Through veterans’ eyes

By Richard A. Serrano (contact)

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Sam Morris

John Ferrin, a second lieutenant in the Nevada National Guard, is interviewed for “Battle Born,” an oral history project documenting the experiences of recent veterans. He is a student at UNLV’s School of Dental Medicine.

The tears came 30 minutes after the camera was rolling. John Ferrin blinked and bit his lip. A tall young man with piercing blue eyes, a second lieutenant in the Nevada National Guard, he kept his hands on his lap. He did not wipe away the tears.

“He was truly my hero. He still is,” Ferrin said, leaning into the microphone. He was talking about his brother, Army Staff Sgt. Clint D. Ferrin, killed in March 2004 in a roadside bomb explosion in Baghdad. “Even though he was in a danger zone, I never thought he would die. I always thought I would see him again.”

A student at the UNLV School of Dental Medicine, John Ferrin on Wednesday was interviewed as part of a new oral history project called “Battle Born” to preserve the stories of veterans and their families in the global war on terror. The effort was the brainchild of Caleb S. Cage, a senior policy adviser to Nevada Lt. Gov. Brian K. Krolicki.

Cage graduated from West Point soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he served two tours in Iraq. Now he and Kathryn A. Besser, Krolicki’s chief of staff, are traveling the state to record stories of veterans and their families in the age of war and terrorism.

They hope to find 50 subjects and compile their stories on a DVD or post them on the Internet. But unlike other compilations that have profiled veterans from distant battlefields, such as the books that sprung up about the Greatest Generation or accounts from the beachhead 50 years after D-day, Besser and Cage are trying to get closer to the battle and bullets.

“We are going after veterans and their stories when they are still fresh in their minds and fresh in their souls,” Besser said.

It is that very freshness of war and the still disturbing recollections they hope to harvest. They are not waiting for the men to grow old, when it might be easier to get them to speak. They want the stories now. So, said Cage, “sometimes, we’re dragging the stories out of them.”

One has been in and out of a veterans hospital for substance abuse. He broke down and cried before the camera. “He said he had to get control of himself,” Cage recalled.

An ROTC commander told about losing one of his students, a 40-year-old lieutenant colonel killed when one of Osama bin Laden’s planes hit the Pentagon. A veteran of Afghanistan is tortured by the deaths of two comrades in a training accident after they returned home.

A member of the Air Force Reserve at Nellis described his work as an intelligence officer on the Predator, and how though he has never left Las Vegas to join his comrades in war he still feels he is “a part of the kill chain.”

Nevertheless, Besser said, “he has this tremendous guilt that he can go home every night and sleep in his own bed, of having laundry to pick up and his children to take care of, and not being 100 percent fixed on his deployment.”

In two weeks Besser and Cage are off to Winnemucca to interview parents whose son returned from Iraq only to die a year later in a car wreck. When his tire blew out, he intuitively, the way he was trained, dove to the floor of the car rather than steer it to safety. He must have thought a roadside bomb had gone off.

John Ferrin’s turn to unburden himself came Wednesday.

He talked about how he joined the Guard, and later set up a special program at the dental school for free treatment for veterans still struggling to get ahead. He said one was found living in his van, and “his teeth were all broken.”

But his greatest hero remains his older brother. He recalled how years ago Clint took him to an abandoned cemetery where they cleaned up the tombstones of veterans, then went to a Wal-Mart and bought small flags for the graves. That, he said, is the lesson of his brother’s life and the legacy of the war on terror. That is also why he agreed to speak to the camera.

“I do love veterans,” Ferrin said. “I do love this country.”