Coming home: 'The smartest guy in Company B'

[unhappycamper]

Sgt. David Johnson, a soldier assigned to Company B, 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, turns in his weapon during in-processing near the air field at Ft. Drum Oct. 26th, 2008. After doing his extra time, courtesy of stop-loss, Johnson plans to join his family business back home in Washington state early December. Johnson just returned home from his deployment to southern Kirkuk, Iraq. (Day 5 of a five-day Stars and Stripes series)


Coming home: 'The smartest guy in Company B'
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, February 23, 2009

The smartest guy in Company B? He’s not even a staff sergeant.

Sgt. David Johnson of Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., who started college at 16 and passed the Washington state bar shortly before enlisting, was universally acknowledged as the brains of Bravo.

Johnson, according to most people in his unit, was the man most responsible for whatever good Company B did in its corner of Kirkuk province.

In some ways, he was just another soldier in the Army’s five-year-plus effort to stabilize Iraq. He suffered like the others, laughed hard at their sophomoric, obscene and often hilarious jokes, did as he was ordered.

~snip~

More than 10,000 soldiers are now being kept in the Army on stop loss, what’s been called a backdoor draft. That’s almost 10 percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq, Johnson noted.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=60907