For Windham veteran, patriotism is more than a word

WINDHAM―In times gone by, but unforgotten, there was a little weekly newspaper called the Windham Journal that once 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. Nowadays he serves as worshipful master of the F.A.M. Masons, Mountain Lodge No. 529 and as an investigator with the county Public Defender's Office.

In 2007-08, serving with the 69th Infantry, he was deployed to the Lieja Outpost in Afghanistan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The similarly mountainous but desolately far-from-here country is bordered by Iran to the west, Uzbekistan to the north and China to the northeast.

Gonzalez was soldiering within Operation Enduring Freedom, the American response to the 9/11 attacks, part of 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 for those who know more of the story.

Gonzalez, a 1986 graduate of Windham-Ashland-Jewett, joined the Navy at 17, a country boy who couldn't possibly have dreamed he'd soon be escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

That has an unsettlingly familiar ring today. Iran and Iraq were at war then. Iran was planting mines in the vital waterway, creating a deadly hazard that threatened the flow of oil.

Gonzalez was an operations specialist aboard the USS O'Brien, working in the ship's innermost combat information hub, when the USS Samuel B. Roberts hit a mine.

The blast blew a cavernous hole in the guided-missile frigate, prompting the United States to launch the retaliatory Operation Praying Mantis. It was a chain of real and surreal events that Gonzalez remembers vividly.

"I remember like it was yesterday," he says.

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 degrees in criminal justice and sociology.

It was 1996 when he passed the FBI special agent exam and advanced to the interview stage. Lacking the required experience to get in, he ultimately took a job in the operations office at Albany International Airport.

Two years later, the Greene County sheriff called. He aced the police exam 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 added.

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."

After training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Gonzalez flew to Dublin, then Turkey and finally Kabul. Then everything changed.

"Our company got split up everywhere, filling holes all over Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom," says Gonzalez,

"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,” he added.

"But then I got angry. Soldiers were getting killed and people were getting blown up by IEDs. All I cared about was the guys in the same uniform,” he said.

And he cared about getting home, which is where the Windham Journal enters the tale.

Over more than a century of publication, readers would take a copy along on their trips away from the local hills and hearth.

They would pose with the newspaper and bring the picture back to be printed, from anywhere on the planet. Well, 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 says. "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 Vietnam," Gonzalez says.

He was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge, an Army Commendation Medal, a Meritorious Service Medal and a Global War on Terrorism Medal, among others, before retiring from the National Guard three 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?"

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