Side-Career In Guard Finds

State Trooper On His Way To Iraq

By Nancy K. Crevier

“You don’t always get a chance to ‘pick your poison,’” Sgt Bill Flynn said. That is why he volunteered for the Army National Guard mission that will deploy him to Iraq this time around. “The guys in this mission are top-notch. They’re people I’ve known for years and I have faith in them.”

As an “available asset” in the Army National Guard for the past 20 years, Sgt Flynn has been involved in many other missions. Some were local, such as driving doctors and nurses to hospitals around the state following a massive snowstorm in the early 90s. Other missions have taken him further from his home state, where he has served for the past seven years as a Connecticut State Trooper, five of them out of the Southbury barracks.

He has rebuilt schools and homes in the Dominican Republic as part of his army service and has been to the San Diego area five times since 1996 with a task force to reinforce the borders.

In 2003, he was deployed to guard bases in Fort Drum, New York, and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn with the 242nd Combat Engineers Charlie Company of Branford, as part of the Nobel Eagle Three homeland security mission. At those limited-access posts, his job was searching personnel, doing identity checks, and undertaking vehicle searches to all vehicles going on base.

It was not his intention when he joined the service in the delayed entry program as a senior at Newtown High School in 1986 to make a career of the military; $20,000 to $30,000 a year to go to college seemed unreasonable to him at the time, and military service offered a means of offsetting those costs in the long run.

“I decided to go active duty with the Navy, get some focus on what I wanted to do, and then go to college,” said Sgt Flynn.

It was in the Navy that Sgt Flynn was steered toward a career in law enforcement. “The movie Top Gun had just come out when I was in high school, and I decided I wanted to work with jets. I wanted to be an aviation electrician.” He was well on his way to fulfilling that dream when the Navy realized it had a glut of electricians and Sgt Flynn was sent off to the first of three police academies for training by the Navy.

When his four years with the Navy were up, Sgt Flynn made a lateral move to the Army National Guard, because it offered a better college package. He graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in psychology, a degree that has served him well over the years in his positions as a Southbury police officer and state trooper.

He had achieved what he had intended: served his country for eight years, four in active service, and had received a college education. It could have been the end of his military career. Sgt Flynn realized though, that after all was said and done, “I was still having fun [in the service.] There’s a lot of satisfaction working with people and training them.” He reupped and the Guard has been his side-career ever since.

The Iraq mission will bring him the closest to a war zone he has ever been in his 20 years of service. In 1991, although he was part of a field artillery reserve unit, he was not called up to serve in the Gulf War. More recently, he was put on alert to go to Afghanistan, but that mission was canceled.

From Comfort Zone To War Zone

The thought of going to a war zone bothered him more when he was younger and the possibility of going to the Middle East loomed over him during the Gulf War. “Now, I’m more confident,” Sgt Flynn said. “I have an exceptionally good team going, and that makes it less of a burden. Also, as a state trooper, the chance of going to work and not coming home is probably greater than the average person, so I am used to it now.”

That is not to say, he emphasized, that there are not days when the twinges of fear are greater than others. “Even though it is what I’ve been training for, you’re being pulled out of your comfort zone and into a war zone,” he said.

The Headquarters Company 192nd Engineers out of Stratford will relieve a unit in Iraq that has been there for a year. “We aren’t the groundbreakers, so that takes off some of the pressure,” said Sgt Flynn. Where he will be stationed in Iraq is not specified at this time, though. What is specified is that his unit will be providing logistical support to other units. “We take care of supplies, training, and quality assurance. We are sort of the thinkers and planners,” he explained.

Not only will the 192nd Engineers be providing support for US troops, they will also be working with the Iraqi army, the British army, and armies from other countries, once they arrive. The company will work, he is told, 12 hour days, seven days a week. Two of those days might be half-days of “only” six hours. “When you are in a routine, I am told, the days aren’t as long as they sound on paper,” he said. Beyond this information, he does not know exactly what his duties will entail.

What he does know, from previous missions, are the steps he must take to prepare for deployment. He took leave from the Connecticut State Police the month of July to get his affairs in order.

Those “affairs” include giving someone power of attorney to take care of his finances for the next year. Typically, a soldier’s pay is far less than that he earns as a civilian, and care must be taken that financial obligations are fulfilled or refinanced for the period of deployment. Other affairs to put in order are those of finding someone to watch over his home while he is away and writing a new will.

Every time a soldier is deployed, he/she is required to make up a new will and show proof of it to the government in case the mission ends unfortunately, he explained. Sgt Flynn is not a husband or a father, but his father and mother, Larry and Audrey Flynn, live in Newtown, and his twin sister, Laurie, lives with her husband and daughters in Naugatuck. As a younger soldier, writing up a will did not tug at his heartstrings quite as much. “Now, when I start listing people in a will, I realize how many lives I’ve touched.” He also is aware of how many people would miss him if he did not return from a mission.

“I’m almost overwhelmed with people wanting to help,” he said, “but it’s a nice burden to have.”

One thing about his family, said Sgt Flynn, is that they are always supportive. “Whatever I do, they are there.”

Family and friends are essential in dealing with the stresses of uprooting from his job and community to serve a mission, or even in his day-to-day life as a trooper. “They are always there, should I stumble. That takes the edge off anything.”

Beyond logical preparations, a lot of handling the lifestyle change is acceptance. “Accepting that this is the way the army is goes a long way,” he said. “It’s not like the possibility of deployment was in the fine print of the contract.”

He alleviates stress, too, by working out, and spending time with his friends on Lake Zoar. “They provide the boat and beverages, and I do the cooking. It works out pretty nicely.” He reads, and finds his involvement with the archers of the Fairfield County Fish and Game Club to be relaxing. When he is not with army buddies or other troopers, he makes a point of not talking “business.”

With this mission, he knows he has one other bit of preparation. “They tell me the weather [in Iraq] will be about 120 degrees.” As part of the cardiovascular preparation for the heat, the army has suggested that the soldiers start running every day. “We have to do a two-mile, a four-mile, and a five-mile road march before we report.” That means filling his backpack with 40 to 60 pounds of gear and setting off at a brisk pace down the road.

His unit will probably not be marching with full packs in Iraq, but preparing physically in this manner will make the adjustment to the weather easier all around, he said.

What will not be easy about this deployment, as with others, most of which are also yearlong deployments, is leaving his family and friends. “I will miss them. That’s what my life centers around. And this time, my nieces are old enough to understand the concept of what war is and where I am going.”

A small comfort, he said, is knowing that technology today has changed overseas deployment, making it much easier to keep in touch with loved ones. “Because I will be in a headquarters building, email access, as a general rule, is readily available. And I understand that almost every base has an Internet café now. Twenty years ago, they had a phone center where you could go and make calls, but they might have limited you to the time you could spend, because so many wanted to use it. I’m told that I might have cell phone service there, and I had a buddy call me from Afghanistan on satellite phone.”

According to friends of Sgt Flynn’s stationed in Afghanistan, the timely delivery of care packages has greatly improved over the years, as well. They told him that recently they received care packages in just under a week from the time they were mailed. “Mail and stuff from home is important when you are away, and I think the army has worked hard to make sure care packages get to servicemen as quickly as possible,” Sgt Flynn said.

When his mission to Iraq ends in November of 2007, Sgt Flynn expects to retire from the Army National Guard. “If you serve four years active duty, or six years, and then retire, you know you have done your part. When you put in 20 years, it is time.”

As a trained combat engineer, Sgt Flynn has always wanted to do an engineer mission. “I volunteered for this mission. Right now, I’m almost looking forward to deployment. This mission, at the end of my career, is a nice endpoint.”