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Student-Veteran Brings Home Lessons from Iraq
by Michael Wade
Justin Adams
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Justin Adams was riding along in the desert heat, the sweat dripping off of his face and the sun beating down. He was manning a heavy machine gun on top of a Humvee, trying to stay as vigilant as possible. All he could see was desert as he was leaving the hostile town of Fallujah, about 30 miles from Baghdad.
Then his mind began to wander. He started to daydream about home and about what he would do when he got back.
Just then, right in front of his face, he saw a red trail of missile fire and heard a loud boom. The explosion was no more than five feet away from his Humvee.
"We were rolling about 55 miles an hour. They just missed us. I didn't even see where it came from. And I was thinking about going home and not concentrating on watching my lane. Man, I should have been doing my job instead of thinking about going home!"
Today Justin Adams feels lucky to finally be back. After serving for one year with the Army's 130th Army Engineer Brigade in Iraq, he is back at Mars Hill College, majoring in computer science, playing defensive back for the football team. He often reflects on his many life roles as a son, a brother, a student, a football player, and a soldier.
Adams is originally from Charlotte, N.C., then moved to Lancaster, S.C. He went into the Army National Guard after he graduated from high school. "The major reason that I joined is that I have a little brother that wanted go to college," he said. His family could not afford to send both of them. In the service, he could earn money and get a scholarship to college. He spent a year in basic training, from 1998-1999.
Then he received a phone call from Kevin Barnette, assistant coach and head defensive coordinator for the Mars Hill College football team. He visited the college, liked it, and became a student and member of the team. "I was still in the service and had to go one weekend or two weeks out of the summer."
Then after one horrible day, things changed for Adams. On September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"When 9/11 hit, the first thing I did - there were three or four of us in the reserves, and we tried to rally together, and we asked each other every day, "Have you heard anything yet? Are you going to have to go?" Troops were sent first to Afghanistan, then to Iraq.
In February 2003, he got the phone call. He had to go for war training at Fort Stewart in Savannah, Georgia. "I knew that we would probably have to go to Iraq."
When he went into war training he thought he would be back by summer. "The Army told me that I was only going to be gone for six months." But he was mistaken. He wouldn't be back for more than a year. He was in training and overseas from February 5, 2003 through April 2004.
In Iraq he was with an engineer brigade. "The first thing we had to do was rebuild." If a bridge had been destroyed by U.S. missiles, and if the Army had to get somewhere and couldn't, then it was Adams and his fellow soldiers who would figure out a way to make it accessible. They rebuilt buildings, repaired an airport, and rebuilt bridges. "Because we're engineers. We build and destroy.
" We executed the first half, which was build. So we were doing a whole lot of building the first two months we were there. Then we had to move to Fallujah and Baghdad and those places. We started doing more destroying. Taking buildings down. Any weapons we found we destroyed, in place."
They faced the shock of being in a foreign country where they could never let down their guard. They had to get used to new customs. He saw that the people had very little. "We're sitting over here and we have plenty to eat, plenty to drink. They have none of those things. They just have oil, that's it. …Most of them don't even have shoes. They don't have sandals."
When he and his fellow soldiers had time, they would just mess around at the base and try to make things more like home and more enjoyable while they had to stay there. "What we did as engineers, we built a weight room. I gained a little weight, but not much. We built a theatre. You'd go in to watch movies. We had softball leagues and football leagues, and little army contests - like obstacle courses."
His perspective on life has changed a great deal since he was in Iraq.
"Maybe the biggest thing I learned was, don't take life for granted. We as Americans, we have so much that we really don't realize the littler things in life. Like one of the things was, a flushing commode. I didn't have that for a year. We didn't have showers over there… All the food we have. Being able to drive right up the street here and stop in a gas station and get you a drink. They didn't have all those things. AC! It's 130 degrees over there! Nowhere to run. It was hotter in the tents than outside. It was 130 outside and 140 in the tent!"
He learned that "nothing can prepare you for war…" But he was determined not to hate. "I'm not a hateful person. My parents didn't raise me to hate, so I'm not going to hate anybody. But a lot of times you get over there, and you start getting those feelings, because you don't want to be there. They're trying to kill you. And you can't tell the bad Iraqis from the good Iraqis. You're trying to stereotype me. And anytime you stereotype, you're wrong most of the time anyway. Especially when a roadside explosion goes off and you lose a couple of your buddies.
"Now I lost plenty of friends over there - just no one from my company. Things like that happen. That revenge kicks in, and you just want to go out there and kill, kill, kill.
" People would tell me, 'Justin, how come you just don't want to kill everybody?' But the thing is - that's what Hitler wanted to do. He just wanted to kill everybody. So that's what I tell people. What justifies us to kill? That's why this war is so hard. Because we're trying to play by a set of rules, and they're not about playing by any rules, but we have to do that, or we'll be seen as murderers."
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