Capt. Adrian Bonenberger '96 comes home to Hopkins

11/14/2011

In a special Veteran's Day assembly on Friday, November 11, Hopkins was honored to welcome Captain Adrian Bonenberger, Class of 1996 back to campus.

In a special Veteran's Day assembly on Friday, November 11, Hopkins was honored to welcome Captain Adrian Bonenberger, Class of 1996 back to campus.

After graduating from Hopkins in 1996, Adrian went on to graduate with an English degree from Yale in 2002. Following a year teaching English in Japan, Adrian returned to the U.S. and joined the U.S. Army in 2005. He has served most recently as Commander for Alpha Company, First Battalion, 87th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division, the Battalion featured in the New York Times series on the war in Afghanistan.

Head of School Barbara Riley introduced Adrian at assembly on Friday morning and spoke about the importance of recognizing the men and women who have served and protected our country on Veteran's Day. At the podium, Adrian shared with the students and faculty some of his most challenging experiences in combat, as well as his reasons for joining the Army. He shared his thoughts on how civilians could best commemorate Veteran's Day. Following his address, he answered questions from the audience. See below to read Adrian's full address as well as Barbara Riley's introduction.

Following assembly, Adrian visited with several History classes throughout the morning where students asked questions about his opinions on military politics and more direct questions about his experiences in combat and dealing with the many facets of returning home. He also mentioned his plans to write a book about his experiences in Afghanistan, now that his time with the U.S. Army is coming to an end.

Hopkins would like to thank Capt. Bonenberger for joining us on Veteran's Day, and sharing his inspiring and informative story with the community.

Click below to read:
Barbara Riley's introduction of Adrian Bonenberger '96
Adrian Bonenberger's '96 Address

Click here to read the New York Times feature "A Year at War."

Barbara Riley's introduction of Adrian Bonenberger '96

November 11, 1918 – over ninety years ago – marked the end of the First World War, which was until then the most destructive war in human history. Nations on both sides of that war commemorate its end by remembering the day and the time when fighting stopped: on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, as 11:00 a.m. Today, even more of the elevens line up, as is November 11, 2011.

That we observe Veterans Day is not about defending or glorifying war. In the U.S., Veterans Day is simply a chance to thanks and honor those who have fought for our country in the past and who defend it in the present.

We are all, without question, very – too much – caught up in our own lives and purposes. That fact makes it too easy for us to forget about Veterans Day and what soldiers do for us and what their service means to them and what it means to us.

Hopkins graduates have fought in all American wars, beginning with the Revolutionary War, through the Civil War and all the wars of the 20th and early 21st centuries. There are Hopkins graduates fighting today in Afghanistan. But even that leaves the idea of a veteran much too distant and too anonymous.

Our speaker this morning is Adrian Bonenberger, Hopkins Class of 1996 and a Yale College English major who graduated from that University down the hill in 2002.

I have watched Adrian’s career and trajectory for many years now, starting in his senior year at Hopkins, when he was finding his way to an interest in English, competing as a Hopkins athlete, and singing with the Harmonaires. Along the way, he was developing an interest in leadership, one both developed and was tested during his service in Afghanistan.

Over the last few years, Adrian Bonenberger has served in the U.S. Army, most recently as the Commander for Alpha Company, First Battalion, 87th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division, the Battalion featured in the New York Times series on the war in Afghanistan.

He has written – and will write and speak more, I think – about changes in military policy, i.e. about the wisdom, decency and difficulty of the repeal of a 1990’s federal policy called “don’t ask-don’t tell.”

He has experienced – and written – about the difficulties soldiers experience when they come “home” from war – something he has described as the unexpected perils that follow an experience in war.

He has written about recent reversals in policies at major American universities in terms of the Reserve Officer Training Program at their schools – ROTC – long ago and now, a way for students to combine their academic studies and preparation for service to the country.

Maybe most important this morning, will be the ways Adrian will reflect about the awesome responsibility of leadership he experienced at a very young age.

I am very proud and grateful to welcome Adrian Bonenberger ’96 home to Hopkins today.

Thank you for extending me the honor of speaking before the students, faculty, and administrators this Veteran’s Day. Special thanks to Head of School Mrs. Riley and Deputy Head of School Mr. Rogers for their hospitality, and to the Hopkins teachers who gave me the tools to fully express my human potential. Mr. MacMullen, Mr. Casanova, Mr. Bucar, Ms. Giamatti, Ms. Dawidoff, Ms. Budinger: without the challenging intellectual and physical education I received in the classroom and on the playing field, I would not be standing before you today.

A bit about me. I graduated Hopkins in 1996, having run cross country, played basketball (poorly), and played Lacrosse for Sandy Macmullen. I’ve walked the halls of your older buildings, done extracurriculars like theater and sang with the Harmonaires, and sat in those same bleachers on many a cold, dismal morning, dreading some test or paper come due. Hopkins is a terrific institution, you all have an incredible opportunity, studying here, and I’m proud to have graduated from Hopkins School.

Other highlights from my life: I graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English, taught English in Japan for a year, and when I came back to the U.S. in the autumn of 2004, we were involved in a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency in Iraq. Nobody was paying much attention to Afghanistan then. I joined the Army in 2005, went through infantry training, was commissioned as an officer, and got pulled into the 173rd Airborne, the best line unit in the Army, by another Hopkins (and lacrosse player), Eric Nelson (class of ’97). Another notable Hopkins grad and Airborne Ranger is now-Major Mark Castallucci. He was class of ’96 with me. We’ve all had multiple combat deployments.

Before I jump into war stories, I’d like to explain the military a bit. Although there are differences between the services—Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force—every service in the military is a hierarchical organization, where a person’s rank determines, for the most part, what type of job he or she does, and how a person goes about that job. The higher you rank, the more people, in theory, you can boss around, but the more responsibility you have. There are two forms of service, “Enlisted”—the soldiers and sergeants; and “Officers”— the officers and leaders. The closest analogy that I could come up with would be that in Hopkins, the students would be enlisted, and the teachers would be officers. This is obviously not a perfect analogy, but there are similarities. Officers are responsible for training the soldiers and sergeants, and ultimately responsible for everything that happens in a unit. And enlisted with more time and experience have more respect and responsibilities than those soldiers with less time, or little experience.

Now we understand a little of what the military is: a group of officers who train and direct soldiers and sergeants (and each other). Why is the military set up like this? Because its job is to wage war, and war involves a lot of people doing things that civilization or self-preservation tells them are bad ideas. Some of you may be wondering what it’s like to be in a firefight, in combat. Visually, it’s a lot like recent movies and first-person shooter video games. Confusing. Smoke, difficulty figuring out what’s going on, loud, disorienting. Now, physically it’s like nothing else I’ve ever encountered, the smells, the way you feel during and after a nearby explosion, the level of exhaustion you reach. Combat is similar to being at the end of a really trying athletic contest, just absolutely smoked. You’ve given 100% the whole game, but it’s not over, and you have to somehow find more energy to go on. You are sending your arms and legs orders that they cannot obey.

A quick story—early on in my second deployment, I and about 12 soldiers from my 3rd Platoon, along with my best Sergeant, Sergeant First Class Dean Lee, were fighting through fallow fields and rice paddies. It was about 10am, the middle of July, the sun was out, so it was hot like you read about. SFC Lee and myself, along with the medic, were shooting at the enemy so the rest of the soldiers could get across this irrigation ditch and try to hit the Taliban on the flank. The soldiers crossed this ditch, which was just wide enough so you had to jump across it, and started shooting at the enemy so we could cross. Well, we’d been shooting and running, taking cover from enemy artillery, shooting and running, and we were exhausted. We get to the ditch, but can’t find where the rest of the soldiers crossed. I was winded, just… exhausted, so I asked SFC Lee: “should we jump across?” He looked at me, sweat pouring down his face, and said “how deep could it be?” I got a little running start, and tried to jump the ditch, but—again—my legs didn’t listen, and I just ran into it—and landed up to my armpits. This was the very beginning of a two day operation, and I didn’t have a change of clothes, so was fighting in a disgusting, filth-encrusted uniform for the next 36 hours.

I’ve done two combat deployments to Afghanistan totaling 25 months. The first was with the 173rd, and was on the border of Pakistan, Paktika Province. I was the Executive Officer or 2nd in Command of an Airborne Company of 150 paratroopers. The elevation started at 8,000 feet on the valley floor, and went up from there into the mountains. We were patrolling up to 10,000 feet, each carrying, on average 120lbs of food, water, and equipment. Just to give you a visual, imagine something like the badlands of Montana, or New Mexico / Arizona in the hills. Scraggly trees, dusty, everything a shade of brown. Civilization makes its home around the rivers—little fortress communities of “compounds” where villagers live together in medieval conditions. A compound consists of 20-50 people; one elder, his first or eldest son (a man with two or three wives, an unmarried brother or two, and a heap of children). Unemployment is around 50% (that counts the Taliban as an employer). Literacy around 5%. The people there call the area “Waziristan,” and many of the people there think of themselves as Pashtun or Waziri before they think of themselves as Afghans or Pakistani. There has never been government, apart from tribalism, and crimes like murder, banditry, and every horror you can imagine are commonplace.

The fighting on that first deployment, 2007-2008, resembles the fighting that goes on to this day. We were under constant, near-daily rocket fire from positions in the hills and inside Pakistan. The Taliban would ambush us when we sent patrols into the hills or on long vehicle missions, and attacked our Combat Outposts with 10-30 fighters on numerous occasions, attempting to overrun them three times with warbands of 150+. The Taliban we faced were tenacious fighters, but our artillery, airplanes, and helicopters guaranteed our victory in every battle. By the end of the deployment, each time the enemy would attack, I would feel very sorry for them—I’m sure most of them were just impoverished Waziri tribesman looking to earn a quick buck.

My second deployment was as the Commander of a Mountain Infantry unit, Alpha Company, “Gators,” 1st Battalion 87th Infantry. We rarely patrolled with more than 20 U.S. soldiers, with Afghans often filling out the remainder of our combat power. Bigger operations were conducted with around 100 U.S. soldiers and 300-400 additional Afghans of all types, police, army, and militia. This deployment, from 2010 to 2011, was in Kunduz Province, RC-North, on the border of Tajikistan. The people there were mostly Tajik or Uzbek, but there was a substantial community of Pashtuns who had been forced to resettle from the south sometime in the 19th or early 20th century—they made up the bulk of the Taliban, though we faced Tajiks and Uzbeki as well. There were rice paddies and thick forests, and every time we left the trucks the movements were slow and miserable. The Taliban of the North were more like criminals or gangsters, there were less of them but they were very savvy about using the terrain against us. When we would defeat a particular “gang” of Taliban, that gang would often join us as militia. So it was that on several operations, I was fighting alongside 20-50 militia who had recently been Taliban fighting against me. I understood the risk I was taking, but in the end the risks paid off—by trusting the Afghans, and giving them responsibility, and treating them like allies, and empowering them, the Afghans were ultimately able to completely push the Taliban out from Kunduz Province. Today, Kunduz has a very limited Taliban presence, largely contained to Suicide Bomber and IED attacks. My Company paid a high price for this peace, had over 20 wounded (thankfully no killed) but I think it was worth it.

Veterans Day is an opportunity to observe and remember the sacrifice, service, and courage of those citizens—present, and past—who served in the nation’s armed forces. Veterans Day is also important because, properly observed, it gives us a sense of gratitude to people, normal people, who went out and committed to doing something that is still necessary for our national security.

Most importantly, though, Veterans Day is an opportunity to go outside yourself, and your bounds of comfort, to consider for a moment what it might be like to serve, and to appreciate the difficulty of that service. Not because of some empty idea like honor, or patriotism, or freedom. Not because an authority is forcing you to celebrate or commemorate the day. If you think about America’s veterans on Veterans Day, think about military service, and what it must be like to have experienced war, for this excellent reason alone: you live in a democratic society and so long as our democracy insists by consensus that we maintain a military, and our congress deploys that military to war zones, then we must take responsibility by honoring those people who are or were a part of it. We are all citizens of the same nation—the greatest, most audacious and revolutionary nation in the world, even today. As young future leaders, and the intellectual and moral potential of both America and the world, you must get used to understanding that so long as we support war, or entertain war as a possible tool of foreign policy, then we the American People owe it to ourselves and to those we’ve asked to wear the uniform to thank them for what they’ve done on our behalf—in past wars, and in the present.

Thank you again for listening, and considering my words. I appreciate your time, and wish you all prosperous and lucky lives.

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Capt. Adrian Bonenberger '96 comes home to Hopkins