This was originally printed September 11, 2011 in Stars and Stripes. Reprinted with permission.
The catalyst for action was 9/11
The MV Anastasis, a 12,000-ton hospital ship operated by a Christian relief group called Mercy Ships, was loading supplies in Germany on Sept. 11, 2001, in preparation for a mission in Sierra Leone. The ship’s captain, Clement Ketchum and his wife, Jennifer, were U.S. Coast Guard veterans who’d been doing relief work in Africa for six years. Their two sons, Will and Benjamin, then 9 and 10, had basically grown up aboard.
Now, on the 10th anniversary of that tragic day, the entire Ketchum family — parents and both sons — is in uniform in the U.S. military.
Jennifer Ketchum is a Coast Guard commander in Monrovia, Liberia, advising the new Liberian National Coast Guard. Clement is now an Army lieutenant colonel working as a foreign area officer specializing in Africa. Both Ketchum sons, Will and Benjamin, are cadets at West Point.
Were it not for 9/11, the Ketchums said, it’s unlikely any of them would be wearing a uniform full-time. Along the way family members have served in Afghanistan, Sweden and the U.S., as well as in Africa.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, the U.S. Coast Guard started mobilizing reservists, and Jennifer Ketchum learned she would likely be called up. She decided to volunteer for an assignment she thought she’d really enjoy — teaching as the Coast Guard’s contribution to the faculty of a United Nations maritime school in Sweden.
The Ketchum family left the Anastasis after she landed the job.
“I followed Jennifer,” Clement recalled. Her tour was extended repeatedly.
The whole time, however, Jennifer said she could see her husband wanted to be involved himself.
“He really wanted to go, wanted to contribute, but he was always looking to fit it in with where the family was now,” she recalled. “This was an intense desire to get into the fight and do something. He kept telling me, ‘I just want to do something for the effort.’”
Although he’d served 12 years in the Coast Guard and 13 in the Navy Reserve, Clement said the bottom line was that he felt like he had missed out.
“Especially once the war started in Afghanistan and Iraq, and especially as my kids started getting older, I felt like I was born at the wrong time,” he said. “I felt like I had served and
I had missed something that I really wanted to do.”
As Jennifer’s mobilization ended, the Ketchum family relocated to Florida in 2007, where Jennifer had a civilian job lined up. Almost simultaneously, Clement volunteered to be mobilized as a Navy Reserve officer in Afghanistan.
At age 46, he went on a six-week weight-loss program to get back into mobilization shape, but when he reached Afghanistan, the job he thought he’d be doing — “teaching logistics or something” — wasn’t really needed anymore.
“But they needed civil affairs officers to support teams downrange,” Clement said, and so he volunteered for that.
“It was more of a combat role than I’d expected, but given all the experience I’d had on Mercy Ships, it was pretty similar. I didn’t get IED’d, but the vehicles in the convoy I was in did,” Clement said.
In the meantime, the Ketchums’ kids had grown up. Their elder son, Benjamin, enlisted in the Coast Guard Reserve and was later accepted to West Point through the Soldier Admission Program — the first Coast Guardsman ever to be accepted into the program, academy officials said.
The bigger surprise was that the younger Ketchum son, Will, decided to apply as well.
“He’d always said, ‘Yeah, the military is OK for you three, but I’m not going to do it,’” Jennifer recalled. “We took him to the older one’s acceptance parade in August [2009]. He was hot and sweating and not having a good day. But when we got back to Miami, I saw him on the computer. ‘What you doing?’ ‘Nothing.’
It turned out he was applying to West Point. Benjamin is a member of the academy’s class of 2013; Will is in the class of 2014.
“I really liked the campus. It was just a really nice place,” Will said. “But I was also into the mindset. … It seemed this was different from other colleges. Everyone is motivated here to do more than just party and get through.”
Both Jennifer and Clement also had more chapters left in their military careers.
First, Clement decided he wanted to go back on active duty full-time. It was a long and involved process, but he applied and was accepted for an interservice transfer to the Army. As some of his friends from the Coast Guard Academy were retiring, he started a new role, as an Army foreign area officer in Liberia.
Independently, the Ketchums say, Jennifer learned about the chance to volunteer to be called up once again, and to help the government of Liberia to stand up its new national coast guard.
“This is my dream job,” Jennifer said. “We got co-located without even trying.”
“Two independent services doing different processes coming to the same location,” Clement said. “I was perfectly fine doing an unaccompanied tour, and I think if we had tried it wouldn’t have worked.”
While it can be a challenge getting their family together given the four military careers and nearly 4,500 miles that separate the Ketchums, the parents say they’re making it work. The family has a condominium in Falls Church, Va., that serves as a home base.
“Today, I look in the mirror and I’m wearing a U.S. Army uniform and I’m actually used to it,” Clement said. “I’m getting ready for my 50th birthday, and it’s completely beyond anything I would have imagined 10 years ago. I’m very happy.”
“It’s really great,” Jennifer said. “I was home with the boys when they were home from West Point, and they were exchanging insignia. ‘Hey, do you have another nape tape with the name “Ketchum” on it?’”
Jennifer said she’s cognizant that while all four are happy to have military careers, it likely never would have happened if it weren’t for the terrorist attacks.
“For Clem, it was 9/11 directly. For me it was the same as well,” she said. “I think the boys saw our commitment, too, and said, ‘Well, we’d like to be a part of that as well.’ … The catalyst for action was 9/11.”
murphyjrb@stripes.osd.mil
Twitter: @billmurphyjr
Background photo by Chuck Kennedy/MCT
‘I realized I needed to be doing more’
On the day the Twin Towers crashed down and a pall of smoke rose above the Pentagon, Mathew Niblack, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran and former National Guardsman, knew the attacks meant war.
“I remember the pictures of the burning buildings and the people falling,” said Niblack, of Salem, Ore. “That’s an image I can’t get out of my head.”
Niblack, then in his early 50s, assumed the conflict would be waged by younger men.
He didn’t know it yet, but the tragic events of 9/11 would bring about momentous shifts in his own life and set in motion a personal tale of loss. some of the changes in the coming years would be welcome, but others would be wrenching testimony to the unexpected costs of war.
In the years after the attacks, Niblack worked as a vocational trainer with the Oregon State Employment Division. As he watched the rising tides of conflict in faraway Afghanistan and then in Iraq, his thoughts were often with the Oregon National Guard troops increasingly being sent to war.
In January 2004, Niblack went to the local National Guard recruitment office to rejoin. He harbored no fantasies of combat glory. At his age, he doubted he’d even be sent overseas. But with his experience of years working in state government, Niblack thought he could be of some use.
“I just wanted to do something to support those young people,” he said.
The years, however, had left him with more than just professional experience. The recruiter’s scale showed Niblack, at 5-foot-11, had ballooned to more than 250 pounds.
“I was obese, with the beer belly sticking out,” he said. “I didn’t have any energy. I was a couch potato.”
An age waiver for the then 53-year-old Niblack to re-enlist was possible, but there was no such thing as a beer belly waiver. The recruiter told Niblack to try again after he’d lost nearly 60 pounds.
Niblack had once enjoyed running but doubted his overweight body would handle the pounding now.
“I knew I couldn’t do it without collapsing after half a mile,” he said.
Instead, beginning in March 2004, he cut back on food, eating only fruit and salads during the day and nothing after 6 p.m. And he started walking.
“First I’d have the bus drop me off a mile and a half from home,” he said. “Before long I was up to five and seven miles a day,” he said.
As his strength and energy increased, he began jogging, and the weight melted off. By September 2004, he successfully weighed in and later passed the required physical. Soon, an age waiver was approved and Niblack re-entered the Oregon Army National Guard as a sergeant.
“Age was never an issue for him physically,” said Staff Sgt. Barry Purdy, an active-duty member of the Oregon Guard who served with Niblack. “He smoked a lot of people on the PT test. He smoked me, and I’m only 43.”
In early 2004, Niblack attended an event featuring young members of the Oregon Guard wounded in Iraq. He realized he wasn’t yet satisfied with his level of involvement in the growing wars.
“I realized I needed to be doing more,” he said.
Niblack asked to be sent to the war zone. He was assigned to the 41st Personnel Services Company, where his skills working as a civil servant could be of use. In mid-2005, he was sent to Kuwait for a 14-month deployment as a casualty operations technician, preparing reports when soldiers or civilians are wounded or killed in combat.
For the first time, Niblack was separated from his family — three children, four grandchildren and his wife of 34 years. He told an Oregon newspaper at the time that “this is the longest we have ever been separated. Sometimes I yearn to be home with her as she faces some of the difficulties around the house.” For the first six months, Niblack prepared reports on injured troops. Then he switched to reports on those who’d been killed.
“We would track reports from the FOBs where battles were happening, and we would try to anticipate where soldiers would be injured or killed,” he said. “We’d scrub [reports] to make sure they were free of errors, had the correct wording, made sense. Then we’d send them up the chain of command.”
It was a race against the clock, and against civilian journalists, said Purdy, who also served in the 41st PSC.
“We had to turn them around quickly,” he said. “Journalists were embedded with a lot of these units taking casualties, and we had to move reports quickly to give the Army time to notify the family before they heard about it on the news.”
Niblack returned to Oregon in late 2006, resuming his family and job responsibilities. The euphoria of being home was soon replaced by unwanted memories.
“In 2008 and 2009, we started losing more soldiers in Afghanistan,” he said. “And then all these memories started coming back [that] I couldn’t stop.”
Unlike many soldiers with post-traumatic stress symptoms who struggle to relive wartime experiences, Niblack didn’t have firsthand memories of death and violence.
Instead, the longtime civil servant was reliving what seemed like a bureaucratic nightmare suffused with horror. One recurring dream was of an actual case in which a soldier burned to death after his Humvee was hit by an improvised explosive device.
“Later the Department of the Army called me up and told me they wanted to know what kind of helmet he had on,” Niblack said. “What sense does that make? He burned alive. I called his unit to find out and they thought it was completely stupid.
“I don’t know why, but it’s something that just sticks with me.”
Purdy said that during the 41st PSC’s deployment Niblack — who had become a father figure to younger soldiers in the unit — sometimes identified too closely with dead troops he’d encountered only in death reports.
“I think he felt a lot of guilt he wasn’t up there where the action was,” Purdy said. “If he’d had a chance to go forward with the guys up there, he would have.”
As Niblack’s stress symptoms mounted, he said he began making frequent, uncharacteristic mistakes in his vocational training work.
“I knew what policy I was supposed to follow and I would just do something different,” he said. “I would make completely dumb mistakes.”
He was later diagnosed with PTSD and major depression at a local VA facility, he said. In July, after years of trying to pull his life back together, he was discharged from his state job.
“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he said. “I couldn’t function, couldn’t analyze information like I used to.” Even worse, his extended absence followed by PTSD and depression have ripped apart his home life, Niblack said. He and his wife of four decades are in the midst of a divorce.
That he would arrive at such a point was inconceivable when he reenlisted, he said.
“I consider myself a Godly man who keeps with the Book,” he said. “I thought with my age and experience, I could handle almost anything. Well, I was wrong.”
Niblack, 61, is still a member of the Oregon National Guard, and said today the military is his lifeline.
“My chain of command is doing everything they can to get me a medical extension and keep me in another year,” he said.
That would make it simpler to get the psychological treatment he needs, as well as keep him surrounded by his most effective support group — the men and women he served with in Kuwait.
For all that’s happened, he doesn’t regret his late-life choice to return to military service after 9/11.
“If they’d let me, I’d go back overseas right now,” he said. “I’d take someone else’s place.”
carrollc@stripes.osd.mil
Twitter: @ChrisCarroll_
Background photo by Chuck Kennedy/MCT