Father Loses Taste for Revenge in Iraq

[NNN0LHI]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_JOE_JOHNSON?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=INTERNATIONAL

AL-ASAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin. It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson's Georgia doorstep with the news. Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who'd gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was suddenly dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb planted in a Baghdad slum.

Today it's Joe who mans the M-240 atop a Humvee, warily watching the sides of the road, an unlikely Army corporal at 48, a father who came here for revenge, a Christian missionary on a crusade against Islam, and a man who, after six months at war, is ready to go home.

"I shouldn't even have come," he now says. And if he leaves bloody Iraq with no blood on his hands, he says, that's fine, too.

The Johnson family story is unique, even strange. But in a war where soldiers have heard an ever-changing medley of reasons for fighting, Joe Johnson's may be as simple and direct as any - and to many, as troubling.

[maveric]

1. How does a 48 year old man join the Army for combat duty?

I thouhght that the cut-off was 34?

[MADem]

2. He joined the Guard, and was an OSVET (USN and USA)

They subtract years served from your age, and the Guard has a higher age limit than ACDU. More on this topic here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2173428

[Neil Lisst]

3. it's a great story of redemption

You have to get past your desire for revenge to see the other man's humanity and his reason for doing what he does.

[roguevalley]

4. these parents have to come to the truth in their own way. no one

can tell them. they already know suffering. I hope he finds peace some place.

[Divernan]

5. Another fool goes to Iraq because he's pissed off at terrorists for 911

How many other soldiers have not yet learned there were no Iraqis involved in 9/11 & it was Saudi Arabians manning the planes?

[Divernan]

6. Delete - dupe.