Losing a battle brother who saved lives with a phone call
There were a few ways to see Army Staff Sgt. John O’Hern, from a distance and with your eyes half-shut, like in the heat of the desert.
With his body armor and Kevlar on, he looked like one more G.I. Joe in Iraq — one of a couple million over nearly 20 years.
Standing near the barbecue with his battle buddies, in cargo shorts and a cut-off T-shirt, at the reunions, he looked like one of the gang of characters surrounding Hank Hill in “King Of The Hill” and kind of sounded that way too, with his Iraq battle buddies sharing some first names like Dale, Buck and Jeff.
There’s a nice recent snapshot of O’Hern with his fellow sergeant buddy Les Mounts, who was a first sergeant in the 1498th Transport Co. of the California National Guard.
We lost O’Hern this past weekend. He is gone to the Army’s pastoral watering hole, the mythic Fiddler’s Green. Ah, it hurts.
He was there one day, then wasn’t. He died of heart failure. He and First Sgt. Mounts are together in the ledger of work well done.
My trips to Iraq were in the company of the 1498th/756th, a big National Guard company squeezed into one unit that rolled trucks up the bad bomb roads to and from Baghdad. With troops from the Antelope Valley, Riverside and Sacramento, they were the first California National Guard unit to deploy. Three of their trucks would be the length of a football field.
Most of the combat truckers were experienced, but there was no getting used to Iraq. It was just hot, more hot and often, scary.
The guerrilla war part of the war was on the roads, with the Improvised Explosive Devices planted there. It was a gauntlet and a lottery and the winning ticket meant you got to come home. Some who got their trucks blown up found that the engine block was so big it became their best friend.
One night near the holidays, between the two trips I made there, I got a call from O’Hern.
“Mr. Anderson,” he said, “They aren’t issuing us body armor. Only troops getting full body armor are the regulars. It’s not right, Mr. Anderson. We’re doing the same work as the regulars. We need body armor.”
Sgt. O’Hern rang the alarm. Next, we rang it together with Congressman Buck McKeon, who was in line to chair the Armed Services Committee. He and Rep. Duncan Hunter Sr., a Vietnam War combat vet, brought smoke on the material and acquisition chain of the armed forces. Within a matter of weeks, the supply chain started loosening and the Guard began to get full body armor issued. They had deployed with Vietnam War vintage flak vests that looked and performed like down-feather hiking vests.
A couple of years later, I was in Washington, D.C. with Military Editors & Reporters, my professional association, and we were getting briefed by Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, a no non-sense Green Beret veteran commander who was in charge of the National Guard at the national command level.
“I take my hat off to you,” he told the reporters gathered to hear his Pentagon briefing. “You put armor on the backs of the guard with the stories you wrote. You got their backs covered a year earlier than they would have been.”
O’Hern, who looked a bit like the Pillsbury Doughboy, if the Pillsbury Doughboy pumped iron and rolled in Iraq, was one of the early warning bell ringers. He was less a whistleblower than a kind of Paul Revere rider who picked up the phone.
For years after everyone got back from the war that was all hot and very little nice, O’Hern would call me, usually late at night, just to check in, just to see what was up and also to make sure I knew about the next reunion.
When I wrote about the recent deaths of Les Mount and Mona “Chris” Boissy, I mentioned how armed service takes many veterans sooner than they, or we, would like. It takes people still in their prime years. So it is with Staff Sgt. O’Hern.
I can hardly believe that I won’t be getting anymore late night phone calls from him. One of those calls helped save lives in a war long ago and far away, but still seems like yesterday.
Dennis Anderson is a licensed clinical social worker at High Desert Medical Group. An Army paratrooper veteran, he deployed to Iraq with a local National Guard unit to cover the war for the Antelope Valley Press. He works on veterans and community health initiatives.