I usually hear from at least one of them about this time of the year, near the date four years ago that we buried Justin.
The telephone rang. On the other end was perhaps the last guy I expected to call.
The last time I heard from Juan Polino, he wanted zero to do with the Army. He had enlisted right out of high school and would spend each of his next three birthdays in a hole or in the back of a tank somewhere in Iraq.
He had, by his count, survived eight roadside bombings, had seen way too many people die in way too many firefights. When I last saw him in Iraq four years ago, he’d confided that he didn’t think he would ever see home again.
It was early afternoon when the telephone rang. Juan Polino, now 26, said the rules prohibited him from telling me exactly from where he was calling, but that he was standing a post somewhere in Europe.
I thought you were through with the military, I half-scolded him. “I did too,” he replied.
He is, you see, from a tiny speck of a town named Planada, deep in California’s Central Valley. He had sworn back then that if he made it out of Iraq, he’d get out of the Army and do something completely different in nearby Fresno.
But there simply wasn’t much call for a man whose lone specialty is commanding a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
He wound up working for his father, Ramon, a gentle, soft-spoken man, who runs a successful landscaping business in Planada.
So one day, three and a half years ago, he walked into a National Guard office. He longed to be in uniform yet again.
He was manning a desk at his base when he called. “Peacekeeping is boring,” Juan Polino said.
We talked for a long time about Justin Vasquez, a skilled and popular staff sergeant who was the first soldier in his unit killed when a roadside bomb went off four years ago just south of Baghdad.
“After Sgt. Vasquez died, I knew that if I didn’t die too, I wanted to experience something different from the Army world when I got home. I didn’t last a month.
“Now, I’m trying to go back to the regular Army,” Juan Polino said. “But it’s tough to do with the economy in the tank. The Army is now the only steady paycheck around.”
I was astounded. I’d seen the fear in his eyes when he stood in formation, about to cross the wire into that dangerous and bloody city. I once watched his mother cling to his feet in their Planada home and beg him not to return from his two-week leave.
“There’s just no work in Planada, not if I don’t want to work the fields,” he explained. “And there is something about the Army I just miss.”
This country, I suppose, needs men like Juan Polino.
“I’d rather go back to Iraq and get blown up again, get shot at, than spend another day here safe and kicked back.
“Even if they didn’t give me ammo for a weapon, I’d take Iraq over this,” he said. “I miss the firefights, the packing of sandbags and throwing them on the Humvee floor plates, knowing you might get hit that day.
“I’m just counting down the months I have to go here.”
We make plans to see each other in Colorado when his deployment is up in November, agree to meet in Manzanola and drop flowers and a few prayers in the little cemetery where Justin now rests.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
