A full resume

Another patrol for second platoon, Alpha company, and Rob Corkrum – all 6-foot-8 of him – is wedged in the back of a heavily armored MRAP, with a sticker price of more than $500,000, crawling along a supply road outside Fallujah.

This is January and as days go it’s prominent in the memory, but in fact the days all pretty much run together. Alpha company runs lead operations, looking for IEDs – improvised explosive devices. Or in regularspeak, roadside bombs. The missions are 12 to 16 hours long, though they will be shortened somewhat when the insane heat of an Iraq summer is turned up. Every week, the company heads back to Ramadi where the battalion – the 321st Engineers – is based, for rest and repairs.

Rob Corkrum has been marking off the days of his year-long tour since he arrived. But on patrol this day, as most, the conversation is light-hearted.

“You have to keep it happy,” he said. “It makes time go faster.”

Until something makes it stand still. There is an explosion under the vehicle and suddenly 15 tons of military steel is airborne – for barely a second and only four or five feet, though of course it seems longer. It crashes back to the desert floor with an angry force that Corkrum will feel in his coccyx a year later. A quick inventory reveals that everyone is in one piece, but not everything.

“Our gunner looks out the window,” Corkrum will recall later, “and asks, ‘Is that our tires and gas tank?’ And there they are, about 50 meters out in the road. That’s why we hit so hard – there weren’t any tires or axle left on it.”

“““

Is this Rob Corkrum’s time of year, or what?

High school basketball is under way, and no one has better memories than Corkrum, who led Shadle Park to the 1990 state championship with an MVP performance. And his alma mater, Washington State, is the eighth-ranked team in the country heading into a Wednesday night showdown at Gonzaga.

“It’s nice to be able to tell people you went to Washington State and played there when they’re good,” Corkrum said. “I told them I played there when they were bad, too, but it’s a totally different feeling.”

Above all, he’s been back in the states since September, still active in the Army Reserves but training soldiers at Fort Lewis to do the job he did in Iraq. He lives in Federal Way with his wife of a year, Susana – and is even, at the age of 35, a grandfather. Susana’s daughter from a previous marriage gave birth to a boy six months ago.

There’s a lot of catching up to do with Rob Corkrum, which is something of a surprise in itself.

Soft-spoken but blessed with a quick and natural laugh, Corkrum doesn’t seem like the bold and adventurous type – yet after graduating from WSU in 1995 he embarked on a professional basketball career in Belgium that lasted six years. And that, too, is a little surprising. After a promising start at WSU – he had 19 points in his first Pac-10 game – his role diminished, to the point he was averaging just 11 minutes a game as a senior.

“My whole career there was very up and down,” he acknowledged. “It was frustrating for the coaches and for me.”

That wouldn’t seem like a promising recipe in the cutthroat world of European basketball, where American imports are expected to produce – and even then can have trouble getting paid. Corkrum found mostly stable arrangements with clubs in Gilly and Estaimpuis, and rediscovered some of his long-lost offensive game – not that there weren’t hiccups.

“If you had a bad game, the general manager would be mad,” he remembered. “I remember going over my stats one year at Estaimpuis – I’d played well and averaged like 25 a game. We had our conference and we were going over game by game and there were none below 20 points – except for one when I scored just five. And he was just all upset over that game.

“The referees screwed me in that one, of course,” he laughed.

When he returned to America, he sold real estate in Olympia and spent a year and a half as a Seattle cop, neither of which suited him. In between, in 2003, he joined the Army Reserves and in April 2006 was called to active duty. On his very first mission, a 155-millimeter shell shattered the windows of his MRAP.

“But we found about 200 IEDs and luckily during my time there nobody in my team died,” Corkrum said. “We knew we were doing an important job. If a HUMVV got hit the way we got hit or we didn’t find some of those bombs, a lot of guys would die.

“I don’t know why I joined, really. I tried to talk myself out of it a few times. I just felt like I should. I’m not overly patriotic – but I am patriotic. I feel like I did something for the country. I’m glad I did it – especially after coming back.”

He’s still catching up himself. He finds a hoop occasionally – “I can still dunk, even though I’m old” – and was excited to learn that another Shadle player, junior Anthony Brown, has committed to play at WSU.

That brings back some memories of his own – particularly the state tournament run. Beating Gonzaga Prep for a third time in the quarterfinals. Dominating future WSU teammate David Vik – who still plays professionally in Portugal – in the semis. The title game upset of Garfield and another future Cougars teammate – Tony Harris, whose mysterious death in Brazil last month Corkrum mourned.

The best moment?

“I was dating Todd Doolittle’s sister at the time,” Corkrum said, “so it was sure nice every time we beat Gonzaga Prep, especially since they still thought they had the better team.”

But it’s not unanimous.

“That championship game – my dad still watches it about every week,” he said. “I think he just put it on DVD because he wore out the tape.”

Hey, he’s just keeping it happy. Makes it seem as if time hasn’t gone by quite so fast.