Joel Talsma served in the Army National Guard for six years. His years of service included a ten and a half-month trip to Iraq in 2006-07.

Joel is a son of Glen and Marcia Talsma. He grew up near Chandler and graduated from Southwest Christian High School in 2003. At that time, he was already thinking about joining the military. His dad had served in Vietnam with the navy.

“I was pretty interested in joining the marines,” Joel recalls. “My dad was pretty reluctant to sign me up to enlist being only 17.” His parents encouraged him to go to college, so Joel decided to try Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. He tried that for one semester.

He came home in December and enlisted in the Army National Guard. His brother Greg was just getting out of the national guard. Originally, he was going to get Greg’s mechanic “slot” out of the Wilmar National Guard unit, but that didn’t work out with Joel’s schedule.

Joel ended up in a unit based out of Redwood Falls. The recruiter told him this unit was an engineering unit and he would probably operate heavy equipment. His training was called One Station Unit Training (OSUT); with this type of training, his basic training and advanced individual training all took place at the same location, Ft. Leonard Wood, MO, with no graduation in between.

While Redwood Falls was an engineering unit, Joel soon found himself learning things he never expected – clearing mine fields and working with explosives. “I was a little disillusioned at the beginning,” he said. “I was not aware of all that the job entailed.”

In the beginning he learned a lot of what is now outdated military techniques. They literally dug in the sand to clear mines. They would blow holes in the ground to make tank ditches or blow up trees into a criss cross pattern to make a barricade. “It was called engineering battlefield obstacles,” he said.

As a national guardsman, he would train one weekend a month and two weeks a year. The rest of the time he worked on going back to school. He studied ag business at Dordt for a year before transferring to South Dakota State University where he studied ag education for a year.

It was then that Joel was notified that he was being deployed to Iraq. By this time, most active duty military and reserve people had been deployed to Iraq or Afganistan at least once. The company Joel went with was a mixed group from all over the state – people who had never been deployed or who wanted to be deployed.

He reported to Camp Ripley on September 11, 2006 – the five year anniversary of the 9-11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

From Ripley, he went to Ft. Dix, New Jersey, and was there until Thanksgiving. His training there was a lot different than his previous training had been – he learned urban warfare, convoy operations, and detainee operations. His company was filled with combat engineers and infantry and cavalry scouts.

Before he shipped out for Kuwait, his family was able to come out to the east coast to visit him for two days. They spent a couple of days in New York City sightseeing.

In Kuwait, “we did some training, and some sitting,” Joel recalls. That is often the case as one has to wait for the wheels of government to turn. By Dec. 2006, he was in Baghdad. Their job was to replace an army unit that had been doing personal security for government official.

“We waited around for a while and it seemed like no one knew what we were supposed to do,” Joel recalls. “We worked on our equipment, our weapons,  our Humvees – typical military stuff.”  They lived in old barracks next to the Ba’ath Party Headquarters, which was a giant marble government building that was half bombed out. “The rumor was that Saddam Hussein had been kept in the basement,” Joel said. Of course, by this time Hussein had been found and put on trial.

That was somewhat ironic, because when Joel was at Calvin College, Hussein had been captured. He had thought at the time that things would settle down in the Persian Gulf. His dad had said at the time that if he signed up, he’d end up in Iraq.

“And here I was, spending Christmas in Baghdad,” Joel recalls. There was a USO concert there over New Years – Kid Rock strumming his guitar. Joel opted to attend church instead.

Shortly after that they left Baghdad, headed for Al Asad Air Force Base in the Al Anbar Province. Al Anbar was the “Wild West” of Iraq. At this point, his company was split up. One platoon went to Fallujah, one to Ramadi, and one even further west, to Al Qa’im near the Syrian border. 

A little interesting tidbit for our readers: On the way to Al Asad they stopped at an oasis – a place called Abraham’s Well. The locals said that when God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, on his way to Canaan, Abraham stopped there at that well.

Joel was in the platoon headed the farthest west and from there they split into three squads. His squad stayed near Al Qa’im to train Iraqi police, while the other two squads went to separate towns in between Al Qa’im and Ramadi. For the next five months he lived at Camp Gannon on the Syrian border, right by the Euphrates River.

When they arrived at Camp Gannon, their housing was basically an open shed surrounded by sand bags called Hesco barriers. These are giant sand bags made of a collapsible wire mesh and heavy duty fabric. They are used to make barrier walls that can protect from blasts and gunfire.

They slept on cots with a dozen men in one big room. Shortly after arriving, they bought the supplies to adapt their living quarters to better suit them – they put up walls, strung lights and electrical wire, and made their habitation area much more comfortable.

There were cooks on Camp Gannon, but because of their sporadic mission schedule visiting police stations, they ate a lot of MREs (meals ready to eat) but did have access to food and supplies that they could bring in weekly from a larger base in Al Qa’im. They ate a lot of muffins and Pop-Tarts for breakfast, and sometimes they got frozen steaks in and grilled those for supper. The interpreter could get them vegetables from the local market.

His squad was attached to a marine corp unit, who had “operational control.”  Their job was to replace the marines that had been doing the police training. “The marines were less than impressed to be replaced by Army National Guard soldiers” Joel recalls. “They soon realized we were up to the task.” His new job was to help train security forces in Iraq so that they could handle their own conflicts.

They worked with a handful of police stations in different towns. Their job was to oversee, supply, and train. The towns were small and severely damaged by war. The towns mostly ran on generators and most of their infrastructure had been blown up.

There were interpreters to help with the work and IPLO (Iraqi Police Liaison Officers) – civilian contractors that were employed by the Dept. of Defense. These were retired police officers or active police officers who were paid to do this work.