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March 20, 2008

A report from the front lines

Perschall talks about Iraq experience

By Angela Weatherford

Thursday’s Athens Rotary Club meeting had a distinctly military theme to it, with guests Norman Black Jr. and Captain Alex Perschall.

Perschall, who serves in the U.S. Army, is on leave from a station in Southern Iraq where he is a soldier in the 3rd Battalion 319 Airborne Field Artillery Regiment.

“It’s not the most glamorous job,” he said, “but it’s the most important.”

As a “truck driver,” Perschall said the greatest danger to convoys are improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

“We drive at night most of the time, and sometimes they are hard to see,” he said. “Although we have a lot of technology, 90 percent of all IEDs are found by the human eye.”

When asked about media coverage of the war, Perschall said he tries not to watch or read it.

“Personally, it’s very hard for me to watch the news, because most of it is three to four days late and only part of what happened,” he said.

He mentioned a story about which he knew the facts, he said, but said the news only covered a “smidgen” of the event that actually happened.

“I see a lot of good,” he said. “There are doctors dealing with patients, and some of my friends are building the infrastructure of the nation.

“There is a lot of good that we are doing over there.”

Perschall received a standing ovation from the Rotarians and guests after his speech. After the meeting many people walked up to him, shook his hand and thanked him for what he is doing in Iraq.

Black spoke about his father, who was a member of the 509th Composite Group — better known as the group that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

“They were completely self sufficient,” Black said. “There were cooks and everything else, because the building of the atomic bomb was so secretive. Very few people had any idea we were developing an atomic bomb.”

The group of 1,747 men were all hand-picked for the operation. He said even if a soldier was injured he was forced to stay with the troop. They would just find something else for them to do, he said.

Even the members of the group were not told what they were doing, Black said.

“My father loaded the atom bomb onto the plane,” he said, “but it was the same size as the other bombs he had loaded onto planes. They just knew that they were a part of something big.”

Black also talked about media coverage. He said he doesn’t like that the media only focuses on the death toll.

“War is not pretty,” he said. “War is war.”

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