In the Army Now
A born soldier from New York shares the army’s
effect on his identity.
by Jenna Greditor
TWEENS & TEENS
News December 2006
Christmas 2005.
Samarra, Iraq
The night air lit up with tracers, red ones
and green. You could track the fire fights
across the city by the tracers ricocheting
into the air. I remember falling asleep slumped
over my rifle and my team leader, barely more
coherent, kicking me awake. The days passed,
the nights passed— a few fitful hours
of sleep in the cold, broken by night patrols
and guard duty.
Christmas was bad for us. As a Jew, I missed
Hanukkah at home with my family. For the others,
a few stockings on the Stryker and a Christmas
tree made from a target stand draped with
belts of ammo and red incendiary grenades
topped with a RPG for an angel was the best
they could do. We got yelled at for that tree.
Ellis walked around telling people that if
anyone wished him a merry Christmas, he would
shoot him in the face. Christmas dinner was
served, and wasn’t half bad, but our
real gift was a whole four hours of uninterrupted
sleep in our cots.
War has the awesome power to challenge your
convictions, throw you down, spit you out.
For some, war also empowers. It can lure you
to follow your calling, outlive adversity
and discover your true identity, as it has
for northeast native Joshua Bressel. Back
from fighting in Iraq, Bressel, who provides
the snapshot quoted above, is now a reservist
finishing his college degree at Virginia Tech.
Afterwards, he plans on returning to the army
for 20 years of service and leading the next
generation of soldiers.
In Iraq, Bressel didn’t celebrate the
holidays, or even his 21st birthday, as he
would have in the United States. Instead,
Bressel watched countless new best friends
die, such as Jake Herring. Herring, a good
man who could make anyone laugh, according
to Bressel, often remarked that he wanted
to be the youngest greeter ever at a Wal-Mart.
That wish died along with Herring when a grenade
hit the young soldier’s vehicle. Rather
than save himself, Herring pushed a sergeant
under the only available armor. Bressel helped
carry Herring back to the base— “his
blood covering us and his screams and pleas
for us to shoot him bringing tears to our
eyes,” recalls Bressel. “I never
let go of his hand as he died.”
Bressel says a part of himself died in war.
But as a self-professed born soldier, Bressel
also says compassion for humanity coupled
with a devotion to serve for something greater
than himself became tangible in combat. War
allowed part of him to come alive.
While Bressel’s Mom reflects that her
son naturally progressed from cub scouts to
civil air patrol to army training, Bressel
says his small stature in grade school played
an integral role in his determination to enlist
in the army. “I was never a big guy,”
says Bressel, now standing at 5 feet 6 inches,
weighing 190 pounds, yet able to bench press
230 pounds. “I never really had a high
self-esteem, and I wanted to be someone whom
others respected. I saw the army as the ideal—
a place of beauty, honor, discipline, respect.
I saw it as a method to improve myself, and
I believe it has.”
Quipping that he never quite outgrew his G.I.
Joe toy figurines, Bressel traces his desire
to join the army as far back as age 6, a year
before his parents divorced and he moved from
Manhattan to Westchester.
Susan Shaw, Bressel’s Mom who has since
remarried and raised Bressel in Westchester
along with son Alex, now age 12, cites that
her oldest son first said he wanted to join
the army at age 4. At a preschool function,
a teacher asked the students what they wanted
to be when they grew up. While the other students
shouted typical occupations— doctors,
teachers, firefighters— Josh declared,
“I’m going to work at the department
of defense.” Shaw figured her son would
outgrow the urge, she says. He never did.
At age 7, when Bressel appeared with a handful
of selected students on Peter Jennings’s
TV program about the Gulf War in Iraq, other
kids on air revealed how they wanted the war
to end, for the good of peace, for the violence
to stop. Bressel, however, jumped in and said:
“I think we should go in there and kill
him,” remembers Shaw. Bressel wanted
the U.S. to violently oust Saddam Hussein
from power. “Jennings couldn’t
rip the microphone away from Josh fast enough!”
Calling her son a dichotomy because of his
kind, sensitive side, which co-exists with
his soldier side, Shaw beams with pride for
Bressel. “He’s found his calling
and I believe we’ve made a difference
in the way of freedom,” she says. “If
my son dies in the army, at least he died
happy. That’s how I assuage myself—
though I think the worst thing in life is
to lose a son.”
When Bressel went to college at age 18, he
enlisted in the army with a recruiter on campus.
As his family knew, Bressel’s goal was
to become an officer. But, he felt that before
he was to command 40 troops in battle, he
should attain complete training. In 2003,
after fall semester of sophomore year and
spending a year and a half in the Virginia
Tech Corps of Cadets and Army ROTC, Bressel
went to basic training in Fort Benning, Ga.
for 14 continuous weeks.
Commenting that he never had to put such extreme
faith in a person prior to service, Bressel
says the most important qualities he amassed
in training, and later in combat, were teamwork
and loyalty. In basic training, Bressel was
paired with Marlon Bustamante, a husband and
father from Jamaica, N.Y. The partners soon
became like brothers, both getting punished
when one did something wrong, both getting
praised when one did something right. The
basic training buddies, however, were placed
in separate squads in Iraq. Bressel later
discovered Bustamante was killed by a roadside
bomb in Baghdad in February 2006.
“There’s an incredible feeling
of loyalty and camaraderie in the army,”
says Bressel. “You’re willing
to give your life for another guy because
you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he’d
give his life for your’s. There are
guys you don’t get along with, but in
combat there’s no time for that. If
the sergeant asks you to move to the front
of the line of fire, there’s no time
to even think. You just act.”
A high point came when Bressel finished basic
training, including his final exam: “a
26-mile grueling march, punctuated by tasks
such as running three of the miles with water
jugs or rescuing a downed pilot— a 200-pound
mannequin at the bottom of the gorge—
or rapidly digging a foxhole in the rock-hard
Georgia red clay.” Post-march, Bressel
graduated to become a U.S. Army Infantryman.
A few months later, he was shipped off to
Iraq.
In Iraq, Bressel met General Casey in a cafeteria
line, befriended Iraqi civilians hired as
interpreters on the base and put his training
to use. Bressel also feels he helped bring
schools, medications, food, prosperity and
the foundation of a new country to Iraqis.
Of course, it wasn’t all glory. “There’s
nothing more terrible than war,” he
confesses. “You don’t do it for
glory. You fight for your friends who are
standing next to you. The biggest fear among
soldiers is not fearing the enemy— it’s
fearing you’ll let your army down.”
Bressel describes Kuwait, which is perched
on the coast of the Persian Gulf and roughly
the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined,
as flat as a dinner plate. The land appeared
a uniform dull color, able to reflect sunlight
painfully and create a surreal rippling haze
over everything in its wake. Days of physical
training in Kuwait gave way to preparation
for combat at a base called Navistar, where
Bressel’s team suffered their first
casualty. Splinters of shrapnel from a recalcitrant
machine gun pierced the crew’s legs,
killing two men.
Though bombs, blood-drenched struggles, explosions,
fatalities, screams, shrieks, bullets, grenades,
hospital stays defined by morphine drips,
sleepless nights in the mud, nightmares, mornings
caked ice-coated sleeping bags and days of
rain ensued, Bressel’s most defining
and horrific moments were still to come. In
June while on patrol, Bressel heard “Grenade!”
as a paper bag landed footsteps from him.
“I suddenly found myself in a ditch
ten feet away covered in blood,” says
Bressel. “I felt the life pouring out
of me, but somehow I lived."
The fortunate son of war, healing from internal
injuries as well as deep arm and wrist wounds,
was discharged from the hospital in Landstuhl,
Germany. He returned to Iraq, finished his
service for the time being, and was set to
return to the base in Fort Bragg, N.C. through
Kuwait. Then came Bressel’s scariest
moment. Thousands of feet in the air over
war-ravished Iraq, one of the planes in Bressel’s
formation was hit by a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft
missile and forced to crash land. Sirens whirred
for miles, though Bressel’s aircraft
remained unscathed. Another shot at life.
When Bressel eventually landed on American
soil, Bressel’s Mom, her husband and
son Alex flew to the airforce base to greet
their soldier, standing in formation with
other sons and daughters. The captain professed
to the hundreds of people packed in the auditorium
how proud everyone should be of the extreme
hardship the soldiers endured for the sake
of freedom. “When the captain said,
‘Dismissed,’ Shaw remembers, “all
hell broke loose as everyone ran to find their
family— alive— back from Iraq.”
Between classroom and field training for psychological
warfare and finishing up his degree, likely
in history and political science, Bressel
may have time this year to return home to
Westchester for the holidays. What’s
on the mind of this born soldier, an aspiring
lieutenant, this holiday season?
“At home, I still feel connected to
the war effort,” says Bressel, “but
a feeling of helplessness takes over. You
feel like you should be over there helping.
Still, nobody prays for peace like a soldier,
because we pay the cost of war.”
Jenna Greditor is the editor.
