grantham-hole-use.jpg

Having served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, 41-year-old Staff Sergeant Don Grantham has seen the differences in combat operations in the nation’s most recent wars.

The Odenville resident grew up near Dothan and joined the Alabama National Guard in 1991, serving until 1993.

He remained out of the service until he felt the need to return the day of his 31st birthday, Sept. 11, 2001.

He was transferred for work in the restaurant industry to Dadeville Alabama, where he met his wife Jennifer Krafft, a graduate from Moody High school.

They were married January 15, 2005, just after he received orders to deploy to Iraq.

He arrived in Iraq in 2005 and returned in April of the next year, serving with the 48th Brigade Combat Infantry team out of Georgia.

“A lot of guys from Ala. deployed with us to Iraq,” Grantham said.

He and his comrades served in a scout team, performing combat missions all through and around Bagdad, based out of Camp Striker. They primarily did route clearance and blockade missions.

“We lost 12 guys on the same couple of roads we went every day. It was pretty intense,” he said of the time spent on routes Arrow, Motorhead and Fatboy.

“We were trying to make sure those roads were free of IEDs, which more than likely they weren’t. It was a continuous battle to keep those clear to have unimpeded movement to the farmlands.”

Of those he served with, Grantham said, “The comradery is unlike anything that you could imagine. You put your life in everyone else’s hands every day you go out. The brotherhood that you develop because of how intense it is and how keyed up everyday you roll outside the wire is very hard to explain. They’re like my brothers, we still talk and I talk to some of them all the time.

“People ask about what it’s like. We’re bound by blood. The stuff we saw and did will be with us forever… It’s  really unexplainable: the sights, the sounds, it’s unexplainable.”

Grantham was awarded a medal, the Army Commendation Medal with V device for Valor.

“Coming home is two-fold, it’s exciting and you’re ready to get home. If you have any responsibility, though, you’re wondering what’s going on with your troops back there. To go from the sights, sounds and smells of Iraq to the sights, sounds and smells of Alabama is a huge contrast and difference. It’s not to say that people don’t realize how good they have it. But when you smell death and you know what that smells like and you come home and everybody’s happy… People don’t want to talk to you about what happened.

“They ask, ‘Are you okay?’ But they’re really not asking the deeper, ‘Are you okay?’ It’s tough to come home on leave because you’re so keyed up all the time. When you come home it’s trying not to be keyed up.”

During his Iraq tour he and his wife had a son Landon. Grantham got to come home when he started kindergarten and surprise him at Odenville Elementary.

“We found out we were pregnant when I went to the national training center.” Their second son Don III was born in November 1 of 2005.

In between his two deployments, Grantham got a job working back in the restaurant industry. Then he received orders three years later that he would deploy to Afghanistan.

“The difference for me was dramatic because of the towns and the streets. There’s more streets in Iraq that are more hardball. It’s more of a suburban type area buildup than Afghanistan, [which is] very rural.”

Afghanistan has mud huts made of out of straw sticks. There really are no doors to speak of in Afghanistan.”

He said towns usually had a large, main wall with homes within in it. There might be a main house in the middle with other swellings surrounding it.

“There’s no doors to kick in, you go through a curtain.”

He said the contrast from Iraq to Afghanistan was stark.

In Iraq constant IED explosions and snipers were the norm. In Afghanistan, IED searches on roads and looking for people who don’t belong in open instead of congested areas was the difference.

His squad was broken into teams and assigned to a police mentoring team for Afghan government police force.

They were then switched over and split up again into two teams, assigned to a joint force headquarters with the Afghanistan army,  military police and border police.

“When we first got there, they still used a lot of the Russian tactics and Russian lingo . We had to convert them how to read a map, from a military guy you read it right, up. They read everything right to left. Everything is backwards. So we’re trying to get them to understand how we do things. Because of all the influence from Russian era, it’s very tough.”

On Dec. 14 2009 Grantham got out of a culvert just before an explosion.

It was snowing, raining and sleeting. “Somehow the device froze. When I got out of the hole and it detonated late.  I would not be talking to you if it detonated while I was in the hole.”

“The thoughts that go through your mind right after is one of anger. ‘How dare somebody try to kill me. The adrenaline is pumping so much I didn’t know I was hit until about 30 minutes later after I was coming down from that adrenaline high.”

He had a few puncture wounds and his calf. “I was lucky.”

He called his wife and parents himself to let them know about the situation. Grantham said sometimes the rumor mill gets going and often a soldier ends up dead when they’ve received a non-life-threatening wound.

Reflecting on his time there and how he sees the conflict as it stands, Grantham said, “They’re waiting for us to leave to they can declare victory. As soon as we really pull out then the Taliban will come back and say they’ve won because they’re still there. When we first got there [Afghan soldiers] were very hesitant to learn from us because of that fact. They’re concerned that after we leave they’ll come back and anyone who helped us then their life expectancy will be very short at that point.”

He is now the course manager for the officer candidate school for State of Georgia. He enjoys being back on active duty and helping to develop the future leaders of the Georgia National Guard.

Asked what he’d like to say to those who he has encountered after returning home, he responds, “It’s been amazing the support I and other have gotten. Anytime I’m out in uniform I get a ‘thank you.’ Not once, not twice, but multiple times. We go to eat and we still have people buying us lunch. We don’t go out as much because of that. It’s amazing the difference as citizens the support we got compared to the Vietnam era.”

Grantham is a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Ragland.