The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
BRAVE EXPLOITS OF 143RD IN IRAQ
Connecticut National Guard commander pens memoir, shares little-known tales of true courage
After he spoke to local students about Connecticut’s 143rd Military Police Company one Veterans Day, the class teacher asked Marc Youngquist a question.
Did he know a friend of hers who served in Iraq?
In an it’s-a-small-world moment, Youngqvist, who lives in Middlefield, realized that the friend in question had been part of the story he just told that focused on “one particularly bad 24-hour period” the company had experienced, he said.
“Her close friend, along with five other soldiers, were awarded a Medal for Valor for rescuing three wounded soldiers while under fire at the risk of their own lives,” Youngqvist said. The teacher didn’t know, he added.
Too few people know of the exploits and bravery of the 143rd Company, deployed in 2003 to recruit and train an Iraqi police force, said the former Marine, who learned of the regiment in his travels around the state.
So he set out to change it, writing their stories in a 90,000-word book, “The 143rd in Iraq: Training the Iraqi Police, In Spite of It All,” published last fall.
The former commander of the 143rd describes the memoir as a “bare knuckle blow-by-blow account of how my former soldiers performed so magnificently in Iraq … the
gritty truth as only a soldier’s noncommissioned officer would tell it,” according to a release.
Many friends, coworkers, employers, and in some cases, even relatives, were unaware that members of the 143rd had risked their lives in the line of duty, Youngvist heard time and again, he said.
The school talk by Youngqvist focused on the story of Andrea Cloutier, a staff sergeant, who, with five others, ran through mortar explosions to rescue three wounded soldiers, Youngqvist said.
Cloutier was one of the teacher’s best friends and she had never talked about what she had done in Iraq, her friend told Youngqvist.
“These conversations repeated themselves many more times, with the same response each time,” Youngquist writes in the book’s foreword. “No one knew. With this book, I am trying to let everyone know.”
If the soldiers had been given the awards they deserved, then those (stories) could have been printed in their hometown newspapers, “but the awards were not forthcoming,” said Youngqvist, who next sent a letter to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. It told of actions by state troopers, including Cloutier, now assigned to his personal security detail.
“He knew she had been in the National Guard and had served in Iraq, but nothing more,” Youngvist added.
The book tells what life was really like for members of the unit, using individual stories to reveal “ongoing trials that all members of the unit endured: daily fire fights with the enemy, difficulties with the military administration, which are often ignored, and those who didn’t appear to care about what was happening at the front,” according to a release.
Today, Youngvist is working on a “cops and robbers” story while trying to land an agent, he said.
Also a retired Connecticut police officer, Youngvist deployed with the National Guard to Panama, in the Dominican Republic, and helped provide airport security after 9/11 before heading to Iraq.