Meet the troops: Cpl. Steve Hanson

Cpl. Steve Hanson

One fine day in North Idaho, Hanson (above) got angry at his wife because she went outside without any shoes.

He’s not a control freak; he’s a combat vet. Hanson, 22, of Bonners Ferry, joined the Army right out of high school and was attached to the 4th Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq. Here’s the deal with the barefoot thing. Hanson drove in convoys, hauling supplies from Kuwait to places in Iraq as far north as Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown.

“When you are down south, it’s a barren wasteland. You may see people off in the distance and you wonder where they live because you see nothing for miles,” Hanson said. “There might be a mosque. And you wonder: Do they all live in the mosque?”

Temperatures could hit 140 degrees and children lining the road to watch passing military convoys went barefoot.

Young American soldiers like himself felt sorry for these roadside boys and would stop to offer them sandals. The boys always refused. Hanson said he learned that for many of these backcountry children, getting a pair of sandals or shoes was akin to a rite of passage. Everyone would have shoes only when the family could afford it.

So when his wife went out barefoot, he said, he had this sudden flashback. “I didn’t want anybody to think my family was poor,” Hanson said. “It’s hard for me to cope with civilian life. The stuff you see over there reflects on your own life.”

Going back to Iraq a second time – Delta Company will be deployed for a year at a forward operations base outside Kirkuk – is a little strange.

“I think someone upstairs is trying to tell me something,” Hanson said. “Maybe I’m meant to be someone’s guardian angel.”

Spc. Dustan Brown

He is the medic for Delta Company, and everybody calls him Doc Brown. He is tall and thin and takes thing seriously, and when he arrives in Kuwait today, Doc Brown is ready to make tracks.

Brown, 20, of Soda Springs, Idaho, has already mailed an electric guitar and a four-track digital recording studio to himself in Kuwait.

His acoustic guitar – a low-price special he found in an El Paso pawn shop in July as he was beginning to play country and bluegrass music – is on the way. Spc. Virgil Akers, of Coeur d’Alene, has already sent his fiddle, and Brown said there are several good vocalists in the company.

“I want to write an album called ‘In Country,’ ” Brown said, smiling at the pun. He plans to take his instruments to the forward operations base outside Kirkuk, where the 97 soldiers in Delta Company – part of the Idaho National Guard’s 116th Brigade Combat Team – will be deployed for the next year.

Being a medic “is a huge responsibility. I’m kind of nervous to see how I’ll handle the first thing that goes down,” he said. “But there’s nobody over there who wants to kill us as bad as we want to get home.”

Brown recently married. He and his wife, Holly, had their first child, Hannah, just before Brown was called away for five months of training. As he has gotten to know the other soldiers in the company – predominantly drawn from armories in Post Falls and Bonners Ferry – Brown has begun thinking about moving with his family to North Idaho because now they have friends there.

He plans to return to school to study anthropology, and he is excited at the chance to hear Kurd and Arab music.

“That’s the cradle of civilization over there, so obviously it will be the cradle of music as well,” he said.

–By Kevin Taylor