A year in Iraq : one soldier's story

By María Eugenia Guerra

Iraq wasn't what Army reservist John Lee Gill had in mind after learning in early November 2003 that he'd passed the Texas Bar exam. But service to country was the commitment he made as an ROTC cadet in 1992 at Manzano High School in Albuquerque. Putting aside some strong feelings about how the war in Iraq was being fought and the reasons for going to war, Captain Gill reported to Ft. Hood , on November 11, 2003, joining 200 other soldiers for service in Iraq as part of the 13th Corps Support Command. Gill, 31, was one of several military intelligence officers in the command.

“Before I was deployed, I was like every other young man who wanted a good job and who wanted his education to pay off,” said Gill, adding, “I was thinking of all the things I wanted to have in life.” Gill, who served at Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad , said his year in Iraq , however, led him to examine the true substance of his life. “In circumstances that included distance and isolation from everyone I loved and who loved me, the constant mortar fire, and fear, I understood that what was important to me was all the relationships I had built in life, not what I had acquired,” said the St. Mary's University School of Law graduate. While earning his law degree, Gill simultaneously completed graduate school studies in theology at St. Mary's.

“Things on earth are passing as we speak. The war brought that into focus,” he said. “Seeing all that destruction on a daily basis, I learned what hope is. Hope isn't just wishful thinking. It is real faith that you have that God will bring things to their right order, that the war will stop. I had to believe that. Hours would seem like an eternity, but the days and weeks would fly by.”

Before his arrival at Camp Anaconda in the Sunni Triangle, Gill spent a month in Kuwait where he honed his marksmanship skills and trained for live fire. “Nothing prepares you for mortars and rockets coming at you,” he said. Gill provided only the sketchiest of details about his intelligence duties to provide convoys with information they would need to move supplies safely. “We did the best we could getting the troops the best information possible. I worked the night shift tracking incidents on the battlefield, and in my spare time when not much was going on I read and learned everything I could about Islam and the Arab people. I was trying to make myself an expert. That never happened, but I wanted to understand the environment in which we were operating, to see what was in their head,” Gill said. “This is a very ancient culture. What we see on the surface is not what they are about.”

He also read Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Dickens' Great Expectations, and the short stories of Leo Tolstoy. “I read the autobiography of Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness. Day was the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement. I found these books and stories to be spiritually upbeat because they were focused on Christ. That helped me day to day,” Gill said. He also read the book by concentration camp internee Victor Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning. “I re-read The Haj by Leon Uris, the story about the life of one Arab boy growing up in Palestine. This story shows the real side of Islam. Islam isn't the cause of all this. It advocates peace and tolerance, which we don't understand on this side of the world watching these events play out,” he said.

Gill found that reading, prayer, and physical activity countered the despair that sometimes pervaded his thoughts. “Any solder can tell you about hours of boredom interspersed with a few hours of terror. Those hours in between were the hard ones,” he said.

“I despise war and didn't think we were prepared to fight this one, but I went and did the best I could to serve my country. I was a leader, a captain,” Gill said.

He said he found solace and inspiration in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius, a 16th century Spanish soldier whose legs were crushed in war. In his convalescence, as Ignatius contemplated the honors and glory of battle, he found that those temporal thoughts left him feeling empty. When he thought about God, he felt fulfilled. So he developed a set of spiritual exercises to bring himself to emulate Christ's actions. “For me, the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius were extremely difficult, because I was doing them in a wartime scenario,” Gill said. “Contemplating death over there was a lot more real than if I was doing it here, because the possibility was larger there. I often thought of what I hadn't done yet with my life.”

Of his service in Iraq, Gill said, “That year in Iraq will have a bearing on the rest of my life, spiritually and physically. I pushed myself physically. When I was studying for the bar, I gained a lot of weight. I was mentally and physically tired, I didn't work out. I ate bad things. In Iraq, I couldn't afford at all to let that happen. I had to be at top form at all times. Enlisted men looked up to me. A lot of people depended on me. I kept a schedule by which I taught karate three days a week. I ran and lifted weights the other three days. Rain or shine or sandstorm, I was running or teaching. I kept my physical strength up, and I read things that fed me spiritually. Sundays I would take a couple of hours off and would make time for myself to go to church and to Pizza Hut on the base.

“My mother wrote me every day that I was there. Her letters were upbeat, but I knew she read the news constantly,” Gill recalled, “and my father e-mailed me. It has been like heaven to see my family again and to see my friends in San Antonio and in Laredo.” Gill recalled Midnight Mass in Albuquerque the Christmas of 2003, just before shipping out for Iraq. “I had a four-day pass last Christmas, and so I was home and attended Midnight Mass. The homily for that Mass had to do with two nuns in a Japanese camp during World War II and their Christmas celebration. I kept telling myself that I would be home for Christmas 2004, and I was,” he said.

Gill earned a BA in Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of New Mexico and has served two active duty tours in the Army reserves in Texas over the last eight years, the first tour with the Internal Revenue and U.S. Customs intelligence, and the second with the Joint Task Force Six drug interdiction effort in Corpus Christi. “I met a U.S. prosecutor in Corpus named Patty Booth, whom I admired. That's how I became interested in St. Mary's University School of Law. I applied and was accepted,” he said. It was about that time, too, Gill said, that he felt the pull to return to the Catholic Church. “I was driving one day on my way to scuba diving and what I felt was like a gentle whisper in my ear,” he recalled. “At the age of 27 I was confirmed a Catholic.”

Gill, who was in Laredo recently for a job interview, an occasion that reunited him with six former law school classmates who practice in Laredo, has a deep love of the law. “Justice has to be tempered with mercy. I like thinking that as an attorney I could have bearing on that,” he said. In his last year of law school, Gill clerked for renowned civil rights attorney Gerald Goldstein in San Antonio.

Gill is the son of Walter and Vanda De Moura Gill. He lived with his parents in Brazil, his mother's country, for five years. His younger sister, Jennifer, is a mechanical engineer in Florida.

Gill is tender-hearted about the relationships that sustained him while out of country. “My mother often sent boxes of things we all shared. My father sent books. My friends wrote. My law school friend Nicole True sent me a case of Dr. Pepper and a photograph of a friend and me canoeing on the Devil's River in Texas,” he remembered.

A few weeks ago, just days home after Iraq, Gill drank six cans of Dr. Pepper at one setting. His mother asked if that wasn't a bit over the top. “It was, and it wasn't,” he said, though he added, “I'm in a fight with myself to keep in shape mentally and physically. It's a challenge to be disciplined.”

“I read a commencement speech of Toni Morrison's in The New York Times,” Gill said. “She said every day should be the best day of your life. She said we rush children through their lives, pushing them so quickly to success and power that they live their lives on a superficial level. I'm going to hang on to the spiritual lessons I learned in Iraq, especially those of prioritizing relationships that allow for growth.”

Gill said that his own service to country follows in the footsteps of both his maternal and paternal grandfathers, who served their respective countries in World War II -- Osmar Moura who served in Italy with the Brazilian expeditionary forces, and Walter Gill who also served in Italy. “That has given my own service an immediate sense of meaning. Whether this war was right or wrong, that will be history,” he said.