news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060320/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_joe_johnson
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. And if he leaves bloody Iraq with no blood on his hands, he says, that's fine, too. 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. He wasn't there that day the tragic news arrived in Rome, Ga. With six years of long-ago Army and Navy service, Johnson had joined the National Guard in 2003, wanting to serve his country again, this time in combat, and to go to Iraq while his son was there. A year with both husband and son at war would be easier on Jan than two years separately, he reasoned. The death of Justin, a 1st Cavalry Division machine gunner, stunned his parents with a shock that lingers still. "What were the odds, of thousands of people here, that somebody in my family would get killed?" At that point, Johnson said, "I decided it was too soon to leave home." But last April 11, a year and a day after his son was killed, Johnson told his Iraq-bound Georgia National Guard unit, the 48th Infantry Brigade, he was ready to join them. They ended up at this dustblown base in Iraq's far west, pulling escort duty for fuel convoys on the bomb-pocked desert highways from Jordan. The wiry lean Georgian, an easy-talking man with a boyish, sunburned face, tried to answer the question that won't go away. I was pissed off at the terrorists for 9/11 and other atrocities. But there was more on the mind of this man who has done Church of God missionary work as far afield as Peru and the Arctic. "I don't really have love for Muslim people," Johnson said. Although he hasn't read the Quran, or spoken with Muslims, he has "heard" the Islamic holy book "teaches to kill Jews and infidels. He could love Iraqi children, though, and said he'd hoped "to see them grow up to know right and wrong." Somewhere along the way, however, the righteous passion cooled, as the over-aged corporal, like tens of thousands of other American soldiers here, faced the reality of Iraq. Was it last Christmas morning, when roadside bombs rocked his convoy one after another, and Johnson thought he was next? Or was it when speeding civilian cars passed the Americans' Humvees and Johnson failed to level his gun and open fire, which "I think anyone else," fearing car bombs, "would have done." "I really don't want to kill innocent people," he now says.
"I don't like that Joe's there," Jan Johnson said when called by satellite telephone from al-Asad. "She's ready for me to come home," Joe Johnson concludes. His battalion exits Iraq in early May, when Johnson's own enlistment term, coincidentally, expires. "If I go home and didn't kill a terrorist, it's not going to ruin my life," he said. Once back home among the northwest Georgia pines, he has one last ceremonial act in mind, removing the silver-toned bracelet he's worn on his right wrist throughout his deployment, bearing Justin's name and date of death.
This is an undated family handout photo of Justin Johnson, dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in April, 2004. Joe Johnson, Justin's father, joined the war effort at 48, a year and a day after his son was killed, serving in Iraq with his Georgia National Guard unit, the 48th Infantry.
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