SEBASTIAN — Four families of combat veterans got a thank-you gift Sunday – a home-cooked spaghetti and meatballs dinner and presents from Santa for their kids.
That was the public show of appreciation, but what went on in private meant even more to the former soldiers and their wives.
Before the Christmas party, which drew about 200 people to the Sebastian Eagles Aerie 4067 just off Barber Street, the veterans loaded up their cars and trucks with everything on their kids’ Christmas lists so they could play Santa at home on Christmas Eve.
The toys, games and electronics are just things, but they’re a concrete way for Eagles members to show how much they appreciate our troops’ sacrifice.
All they asked in return was a few snapshots of Christmas morning gift-opening to post on their bulletin board.
The $4,000 that paid for the gifts was appropriately raised on Nov. 10 at the Eagles’ U.S. Marine Corps birthday party.
U.S. Army veteran James Redenour came to the party with his wife, Bernadette, and their two children Luke, 11 and Makaila, 2. He enjoyed seeing the smiles on the kids’ faces and appreciated everything the Eagles did for his family.
“It would have been a very scarce Christmas,” he said. “This let our children have the best Christmas we’ve had in years.”
One thing about the event, however, made Redenour a bit uneasy.
“Everybody’s been coming up and saying ‘thank you.’ I never know what to say when people thank me for my service,” Redenour said. “We didn’t do it for the thanks, or for a reward or for an award. We do it because it’s the right thing to do and because it needs to be done.”
Admittedly an adrenaline junky as a teenager, Redenour said the quest for adventure played a part in his choice to join the Army. But there’s more – there’s duty and honor, and he does not use those words as empty platitudes. The concepts seem to resonate in his very DNA.
“I believe in good and evil. I choose good and I want to destroy the evil,” he said. “I don’t know how to respond to thanks because I didn’t do it for the thanks. Once you get there, it’s about the guy next to you. Your survival is second to the guy next to you.”
A serious and intense 30-year-old, Redenour enlisted in the Army when he was 17.
While serving in Iraq, he suffered a traumatic brain injury from an IED that hit the Humvee he was riding in.
Doctors thought he was dead, but he woke up and sat straight up, as he says, “scaring the crap out of everybody.”
“James turned 18 during boot camp. He turned 19 in Kosovo. He turned 20 in England and he turned 21 in Iraq,” said the Eagles Lodge Chaplain Charles Redstone, a towering man who introduced the veterans. “Nobody expected this man to live, but he surprised them.”
Redstone told each man’s story, emphasizing that Redenour and the others “served so that everybody in this room could sit here and enjoy freedom.”
But Redenour doesn’t want thanks, he just wants people to understand what war is like.
After spending six weeks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and another six weeks at James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Redenour wound up in Vero Lake Estates, where his parents had moved from Ohio.
Was Redenour’s transition back into civilian life smooth?
“It ain’t smooth – it’s not,” he said, describing his immense frustration with everything and his extreme lack of patience as he tries to adjust to life after war with a four-inch plate in his head.
Still, he said, veterans of Iraq have it easier than previous generations of foreign war vets.
Being thanked and treated like a hero, though uncomfortable and a challenge to his humility, is better than being derided and treated as a pariah.
“We are definitely grateful that our homecoming was not the Vietnam veterans’ homecoming,” Redenour said.
Redenour worked after going through rehab for his injuries, but he discovered through trial and error that he was no longer employable.
As all the long-term effects of his brain injury manifested themselves, he ended up being declared 100 percent disabled. But in the meantime he beat himself up psychologically over not being the man he used to be.
“I worked two different jobs, but at both of them, I was too slow. My work was perfect, but I was just too slow. It takes me a while to process things and to formulate my thoughts and a response sometimes,” he said.
It was a dispiriting experience for such a determined and intelligent young man.
What happened after Redenour got home is typical of the stories shared by the veterans at the Eagles lodge on Sunday.
It took them months, even years, of fighting the military bureaucracy to get disability benefits commensurate with their injuries.
Veteran Joshua Chapple and his wife, Rebecca, whose story of a struggle after being laid-off from the Army in June has been reported by sister publication Sebastian River News, were also at the party with their two daughters.
The Chapples, in four months, went from being homeless to being self-sufficient, with the help of local veterans groups and a generous outpouring of the community.
The Chapples smiled watching the girls opening gifts from Santa and playing with the children of the other veterans at the party.
Army veteran Phillip Turner, a three-year Sebastian resident, was at the party with his wife, Kelli, and their four children.
A veteran of Operation Desert Storm, Turner volunteered to go to Afghanistan but was injured in a training accident before he could deploy with his unit.
He is employed at Auto Zone in the parts department, and works around his injuries.
“I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to stay. I would have loved to go to Afghanistan, but it is what it is,” Turner said. “Fortunately, every one of the soldiers in my unit came home.”
Of the Eagles’ Christmas party, he said, “It was awesome. I want to thank these guys so much, I was blown away.”