One Veteran’s Vigilance

WINDHAM - In times gone by, but unforgotten, there was a little weekly newspaper called the Windham Journal that made a sojourn to the crossroads of Central and South Asia with patriot Karl Gonzalez.

Gonzalez is a retired Greene County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant, a former Windham town councilman and police chief, and nowadays sits as Worshipful Master of the F.A.M. Masons, Mountain Lodge #529.

In 2007/08, serving with the 69th Infantry Division, he was dispatched to the Lieja Outpost in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

The similarly mountainous but desolately far-from-here place is walled by Iran on the west, Uzbekistan to the north and China in the northeast.

Gonzalez was soldiering within Operation Enduring Freedom, the American response to the 9/11 attacks, the longest war in United States history.

A copy of the old Windham Journal, reincarnated in the Mountain Eagle, was with him for a reason that matters if you know more of the story.

Gonzalez is a 1986 graduate of Windham-Ashland-Jewett school, joining the Navy when he was 17, a country boy who wouldn’t possibly have dreamed he’d soon be escorting tankers thru the Strait of Hormuz.

That has an eerie ring. Iran and Iraq were the ones at war then. Iran was mining the vital waterway, a floating death disrupting the flow of oil. 

Gonzalez was an operations specialist on the USS O’Brien, in the inmost combat information hub, when the USS Samuel B. Roberts hit a mine.

The blast blew a cavernous hole in the guided missile frigate, launching the United States retaliatory Operation Praying Mantis, a chain of real and surreal events Gonzalez says, “I remember like it was yesterday.”

It was April, 1988, and he was 19, no longer a Tom Sawyer, small town kid. He had signed up to see the world, getting an unfathomable view.

Gonzalez finished his four-year stint with a drug interdiction operation off southern California which “sparked my interest in law enforcement,” he says, later earning criminal justice and sociology degrees.

It was 1996 when he passed the FBI special agent exam, advancing to the interview stage, not having the required experience to get in, ultimately taking a job in the operations office at Albany International Airport.

Two years later, the Greene County sheriff called. He aced the police academy and was in the thick of it when, he says, “9/11 happened.”

Something deeply internal summoned. “I wanted to join the infantry but my son was born in 1999 and my wife was pregnant with our daughter at the time of 9/11, so I waited,” Gonzalez says.

“I later became friends with some of the infantry sergeants at the Leeds Armory and in 2006 I joined the 69th Infantry with the National Guard.”

He was 36 years old. “I wanted to be part of what was going on. We knew the 69th Infantry was going to Afghanistan in 2007,” Gonzalez says. “My orders actually came in on my birthday.”

Train-up was done at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, flying out of there to Dublin and then Turkey and then Kabul and then…

Every known thing changed. “Our company got split up everywhere, filling holes all over Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom,” says Gonzalez, currently an investigator with the county Public Defender.

“I was assigned to Team Barbarian with the Afghan police on the border of Pakistan, living with the Afghani people out in a makeshift FOB, a forward operating base, at Camp Clarke in Khost,” he says.

It was life and death business. “It was strange and to tell the truth, after two weeks I was asking myself, ‘what are we doing here?’” Gonzalez says.

“Everything was tribal. There was no government. It was like the Stone Age. Some tribes liked us. Some didn’t, We didn’t know who to trust.

“But then I got angry. Soldiers were getting killed and people were getting blown up by IED’s. All I cared about was the guys in the same uniform.”

And he cared about getting home, which is where the Windham Journal enters the tale. Over the century and more of its publications, readers would take one along on their trips away from local hills and hearth.

They would pose with a copy of the newspaper and bring the picture back to be printed, from anywhere on the planet. Well, not everywhere

Not the war torn terrain of Afghanistan. “I’m probably the first,” Gonzalez says, knowing full well he is and that it’s about more than a photo op.

The weathered pages, with their familiar names and faces, spoke of hope and loyalty and a wordless longing for his waiting wife and children.

“Am I different because I was there and what we saw and did?” Gonzalez answers. “Sure, a little bit I guess. It was the Wild West.

“Nothing would happen for two weeks and then it was a you-know-what storm. You get numb to it but you don’t. You know what I mean?

“The way I look at it now, the way we exited Afghanistan, we could have done it better. It was like when we left Viet Nam,” Gonzalez says.

He was given a Combat Infantry Badge, an Army Commendation Medal, a Meritorious Service Medal and a Global War on Terrorism Medal among others before retiring from the National Guard, there years ago, as an infantry instructor.

“I’m happy I served. Proud. I encourage all young people with no direction to join the military,” Gonzalez says. “Why? For me, that’s easy.

“It’s the camaraderie. When you’re the guy next to a guy who has the next guy’s back, that’s patriotism. That’s why.”

Pictured: A reunion of 69th Infantry buddies (left to right) Joseph Nuite, Karl Gonzalez, Afghani interpreter Hashmat and Steve Nobles.