Jonah Engle

March 15th, 2009

New York - In a conference room at the Sheraton hotel in midtown, 150 young politicos are yelling and screaming. The kickoff of the annual Young Democrats of America conference feels like a nerdy pep rally. Speaker after speaker whips up the audience still giddy from Barack Obama’s victory.

A man near the front of the crowd stands out from the throng of dark-suited twenty-somethings. He’s older, at 33, and bulkier than most of those around him, and dressed down in khakis and brown walking shoes with a red shirt and dark grey sports coat. He’s in the crowd but not quite of it; while people whoop, he’s taking in the spectacle.

For as long as he can remember, Captain Joe Merrill has wanted two things: to serve in the Army and run for office. Now, after spending nearly half is life in the military and serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’s making the switch, running for mayor of Binghamton, N.Y.

Earlier in the day Merrill, his girlfriend, Katy Johnson, and his Army buddy from Afghanistan and campaign manager, Chris Marrion, drove the three and a half hours to New York City for the three-day conference. Merrill and Marrion hope to pick up some tips about fundraising and recruitment, and make some connections.

When the speeches end, the young faithful gravitate towards the more established, including New York Democratic Party chairwoman, June O’Neil and New York City councilor Eric Gioia. Like buddies at a high school dance, Merrill and Marrion try to summon the courage to approach the kingpins. “We should introduce ourselves to June O’Neil,” Merrill suggests. They wonder if she remembers them and think better of it.

Gradually people disperse and head off to parties. Merrill, Johnson and Marrion step out into the cold night in search of dinner.

Merrill is part of a new generation of young combat veterans being courted by both Democrats and Republicans. Political scientist Jeremy Teigen of Ramapo University says since September 11th, with national security emerging as a key issue, both parties want to bolster their credibility by deploying veteran-politicians. Merrill, whose just started working as the City Clerk for Binghamton after returning from Afghanistan, says he decided to run for mayor after being encouraged to do so by members of the Broome County Democrats.

As he walks down 51st Street, Merrill thinks back to another time he was here, revealing how much the last few years have changed him.

In the winter of 2003, Merrill was a Republican guardsman itching to go to war. He’d known the invasion of Iraq was imminent and he kept trying to volunteer. At one point he even offered to resign his commission and serve as a corporal if it meant he’d be deployed.

This is what he’d trained for all his life. Born in the small town of Deposit, N.Y. he grew up on the soldiers’ tales of his grandfathers. His maternal grandfather, who raised him, was a waist gunner on a B-24 who flew 54 missions over Europe. His paternal grandfather landed on Omaha beach and drove across Europe with Patton’s Army.

As soon as he was old enough, Merrill enlisted in the 82nd Airborne. In his early 20s he transferred to the New York Army National Guard and went to college as an ROTC student.

Instead of going to war, on the night the U.S. invaded Iraq, Merrill and his infantry company were on a bus to New York City. For the next month, he slept four hours a night and spent days in charge of the platoon guarding the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Almost a year later, Merrill finally got his wish. He was transferred to another battalion and on February 26, 2004, deployed to Iraq with the Delta Company 2-108th infantry of the New York Army National Guard.

As the insurgency grew in the Sunni Triangle, Merrill led a platoon that helped re-conquer the town of Samara. “It was down and dirty house to house combat for the first three or four days,” Merrill remembers. After that, his platoon took charge of securing a hospital whose generator kept failing. “That was probably one of the worst five or six days of my life, having to be in that hospital, cuz all you could smell was… was… was death.”

Nearly six years and two combat tours later, Merrill, is a Democrat getting out of the Guard and trying as hard as he can to forget those days. But the memories don’t go away.

“This is the longest my hair’s been since I was 17 years old,” he says of his not very long haircut as he sips a corona in a hotel restaurant. He orders a cheeseburger with bacon - no tomato or lettuce. “Joe doesn’t eat it if it’s green or red,” his girlfriend laughs.

“I just got off leave yesterday,” Merrill says, “I don’t want anything to do with the Army right now.” He’s not answering emails and he’s taking his military books off the shelf in the living room and putting them away upstairs in a spare room. “I don’t want anything green in the house.”

The only visible sign of his old life is a small pin on his jacket: a grey musket against a blue rectangle. “It’s a Combat Infantry Badge. It’s all I wanted when I joined the Army,” Merrill says. Now he’d gladly give it back, along with his three Bronze Stars for valor and service if that would make the nightmares go away.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way for Merrill who was steeped in the military exploits of his forefathers in WWII and WWI. “WWII vets can walk around and say, we stopped genocide,” Merrill says. He’s still struggling to figure out what he was sent to fight for after seeing successive explanations for the war crumble. “If the justification is, we took out a dictator to replace him with a dictator who was more friendly to us, really was it worth it?”

But as Merrill talks about the heroic exploits of his grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the shadow side of all wars emerges. The grandfather who fought with Patton liberated several concentration camps, found piles of bodies and had to bury them. “My grandmother told me later he wouldn’t go to sleep for ten years without looking under the bed.”

Merrill’s father went to Vietnam at 20. As a chaplain’s assistant, it was his job to put dead soldiers in body bags. He survived the war, but he never recovered. Now, Merrill struggles to leave his war in Iraq behind, but sometimes it sneaks up on him. Shortly after coming home, he went to visit his maternal grandfather. The man he calls his father figure was 84 and had just been committed to a nursing home in downtown Binghamton, to Merrill’s great distress. They sat in the hallway eating lunch, but his grandfather was gone, whacked out on medication.

Merrill could feel the anger and sadness rising – and suddenly he was back in that horrible hospital in Samara, with its cement walls and the inerasable smell of burning human flesh. He told his grandfather he had to leave and drove straight up the hill to the V.A. clinic.

Twenty minutes later he had a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and a prescription for Zoloft, an anti-depressant and, Clonazepam, a heavy-duty “tranq”. As he retells the story, Merill nervously rubs his thumbs against his fingers. His girlfriend reaches over, places her hand on his and looks at him gently. “I really think he hid a lot from me,” she says. “I did,” he agrees. “She’s like, why don’t you talk to me, why don’t you tell me the things that happened. I’m like, why?” “Because it’s who you are,” she says.

A couple of days later, dressed in a charcoal suit, blue shirt and a red tie, Merrill sits at his desk on the ground floor of Binghamton City hall. It’s his first week back at work after returning from Afghanistan and his office is nearly empty. The new city hall, a 1970s concrete mistake, stands out from the nearby stately Victorian architecture that reflects the city’s past wealth. That many of those grand buildings today lie vacant, reflects the tough economic challenges Merrill will face if he gets elected.

The paradox is that as he tries to put his past behind him, interest in his military service is a vital political asset. Last week, the local paper profiled the returning veteran; in a few hours a TV crew from channel 10 will show up to do the same. It’s something about which he’s very ambivalent; he wants people to judge him for his ideas and his skills. “I don’t like to use it but the unfortunate thing is that it works. There are going to be people who go out there and go, ‘he’s got three bronze stars. I’m going to vote for him.’”