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Soldiers Back For Holidays May Still Face Obstacles

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By BILLY COX, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: December 24, 2007

SARASOTA - Just outside the security gate, Mom locks one arm around Dad and dabs a moist eye with a tissue. With poinsettias blazing along the terminal corridors, this Christmas reunion scene at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport might well be lost to anonymity.

Except it is joined by a sizable welcome-home contingent, each member clutching an American flag blooming with a yellow ribbon. A couple of media photographers also are on hand to record the moment.

As the passenger arrivals wander into view, the buzz is contagious. Strangers stop to see. On this slow Sunday evening, a cashier ducks out of her shop. She doesn't even need a noun.

"Coming back from Iraq?" she asks. The affirmation lights her face; she joins the onlookers.

There. There he is: 22-year-old Army sergeant Christopher Smith, civilian clothes, backpack, along with his wife, Marion, and their two exhausted sons in a double stroller. No conspicuous signs of the wounds from the roadside bomb back in April. Cheers, clenching embraces, snapshots.

A TV reporter steers him off to the side for sound bites. Smith has plenty to say, but he plays it by the book. For now.

"It's good to see the support," Smith tells the reporter. A question about the mission elicits a clipped reply: "It's not our fight. It's just our job."

His mom, Claire Wells, and stepfather Ben have rented a black SUV limo for the ride to their home in Parrish. That's where, unbeknownst to Chris and Marion, the neighbors are waiting at the end of the street for a cue to light the fuses.

Glittering cascades of pyrotechnics whistle, shriek, pop and boom across the night sky as the small convoy turns the corner. It rolls to a halt at what looks like the happiest, most brightly lit home in the neighborhood.

The banner reads "Welcome Home Sgt. Chris Smith." The yard and trees are jubilant with yuletide decorations. The front-door wreath is festooned with laminated photos of Christmases past, largely from childhood.

As the entourage migrates inside, Ben approaches the driver-side limo window. The chauffeur declines the tip.

"Nobody did this for us," says the Vietnam veteran. "I'm happy to do it for you."

The party inside unfolds amid sparkling tree lights, a small feast and flowing libations. Conversation is criss-crossed with accents that are not quite English, not quite Scottish. And not even the fact that Chris Smith has just been denied U.S. citizenship can dampen the occasion.

For now, as the pink scars above his right brow attest, survival is its own reward.

The Lucky Ones

The precise number of American military personnel coming home for the holidays is classified.

"Due to operational security," states an e-mail from Sgt. Nicole Dykstra of U.S. Central Command's press office, "we cannot disclose specific numbers."

In this seventh season of Americans deployed to combat zones in Afghanistan or Iraq, though, some families are luckier than others.

Bradenton's Peggy Jelemensky, for instance, will have her Navy sons - Rocky, 28, and Justin, 25 - under the same roof "for the first time in three or four years," she says.

"We don't sit around and mope when they're not here," she says. "But it's a lot quieter, obviously. We don't bother to get a tree unless they're here."

For Katie Powers, also of Bradenton, this marks the first holiday in three years that neither Marine son is in a war zone. Sean, 31, and Brendan, 30, have left active duty, but she still attends regular meetings of an informal sorority of Marine moms called Band of Mothers. Their Christmas party, which drew 60 attendees, was no doubt dominated by faraway thoughts.

"I remember one Christmas, when Brendan was in Iraq, he told me he looked out on the surrounding area, and he could see the shepherds and their sheep," Powers says. "He said it probably looked a lot like it did when Jesus was born, that it hadn't advanced much beyond that point."

A Change Of Scenery

Daylight clarifies the lengths to which Claire Wells went in order to make her son's homecoming just right. Every mailbox in the Aberdeen subdivision wears a yellow ribbon. Oak trees, too. Between the decorations and the shopping and the food and the logistics, she reckons she spent six weeks putting things in order.

Things are quieter this morning than they were several days ago. Chris Smith is playing on the floor with his 1-year-old son, Cody. His drowsy 2-year-old, Cameron, is about to take a nap.

Just a few weeks ago, Smith was a gunner on an M1 Abrams tank prowling the streets of West Rashid, the Baghdad stronghold of the Mahdi Army. It was his second tour, a 15-month, white-knuckle grindhouse of tension and killing.

When he was reunited with his wife last month at the U.S. base in Schweinfurt, Germany, Smith applied for American citizenship at the consulate in Frankfurt. He'd spent his first 11 years growing up in Newcastle, just south of England's border with Scotland, before his family moved to Sarasota.

According to the Defense Department, 20,877 men and women in uniform are non-U.S. citizens.

Since military operations in Afghanistan began in 2001, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has naturalized 32,500 enlistees, 96 of them posthumously.

Joining the service can be a ticket to citizenship, but as Smith discovered, a Purple Heart is no guarantee.

Smith says he was rejected because he supposedly gave incomplete answers about his arrest record. He admits to a couple of incidents involving intoxication, a DUI, a scuffle with a fellow soldier when he was a private.

"I'm not proud of what I did, but I have no reason to lie about it," Smith says. "The naturalization officer said I lied to her."

Smith is appealing his denial, but the USCIS is prohibited from discussing individual cases. "That gets into privacy issues," says agency spokesperson Chris Rhatigan in Washington.

Smith's stepfather, Ben, is a 20-year Army veteran who advised him to pursue a military career. Ben lost his father in Vietnam.

"I'm as confused and frustrated over this as anybody," he says. "But I will say this: Chris went away a boy, and he came back a man. I've seen how responsible he's become, and he makes me very proud."

Going Back?

Smith's Army contract expires in December 2009. He says he wants to re-enlist, but that depends largely on what happens in Iraq.

Continued American engagement seems pointless, he says. "If the Iraqis won't run their country, we can't do it for them."

Around noon on April 28, he was rolling with a four-tank recon column when the equivalent of a 500-pound bomb exploded beneath his vehicle. The four-man crew was briefly knocked unconscious, and Smith needed stitches to repair his forehead.

The 72-ton Abrams - a $7 million marvel of speed, stealth, mobility and firepower - was a total loss. Smith says the crater stretched 8 by 12 feet wide and 6 feet deep.

He salutes the ingenuity of the bombers. "I was thoroughly impressed," he says. "I've never seen that kind of force before."

Smith rattles off the names of buddies who didn't leave Iraq alive. They continue to inform him, Smith says,

"Every minute of every day is very important." Because he's also certain of this: "I'll be going back to Iraq. It's destined."

Claire Wells is working on the next best thing to time in a bottle - a scrapbook for the sons of her only child.

"A memory book for the boys," she says, "so they'll know where their daddy grew up."

Someday, Smith's mom will tell them about holiday rituals in northern England, the turkey meal, the glass of sherry for Santa on Christmas Eve.

"And I'd have Christopher in the bath," she says, dropping her voice to a near whisper. "And then I'd go, 'Oh! Did you hear that?' And we'd go out and we'd see where Santa had left some new pajamas for Christmas.

"We'd put them on before Christopher went to bed."

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