For post-9/11 enlistees, like three Edison High pals, deployment has been the norm

The three friends were all in the 11th grade at Philadelphia's Thomas Edison High School when terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

Julio Clavell, Jermaine Veasy, and John Redding - all rowhouse kids, all the nephews or grandsons of men who had served in the military - decided to join a local National Guard unit together upon graduation.

A bronze plaque at the school entrance made clear what enlisting in wartime could mean. It names the students who died in Vietnam, 66 of them, more than from any other U.S. high school.

As the trio entered basic training in summer 2003, President George W. Bush had already declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, and allied forces seemed to be mopping up in Afghanistan. But the fighting had only begun.

In their eight years as Guardsmen, Redding, Veasy, and Clavell have been deployed twice for combat duty in Iraq. And they expect another Middle East deployment next year.

The three are emblematic of the 1.65 million Americans - on active duty, in the Guard, or in the Army Reserve - who have enlisted since 9/11. Including personnel already in the military when the terrorists struck, 2.2 million service members have been deployed overseas at least once for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Edison grads' experience has been largely positive, although they've seen comrades get hurt, and deployments have repeatedly disrupted their home lives.

"There's been lots of bad moments," said Redding, still a college freshman at 26, "but then there are a lot of good moments."

Always in the same unit - now designated as Charlie Company of the 55th Brigade Special Troops Battalion - the three were sent to Beiji, Iraq, in 2004 and 2005.

In 2008 and 2009, they were part of the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a Pennsylvania-based unit that fought in and around Baghdad.

Next year, it appears, they're headed to Kuwait, which, at this point, sounds like easy duty. "Hot, dry, boring," Clavell said.

They consider themselves lucky. None has been wounded, and each says he has coped well with the physical and emotional demands. But they've already spent more time in a combat zone than many past American warriors.

A World War II soldier who landed in France on D-Day and fought until Germany surrendered endured 11 months in combat. The Edison draftees and volunteers who went to Vietnam were typically deployed for a year.

Veasy, Redding, and Clavell have already had almost two years of combat duty, and next year will be their third. "It's not the same," they insist. Indeed, wars are of different length and intensity. But as Veasy said: "We've been hit. We have done some things."

On the second weekend in May, Charlie Company had monthly training exercises at an old supply depot next to historic Fort Mifflin on the Delaware River.

Iraq duty had been exciting - hot and dangerous, but exciting. This, however, was Guard life at its most drab.

It had been raining for days, and the brown brick warehouses seemed to sink in the brown mud. Thundering jets taking off from the adjacent Philadelphia International Airport left brown streaks in the sky just overhead. It was dirty, humid, oily.

The 178 men under Capt. John Felts' command had done their physical training test - "Not good," he said with a sigh - and were beginning to prepare for deployment.

Felts, who has been deployed to Iraq himself, said the military over the last decade has asked a lot of the Guard's part-time soldiers.

Before Afghanistan, before Iraq, the Pennsylvania Guard had not been deployed to a combat zone in large numbers since World War II, not even in Vietnam.

But that has changed.

"There's a lot of guys that have graduated high school and want to go to college and have gone on deployment," Felts said as he stood at a warehouse door. "They come back, they have six months, they start to get their life underneath them, and then another deployment comes up.

"I think the story of the last 10 years," he said, "is that you have a very small segment of the population basically getting deployed over and over again. And it's really a testament to the patriotism of these guys."

Veasy, Clavell, and Redding said they never thought of themselves as patriotic. They were just near the end of high school and starting to think about what to do afterward.

Clavell was in a program at Edison that trained him to repair and install vending machines. Part of the school day, he'd be out on the job, and he expected to continue after he graduated.

Veasy and Redding - friends at Stetson Middle School who were in Boy Scouts together - had ideas of going to college. But their ambition was vague.

A Pennsylvania National Guard recruiter frequently came around school. He'd sell students on the educational benefits they could accrue and the money they could pocket - a couple of hundred for a weekend's work, even as privates.

"I said, Maybe this is for me," Clavell remembered. "I was also thinking about my job, careerwise. I said, 'I don't think I can do [military service] full time, but maybe I can do this one weekend a month and two weeks a year.' "

A half-dozen friends said they'd sign up together. Some backed out, some fell by the wayside. Only Redding, Veasy, and Clavell remain.

"My band of brothers," Felts calls them.

Friends in civilian life as well, they're from similar working-class backgrounds in struggling neighborhoods - one black, one white, one Hispanic - all in their mid-20s, all sergeants.

Clavell, at 5-foot-3, with a lopsided grin and an easy attitude, makes himself the butt of the trio's relentless jokes.

He weighs 138 pounds, but was only 103 when he enlisted. "The uniforms didn't fit me," he said. "They never do." Single, he works as an installer of jukeboxes.

"I'm Puerto Rican, and I have a lot of my family members who were in the military - Navy, Marines. I was, like, I'll give something back. I knew I wanted to do it."

Veasy, at 6-foot-1 and 250 pounds, has a dominating presence and sometimes seems like the group's leader.

Like Redding, he has struggled between deployments to get a college degree. He has done some work at the University of Phoenix campus in Center City. He was an aide to former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo and a political adviser to City Council candidate Howard Treatman in the May primary.

He and his girlfriend recently had a baby, "a beautiful little boy, Kendal," he said. "As you start to have more family ties, it's a lot harder [to be deployed]. . . . You have to manage family from abroad. . . . The Guard is a way of life. You conform to it or you leave. It's not for everybody."

Redding is earning a bachelor's degree in restaurant management at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. He wants to own a restaurant. Even in Iraq, back on base after patrol, he'd cook steaks for his buddies. Besides his two tours in Iraq, he has spent a tour guarding the U.S.-Mexico border. He and his wife, Michelle, until recently were living with both their mothers and some brothers in Port Richmond.

He has promised Michelle that, after this next deployment, he will change his military specialty to something less dangerous than combat engineer. "We go up and down the road looking for bombs."

None of the three men intends to leave the Guard any time soon. Their original enlistment was for six years. They've all re-upped.

One of their most trying times as Guardsmen came in January when a Charlie Company soldier, Spec. Ivan Lopez, hanged himself 26 months after returning from Afghanistan.

The news spread among the soldiers, and the company trudged through a foot of packed snow to gather for the viewing at a Front Street church in North Philadelphia.

Lopez's wife, Jadira, said she believed he could not cope with his war experiences.

Redding, Clavell, and Veasy had not been with Lopez in Afghanistan. They could only wonder at what had happened. Even the toughest war veteran may hold on to his equilibrium with a weak grasp.

Clavell recalled that, as a 17-year-old when he joined the Guard, he had needed his mother's signature on the enlistment papers.

"She asked me about 20 times if I was sure, if I was sure. I said: 'Yes, yes, yes. Sign the paper!' "

Michelle and John Redding married just two days before he left for his second Iraq deployment.

She remembered: "You just pray for the best and hope he comes back the same way he left."

Inga Saffron: Given the tumult over its design, the National September 11 Memorial is

a surprisingly effective emotional prompt for our feelings about the attacks that claimed 2,983 lives.

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