From the Front Line

At the 7th annual Veterans Mass and Remembrance Ceremony later this month, the Alumni Association will honor all alumni who have served in the U.S. military. As we pay tribute to those who served, our thoughts also turn to alumni on current tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world. With gratitude for their service, we offer one alum’s account of being recalled to active duty in Iraq.

Brian Cummins and I were classmates at BC, although our friendship has only now begun, 25 years later. Brian’s wife, Patty ’81, is a proud BC grad as well, and her parents, Dan ’55 and Carolyn Foley ’56, and Brian's father, Dan Cummins ’58, are among our most loyal alumni volunteers. I’ve experienced firsthand the level of passion the family has for BC, and I can feel the love they have for each other. Brian and I have become “e-mail pals” since his deployment, and my heart goes out to him each time an email arrives detailing the horrors that he sees, the brief interludes of happiness that generally come from the faces of small Iraqi children with whom he comes into contact, and the inner struggle he has searching for God in a combat zone.
– John Feudo ’82, associate vice president for alumni relations

In late November 2006, I received a recall notice from the U.S. Army requesting me to don the uniform again and be part of the troop increase in Iraq. At that point in my life, I was gliding into middle age, with some kids in college (two at BC, another at Emmanuel) and others in high school. There are scores of reasons why the Army’s request was an impossible one, but in my heart I couldn’t say no.

My decision to accept this call set in motion an odyssey to the middle of America’s presence in Iraq, but it also set in motion a deep reflection on my meaning as a person, my faith, and my relationship to others, especially those with whom I seemingly have little in common. I have found myself wondering how a Catholic reconciles taking part directly or otherwise in combat operations, as well as how we use our faith to discern what is acceptable during wartime. One method I'm using to help guide me is the Ignatian examination of conscience. This is something I studied at BC many years ago in a philosophy class called Right and Reason, but I have used it only infrequently since. Now I find it critical to reach back and draw upon my instruction, like a carefully folded linen placed in a cedar trunk, to help guide my decisions and actions. Here's an example.

I am an officer on a multi-disciplinary advisory team known as a MiTT, a Military Transition Team, which is helping train the newly recomposed Iraqi army to become self-sufficient. MiTT teams are stationed in multiple regions of Iraq as well as in other countries. At the outset, my team was assigned to an Iraqi unit in Kuwait, but we were soon transferred to a town near the Iranian border called Kirkush. This desert region of Iraq is ideally suited for training units and perfecting military skills.

The unit we were training had been nicknamed "the checkpoint brigade" due to its extensive use of roadblocks to search vehicles entering and exiting the border region. The unit did not have a reputation for aggressive patrolling, and the brigade’s commander had in fact been relieved of his duties due to corruption allegations. We learned early on in our mission that confronting suspected corruption head on only succeeded in decreasing the influence the MiTT team had to remedy the problem. Some teams became very confrontational with their Iraqi counterparts, so much so that the officers refused to speak to one another, sacrificing any possibility of developing a working relationship. The MiTT team we replaced had taken an "I’ll hold my nose" attitude, failing to probe some very serious accusations of theft. Since our arrival, my team has been striving for a middle-of-the-road approach.

A potential breakthrough occurred one day not long ago, when the new Iraqi brigade commander gathered his senior U.S. advisors to ask how we could help him combat corruption in his unit. Thanks to his small but profound gesture, we were able to devise a plan to improve supply accountability and maintenance reporting—key ingredients to making a military unit self-sustaining.

It's too early to say whether our MiTT advisory mission will be a success, but for me personally the experience has raised challenging questions about who I am, where I am going, and why I am here. These questions are perhaps best suited for debate in the academic halls of Gasson, but they seem more pertinent right now in my hardened mortar-proof dug-out in Iraq than they did in 1982, when I graduated from Boston College.

In his address at my 25th reunion, which my tour in Iraq prevented me from attending, University Chancellor J. Donald Monan, SJ, told my classmates, "Members of the Class of 1982 are at the spiritual crossroads in their lives …in a position to make a dramatic influence on their community and their remaining spiritual future." No words could ring more true for me at this moment in my life.

–Lieutenant Colonel Brian Cummins, U.S. Army, BC Class of 1982