It was a late August afternoon in Iraq's sweltering desert when James Kania, a Fire Direction Control Specialist in Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry Division, decided not to shoot.
Clad in a traditional one-piece cloak, an Iraqi citizen implored Kania to let him onto the military convoy. He claimed he was an air-conditioning specialist who only wanted to fix some broken units at Kania's base, Camp Muleskinner. This was a hopeless plea, since the civilian bridge was closed for military traffic that day.
James is an unassuming-looking, brown-haired, brown-eyed everyman with a disarming smile and a casual, affable air about him. Yet in 30 pounds of Army-issued gear, standing behind an armored Humvee, he cut an imposing figure.
Still, the man persisted. He needed to get to work.
Kania said one Arabic word he knew for sure after six months in Iraq: "Stop."
The man disobeyed and moved forward.
Kania clicked off the safety on his M-16.
Sensing the gravity of the situation, the Iraqi man backed down and stepped away. He would not win this confrontation.
Kania never knew what became of the man.
This stand-off often weighs on James's mind. Recounting the incident in an essay titled "Another Day in the Sun" (later published in 3808, Penn's Journal of Freshman Writing), he wrote:
"To this day, I wonder often if he understood that I had a job to do that day also. I felt for the man, but I could not care. I will always remember him, because when I looked past my rifle, I saw me."
As a Penn junior and a National Guardsman, Kania and his experience could resonate with a generation of youth disaffected by America's involvement in Iraq. Kania, now 23, is positioned at the intersection of two demographic worlds - or at least, two different media caricatures: the college student and the soldier. A report by the United States Government Accountability Office reveals a more educated Army corp after the end of Vietnam's draft era, but only 24 percent of active component recruits and 38 percent of reserve recruits (like Kania) attend college, as compared to 59 percent of United States civilians.
These kinds of facts usually get political, fast. Yet Kania is not interested in playing an ideological game of 20 questions. While he's not easily annoyed, he sighs recounting the inevitable first question a Penn student typically asks after learning of his year in Iraq:
"Are you a liberal or a conservative?"
He laughs. "They get me to try to answer that question, so then they can draw a box on it. 'Here's another one for our side, let's go back to cheering!' or, 'Here's another one we can argue against.' I refuse to answer to that."
He won't talk about his political affiliation - he's past all that, he says. He just wants to talk about how it was.
The Twin Towers fell when Kania was a 17-year-old junior attending the small, public Crestwood High School in rural Mountain Top, Pennsylvania. He says 9/11 made him think, made him want to help. He did not know that the United States would later enter a protracted conflict in the Middle East.
His heart wasn't originally set on the National Guard. Kania dreamed of a classic West Point life at the United States Military Academy, but a high school Army recruiter changed his direction.
The National Guard recruiter told it straight. He said Kania had three post-graduation options: get a job, go to college, join the military.
Kania brought up West Point. How would he get there if he was already committed to the Guard?
To this, the recruiter had a quick answer: What better way to show the West Point admissions office you're meant to be a soldier than actually being a soldier?
This seemed reasonable enough. On December 20, 2001, Kania signed a six-year contract.
He committed himself to one weekend a month of service after basic training and pledged to serve if and when his division was called to action. In those first years, he saw friends shuffled off to Afghanistan; he figured that that's where he'd go, if the Guard was called into action.
That summer of 2002 between his junior and senior years, when other kids were babysitting or watching Gilmore Girls reruns, Kania spent nine weeks in basic training.
After that summer, Kania's senior fall rolled around and it was college crunch time. Kania was torn between the respective allures of West Point and Penn. His parents were far from wealthy, but he figured Pennsylvania's National Guard Army Education Assistance Program - a mouthful which basically comes down to financial assistance - would help him pay a private school tuition. With his formidable SATs and good grades, he had a decent shot at Penn.
His early decision application was rejected. "I didn't really know what I was doing then," he admits, a bit sheepishly. West Point, on the other hand, offered him admission a full academic year later, so he had some time to kill.
After graduation in 2003, Kania was a bit aimless, biding his time. He was a counselor at a summer camp. He toyed with attending the less prestigious Arcadia University for a little while before transferring to West Point.
That summer he spent another nine weeks training for his job in the National Guard, as a Fire Directions Control Specialist. James became a part of the 109th Field Artillery Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division, the oldest division in the armed forces of the United States. To put this in perspective, members of the 109th's proto-regiment fought in the Revolutionary War. To put this even furthermore into perspective, the division's crest was designed by Penn's de facto founder Benjamin Franklin.
Field artillery is, essentially, blowing stuff up.
Kania explains that there are three main components of ground warfare: infantry, tanks and guns. Artillery is another term for guns. As a "Fire Direction Control Specialist," he was in charge of calculating trajectory - in other words, ballistics.
After training for this job, Kania laid low for awhile, unsure of his next steps.
Then came the second wave of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
That fall, Kania's brigade was the first of the National Guard to be called into action. In December 2003, the Bravo battalion of Kania's regiment mobilized for Kuwait and Baghdad. They spent six weeks preparing for deployment in snowy Fort Dix, New Jersey.
On February 25, 2004, the battalion entered Kuwait for two weeks, preparing for the Iraqi theater. Kania remembers his first day in the theater was Ash Wednesday because, as a devout Catholic, he'd smudged soot on his forehead to honor the religious holiday.
Then there was Baghdad.
Life changed quickly for Kania in the Forward Operating Base (FOB) known as Camp Muleskinner.
For one thing, there was the sheer physical stress of it all: living cramped in an 18 x 36 foot tent in 100-degree temperatures with seven other men - with 30-pound Kevlar armor to boot.
Then there's the issue of free time - that is to say, there's lots of it, even on the 12-hour night shifts Kania served patrolling Baghdad's city streets outside the logistical supply camp. Yet he admits it got boring. "There was a lot of sand," he says, dryly.
But was it scary? No news was good news, he says. Getting shot at was typical "enough [for him] not to like it." The Iraqi insurgents were "everywhere," he says. "I'm not going to call them terrorists."
The whole affair sometimes became comic. He laughs, remembering one of his first nights in a dormitory-style Baghdad station. An alarm rang, indicating the base was getting mortared. He got dressed with the others to run into a safe bunker, only to find his platoon sergeant shouting orders while wearing his Kevlar helmet and body armor over a bright blue Egyptian terrycloth bathrobe.
As the first National Guard division to enter Iraq, there were high expectations for the group's mission. Part of the reason Kania hesitates to invoke a political stance from his experience is the specificity of his brigade's work: For the most part, he was responsible for fostering Iraqi police stations and defending the Iraqi police force.
"What we were doing was simple law and order," James says. "A police station is necessary for a working society."
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Kania's no Bible-thumper, but it's clear a strong Catholic faith helped him during his year in "the sandbox."
Besides learning how to blow stuff up before Baghdad, Kania got himself some old time religion. He took a ROPES course which also trained him as a Catholic lay minister, which means that he could administer the Holy Rite of Communion to his peers. (But he could not consecrate the Communion wafers himself - only priests can do that.)
Every other week, on either Tuesday or Wednesday or sometimes both, Kania would perform the Holy Eucharist at Camp Muleskinner.
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As all of this was going on under the hot sun in Baghdad, he got his act together and reapplied to both Penn and West Point.
He wrote his application in the base's "Internet Cafe," which was a rickety, sporadically-functioning laptop that could be used for 30-minute sessions. His platoon leader, Lieutenant Cliff Morales, wrote his recommendation letter on breaks. Sometimes the power went out and his work was cut short.
Kania got in to both West Point and Penn - the acceptance letters were a welcome diversion on the base. Despite his longtime dream of attending West Point, he checked "Yes" on his Penn acceptance forms and told West Point's admissions officer that he'd let him know during the school year if he'd ultimately be in their freshman class.
When he got to Penn, Kania adjusted well to civilian life. He fell in with a group of friends during pickup games at his first dorm, Stouffer College House. In October, he told West Point that he wouldn't be matriculating there. With his new sense of permanence at Penn, Kania chose to major in math, joined the crew team, helped re-found Zeta Beta Tau fraternity and has worked in development at the Penn Fund. He also finds the time to mentor Philadelphia-based Boy Scouts.
Yet there's some regret evident in his voice when James talks about his Army buddies, now serving in Egypt and Afghanistan. His six-year Guardsman career ended on December 19. He could have re-enlisted, but he didn't want to. He says it's time for a new chapter in his life.
Kania remains concerned over the widespread preoccupation with political partisanship. For this reason, he says, he likes math. "Your answer can't lean left or right," he says. "Nobody cares. You know what I mean?"
Ten thousand times, he says, only somewhat hyperbolically, students at Penn have tried to categorize him, to place the six years of his service on an ideological spectrum, to see where he stands.
When asked again what he meant by seeing himself when he looked at the Iraqi civilian, Kania says, "Everyone is basically the same. We all have commonalities and similarities. He had a job and he had something to worry about and he had relationships with other people and other feelings, and so did I. I had a job that day. Had we known each other under different circumstances, we might have been friends. You just don't know"
