The Shape of Days

Jon Powers never meant to become a soldier. He wanted to be a teacher. He joined the ROTC not out of an overwhelming sense of patriotism, but because the program paid for college. He graduated in 2000 with a degree in education, a second lieutenant’s bar and a debt to his country. It was a debt he was happy to repay: three years and out, and back to the life to which he’d aspired, the life of a schoolteacher.

Jon was stationed in Germany on September 11, 2001.

Jon’s unit — the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Field Artillery Regiment of the 1st Armored Division, the “Gunners” — didn’t deploy to Afghanistan that year. The Gunners are artillerymen, trained to operate the M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzer, essentially a huge canon on tank treads. The mountainous terrain of Central Asia was no place for mechanized artillery, and Jon and his unit stayed put in Germany for the duration of Operation Enduring Freedom.

But in 2003 their time came, not as a front-line unit participating in the invasion of Iraq but as a part of the peacekeeping force that deployed two months later. Jon and his fellow Gunners were assigned to a security mission in Adhamiya, a suburb of Baghdad. They moved into a bombed-out mansion once occupied by Uday Hussein, set up an operations center, and did their jobs.

“We’re trying to reach the three and a half million Iraqi kids who aren’t in school. Because it doesn’t matter where you stand on the war. These kids had nothing to do with it.”

During his time in Iraq — ultimately fourteen months of it, after his year-long rotation was extended in May 2004 — Jon wasn’t a front-line soldier. Oh, he saw plenty of action: mortar and RPG attacks, improvised-bomb ambushes, the sort of brief, hairy firefight that jaded Iraq vets half-jokingly call “minor combat.” But that stuff was all just incidental. That wasn’t Jon’s mission, and it wasn’t the Gunners’ mission. They were there to keep the peace, such as it was.

In late 2003, Jon was on a routine — if anything in such a place can be called routine — humanitarian mission to a Baghdad orphanage called St. Hannah’s when one of the nuns took him aside. She asked him not to come visit the children again. If the insurgents, who were always watching, saw the American soldiers visiting the orphanage again, she said, they would massacre the children.

Jon Powers never meant to be a soldier. He wanted to be a teacher. He didn’t want to put kids in danger. He wanted to take care of them.

It was in that moment, that horrible, sinking moment, that the idea for War Kids Relief was born.

---

In March 2005, a documentary called Gunner Palace was released to well deserved rave reviews. Filmmaker Mike Tucker went to Adhamiya and lived with the Gunners during their time there, lived with them and partied with them and went on patrols and raids with them. His eighty-five-minute documentary captured the reality of war in a way that few films have, focusing not on the moments of shocking and terrifying violence but on the hours — weeks, months — of boredom. The soldiers featured in Gunner Palace play golf. They sing songs. They play the guitar. They dance to Smokey Robinson songs unselfconsciously, like the kids that they still are, deep down inside.

Jon Powers is in Gunner Palace. He’s not a movie star; it’s a fairly blink-and-you-miss-it kind of role. But he’s there. And after he rotated home in September 2004, Tucker asked him to help him promote the movie. He embarked on a publicity tour that took him from Telluride to Toronto to Capitol Hill. He got his face on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and MTV. He was profiled in the Post, the Times and USA Today.

But he never forgot St. Hannah’s. He never forgot that nun. And he never forgot those kids, the kids he helped there, the kids he and the other Gunners inadvertently put in harm’s way.

See, Jon got to come home. Jon and the other Gunners did their time in Iraq, they served their fourteen months, and then they got to come home.

But those kids are still there.

The ones that haven’t been murdered, anyway.

In November 2005, Jon launched War Kids Relief, a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Not to support the war and not to impede it, but simply to help twelve million Iraqi kids grow up a little safer and with a little more hope.

---

I had the opportunity to talk with Captain Jon Powers tonight. He came to Edelman’s D.C. office with a copy of “Gunner Palace.” We watched the movie in the big conference room, then Jon sat with us for an hour and answered our questions.

He told us about what War Kids Relief has planned. There are hundreds of youth centers all over Iraq, he said, youth centers built by Saddam but now abandoned. War Kids Relief hopes, in partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Youth and Sports, to go to 100 of those youth centers and refurbish them, building classrooms and soccer fields and computer labs. They plan to launch a work-study program that would send Iraqi teens out into the cities and towns to do “Depression-era stuff” like painting buildings and picking up trash for a small wage. Every other week they’ll work; on alternate weeks they’ll receive vocational training at the youth centers.

“We’re trying to reach the three and a half million [Iraqi] kids who aren’t in school,” Jon said. “Because it doesn’t matter where you stand on the war. These kids had nothing to do with it.”

VVAF hopes to raise the funds for a pilot project by June. Jon says that the group needs only $50,000 to rebuild one youth center, to launch one work-study program. They’re trying to raise those funds privately, with fundraisers in surprising places. Places like Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, Jon said, has a community of more than 50,000 Iraqi Chaldeans.

“If they each gave me a dollar,” he said, “we’d have the money to do it.”

If the pilot project is a success, Jon hopes that the United States Agency for International Development will ask Congress to appropriate the money for the rest of the program. “The money we need is a rounding error compared to what we’ve spent on Iraq so far,” he said.

---

UNICEF reports that half of the Iraqi population today is under eighteen; 40 percent of the population is under 15. Today’s abandoned, neglected children are tomorrow’s fanatical insurgents and terrorists. A dollar spent educating an Iraqi child is a dollar we don’t have to spend on body armor for the next generation of American soldiers, or on caskets for the next generation of American war dead.

The soldiers in Iraq have done their jobs, and we honor them for it, and we thank them for their continued sacrifice. But what Iraq needs now is not just soldiers, but teachers.

Jon Powers never meant to become a soldier. He wanted to be a teacher.

The VVAF is accepting donations. You can give as little as $2.

• Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004
• It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
• Unacceptably cynical remark of the day