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Sgt. Sonny Wolfe is a communications officer for the 5-73rd Cav/Recon, 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, stationed in the Diyala Province at this writing.“This place is at the beginning and end of time. It’s like 18th-century Arabian Nights with current dress codes,” Sgt. Sonny Wolfe emails from the Diyala Province, a hotbed of Sunni insurgents, criminal gangs, former Hussein army and paramilitary forces and al-Qaeda Islamists. Wolfe’s almost 40, with two sons and a wife, and he thought long and hard about his decision to serve.
“The first year went by, and all I could do was watch on TV and listen to people do the Monday morning quarterback thing,” he writes. “They would say, ‘If I was over there, this is what I would do.’ I’d just listen and think, ‘Bullshit.’” He started talking, tentatively, about enlisting. “Most of my family, friends and clients [he was a personal trainer at Magna Fitness Center in Richmond Heights] thought I was crazy, but I felt that if guys like me didn’t join then, our shorthanded Army would be in trouble.”
His wife, Jodie Lee Wolfe, remembers seeing the resolve harden Sonny’s face after NFL safety Pat Tillman gave up a multimillion–dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers. “Sonny said, ‘If I join the Army, will you follow me?’ I said yes, not thinking he’d really do it. On August 3 of 2003, he called and said, ‘Honey, I enlisted.’” As he left for boot camp, he said, “You know I’ll never be back to St. Louis.”
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“Excuse me?” Jodie said.
“I’ve committed to the next four years. You can move with me where I get stationed or stay here.”
“I’m going with you.”
Sonny was the one who got their easily distracted son, Mat, ready for bed; who did the bath-times; who provided the structure. “They’d go to movies together, eat lots of candy and come home sick as dogs,” Jodie says. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do
this alone.’”
At the time, she wasn’t close to his family. “Please,” Sonny said, “if there’s nothing else you do, put aside any feelings you have and call my mom every other day.” He was sent to Fort Bragg, just outside of Fayetteville, N.C. Jodie wasn’t in a hurry to follow—until what she thought was food poisoning turned out to be pregnancy.
“I cried the whole way to Fayetteville,” she recalls. “And poor Mat: He thought there were snipers in the trees. Two days later I was going to pack the car and go back. Sonny came home and found me in the empty walk-in closet, holding our cat and rocking back and forth weeping.”
He convinced her to stay, and they had a full two years together in Fayetteville before he was sent to Iraq. “They loaded the plane and then unloaded it, saying they weren’t going,” she recalls. “I was so relieved, drove home all relaxed. Then Sonny called and said, ‘I’m shipping out in 10 days.’”
He sees his second-born on a videophone once a week and emails Jodie as often as he can. “Mat is 14, very shy but very polite; 2-year-old Tucker is wild and fearless,” he writes. “I miss them so much.”
Yet when he was home on leave, Jodie says, “He was sharp with me, which is not like him, and he was sharp with Mat, and he was very tired. When we were driving, he said, ‘Jodie, you don’t understand: On the highway in Iraq, if a car even comes near us, we are told to start firing.’”
“Sometimes the Army brings out the worst in me,” concedes Sonny, who’s afraid he’s losing patience and doesn’t want his family to suffer. “You develop a lack of tolerance for bullshit or nonsense.”
He’s achingly proud, though, to be a member of the 82nd Airborne. “I like the honor of standing next to individuals who know the meaning of team,” he writes. “But to put pieces of your brother in a body bag at times sickens me. Some higher-ups like to call it the ultimate sacrifice. I think that’s a cheap way to describe it.”
He thinks every day about a young specialist named Marshall. “Marshall and I had an old man–young man relationship. I would tease him about being a Southern wannabe rodeo hillbilly. He would call me Old Balls. Sorry, but that’s what he called me. The kid had a great heart and did his job really well.”
One day a Bravo platoon was ambushed as a distraction, while two dump trucks drove in and exploded. “Marshall was the first man KIA,” Wolfe writes. “Nine of my guys perished, the worst loss in one day for 3 Panther 3rd Brigade 82nd Airborne since Vietnam. I went numb. I think when we get home and finally realize the men that didn’t come home with us are never coming back, that’s when it will hit and hit hard.”
In less than a year, 21 men in Wolfe’s squadron were killed in action.
“I don’t know what to expect when Sonny comes home,” Jodie says. “I hope he’ll talk if he needs to. A lot of these guys, the mentality is just, ‘Let’s kill somebody.’ But Sonny’s never been afraid to cry or to be honest.” And yet, when an IED exploded 30 feet ahead of his Humvee, he didn’t tell her for three months. “He said, ‘I didn’t want you to worry.’ He got a combat medal, and he wanted to tell me that, so that’s how I found out.”
He was scheduled to come home on August 21 of this year, but his service was extended until October 21. Then he was told it might be extended again.
“I don’t think St. Louisans realize we need more people in the fight,” he writes. “Fighting in large numbers sure would help me and my guys out. Where is my backup, where are my replacements? They’re at home having fun while the rest of us who volunteer take on the burdens of a nation at war. Not mad about it, just stating a fact.”
