47-year-old teacher back from the bloody front lines in Afghanistan
Not many people experience combat for the first time at age 47.
But Jonathan Stamper, a science teacher at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, tends to write his own rules.
Stamper joined the military at age 41, inspired by a newly enlisted student who came to class in uniform. Since then, he’s logged three tours, one in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
During those first two expeditions, Stamper was lucky enough to avoid getting shot at or witnessing violence, death and bloodshed. Not this last time.
He returned to the classroom last week after a six-month deployment in Afghanistan. One day last week, his colleagues cut cake for him in the teachers’ lounge. Like last time, he told some stories. But while his previous yarns of making a difference in the villages had an uplifting quality, “this time, it was like, ‘oof,’ ” said Peninsula Principal Mitzi Cress. “I guess that’s kind of how things are going over there. Very scary.”
For his part, Stamper seems eager to share the stories, in part to keep from suffering psychologically. Talking, in fact, is a prescription from the company chaplain.
“If it fades away, and you can talk about it, clinically, that’s good,” he said, recalling the chaplain’s assessment. “If it comes back to haunt you at night, you got yourself PTSD.”
Stamper’s return comes at a time when violence in the war-ravaged country is escalating, with Afghan soldiers increasingly turning their weapons on the Americans who trained them.
It also comes on the eve of an expected drawdown of American forces, in hopes that the Afghan government and its fledgling military will be able to uproot and fend off the Taliban on its own.
Stamper’s assignment dovetailed neatly with that broader mission. As a sergeant with the Civil Affairs unit, he’s an emissary, not a warrior.
But this is a land where those aims blur together. So rather than taking an office job, Stamper joined the foot soldiers of a platoon. Like them, he took “showers” that consisted of standing on a pallet and dousing himself with bottled water. At first it bothered him, but it was during these showers that he was struck by the beauty of the desert.
“You can see the Milky Way galaxy, I was able to see the Andromeda galaxy — the planets, the stars and Orion,” he said.
And while he carried dolls, harmonicas and other trinkets for the kids, he also toted an M-16.
The mission, this time around, was to repopulate a ghost-town village of 40 families in the notoriously dangerous province of Kandahar.
The people had been shooed from their homes by the Taliban and were living out of lean-tos in the nearby desert. Their village, Jogram, was littered with improvised explosive devices, commonly known as IEDs.
The aim: Clear the IEDs, repopulate the village and persuade the people to notify the authorities of any Taliban efforts to move back in.
Sweeping for IEDs proved the most harrowing task. It involved a single-file patrol led by a soldier with a metal detector. He marked a path for safety using the white powder from a can of Ajax cleaner, but it was easy to stray. One man did so by a footstep too far, triggering an explosion.
The next thing Stamper knew, he was holding a white sheet to provide relief in the 120-degree heat for a frantic team of medics as they applied tourniquets to the bloody legs of a screaming Afghan soldier, who was about to become a double-amputee.
Stamper then helped hustle the stretcher to a helicopter in the middle of a field, fully expecting to draw fire from Taliban insurgents lurking in the shadows, or, worse, to step on another deadly IED.
“I’m sitting there going, I’m 47 years old, I’m C.A. (Civil Affairs), and I’m dealing with kinetic — they call it (combat) kinetic activity,” he said.
That wasn’t the worst of the IED incidents. Another time, an Afghan soldier became overconfident during a sweep and broke into a sprint ahead of the gingerly advancing platoon. Again, there was an explosion.
Stamper has no memory of trying to help the man, who died. But the commanding officer later praised him for his bravery.
“I didn’t realize I helped out on this, but a surveillance balloon was filming us the whole time,” he said.
In the film, he watched himself wrap the man’s leg with bandages.
“I don’t remember it at all,” he said. “I just remember seeing the guy — his face and the blood and the bones and all that, and thinking, `God this is horrible, but keep your wits about you.’ And I remember carrying him to the helicopter.”
Stamper isn’t always given to following protocol. Sidestepping endless amounts of red tape, he enlisted his church back home — Anza Avenue Baptist — to send along seeds for farmers who struggled to grow anything beyond poppy, a lucrative crop used for producing heroin. Sending seeds amounted to a breach of bureaucracy, but Stamper nonetheless smuggled the tomato, squash, pumpkin and watermelon seeds into the village by getting the congregation to stuff them into a shipment of toys.
He also asked his wife to send him a clump of dirt and some seed for a little patch of grass. He initially feared it could get him in trouble. On the contrary, his platoon leader encouraged the men to walk across it barefooted before every patrol.
Said the commander: “That way you can say if you die today, the last thing you did is step on American soil.”