guy. A carpet sales entrepreneur. A Marine turned to politics. A paratroop- er retreaded as an embedded reporter
in Iraq (that was me), and a soldier whose fortune, and misfortune, was that he was too tough to kill.
A few small things, necessary things, got done, like getting the van back.
A local dentist, Dr. Doug Weber, alerted by Anne Aldrich at Lancaster Rotary West, volunteered to perform some needed emergency dentistry. Didn’t care if the VA paid. If they did, fine.
It was a start.
***
Sharing a story can be powerful.
For years, veterans of various American wars made speaker visits to the history class of Jamie Goodreau, a Los Angeles County Teacher of the Year. Most of her speakers were of the fast-departing World War II genera- tion, but also Korean War and Viet- nam War veterans.
In spring of 2013, Hancock shared with Goodreau’s Lancaster High School students, in language simple and sober, how it was in the “hot war” where his battle ended on a Baghdad street, and his fight for life began.
Photograph by Dennis Anderson
The students, teenagers all, were so moved that they voted to launch a funding drive dubbed Operation All The Way Home: OATH. Nobody told these young people that they couldn’t raise more than a half-million bucks to build and buy a quality home to settle some of the nation’s debt to a severely wounded warrior.
“It’s hard to believe we did it, but we did do it,” said Nicole Skinner, who was one of the original fundrais- ing dynamos of OATH.
The students of OATH succeeded in raising more than $500,000, fin- ishing the fundraising drive with a substantial assist from the Gary Si- nise Foundation. Sinise appeared and performed with his Lt. Dan Band in Lancaster on Memorial Day weekend, 2014. The Lt. Dan Band is named for the severely wounded, double-ampu- tee character Lieutenant Dan that Si- nise played in the Oscar-winning film, “Forrest Gump.”
It was during that phenomenal two year fundraising drive that Hancock met Adriana Gonzalez.
The long and short of it, they
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Aerotech News and Review
July 21, 2017
Photograph by Dennis Anderson
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