This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
About the series: More than 1.5 million service members, including more than 10,000 Utahns, have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan - and many have done so more than once. In a continuing series of personal profiles, The Salt Lake Tribune features those whose lives have been forever changed by war.
Long before he left Iraq, Ozro Hamblin knew that things wouldn't be the same back home.
A year at war had left him more familiar with the sound of gunfire than with his daughter's laughter. And in any case, as Hamblin remembers it, the little girl's mother had made it clear she wasn't going to marry him, as he once had hoped.
As the end of their deployment drew near, some of Hamblin's fellow soldiers spoke of returning home to start a normal life. But, he said, "I didn't even know what normal was." And so, less than nine months after returning from his first tour of duty, Hamblin decided to go to the only place where he felt normal.
He went back to war.
* * *
Military leaders like to brag about men like Hamblin - eager young patriots who volunteer to return to combat to support their nation and their fellow soldiers. But Hamblin said he was motivated less by patriotism than by adrenaline.
"Nothing was fulfilling anymore," he remembered of the months after his first tour of duty - a 15-month trip set in the "Wild West" days of the war, when the U.S. had few hardened bases, plenty of opportunities to scrap with members of the burgeoning insurgency and not enough body armor to go around.
Hamblin's unit was shot at by snipers, guerilla mortarmen and insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades. They maneuvered past hundreds of roadside bombs. At one point, the battalion of combat engineers was even called upon to dig through the rubble of a bombed-out restaurant in which it was thought they would find the remains of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who at that point was still eluding capture by U.S. forces.
"When you're out there, everything is such an adrenaline rush," Hamblin said. "When you come back here, nothing compares."
But at least he wasn't alone.
"It was like that for all of us," said Phil McClure, who served with Hamblin during two tours in Iraq. "I guess you could say it's another type of culture shock."
McClure said he enjoyed being home from Iraq for less than a month. "It was maybe two or three weeks," he said. "I came back and there was so much stuff I wanted to do and everything was so different and awesome. But then, pretty soon, everyone falls back into their routine. Everything is just how you left it. You're living a normal life and you say, 'I don't want a 9-to-5 job. I don't want this.' ''
Jefferson Burton, who commanded the unit in which Hamblin and McClure first served in Iraq, said many of his soldiers volunteered for second combat tours. And several others, lured by the potential to make big money while getting back into the fight, took jobs as war zone contractors.
"The Army is a lot like a high-performance sports team. When your buddies are in the fight, you want to be there with them," Burton said. "Once you've experienced the feeling of winning, that's what you expect and what you want to continue to be a part of."
Through the Army grapevine, Hamblin and McClure heard the soon-to-be-deployed 222nd Field Artillery was looking for additional soldiers to fill the battalion's ranks in Iraq.
And rumor had it that the unit's mission, in a country rapidly descending into civil war, was going to be high-speed, low-drag - and dangerous.
* * *
Things changed fast in occupied Iraq. By the time Hamblin and McClure had returned, the Army had taken up defensive positions in large, heavily defended bases scattered throughout the war-torn nation. Soldiers were no longer free to interact with Iraqi civilians. Little happened without weeks of planning.
Even in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, the volatile provincial capital of Iraq's deadly Anbar Province, the second-time soldiers couldn't find the electrifying, unpredictable and dangerous conditions they had grown used to during the first tour. Rather than mixing it up with insurgents and guerilla fighters, as they had been led to believe, Hamblin and McClure found themselves providing base security and guarding remote desert outposts.
"It was pretty disappointing," Hamblin said.
Hamblin, who had studied a bit of Arabic at the University of Utah, was especially frustrated that he constantly was being called upon to act as an interpreter - even though the Army had refused to provide him with specialized training for that task.
In the immediate and chaotic aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it was perhaps understandable that there had been few interpreters to go around. But more than two years into the war, Hamblin was stunned to find the Army trying to win "hearts and minds" without so much as the ability to talk to the people whose country it had occupied.
"It blew my mind," Hamblin said in 2005 after helping to mediate a misunderstanding between several soldiers and an Iraqi taxi driver on a desert road near Ramadi. "You'd think the big Army could fix these problems, but they can't."
* * *
Disillusioned with the U.S. military and disappointed by the lack of opportunities to "kick down doors," Hamblin and several others who had volunteered for a second tour exploited a paperwork oversight to win early homecomings from their second tours.
This time - watching warily from a distance and particularly angered by the revelation that billions of dollars had been lost in fraud, waste and corruption as the U.S. blundered the reconstruction of Iraq - Hamblin said he felt ready to "be normal."
But normal remained elusive.
In an effort to give his little girl as natural an upbringing as possible, Hamblin agreed to her new stepfather's request to adopt her as his own. Hamblin said he believed his acquiescence to the arrangement - done so that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints family could be "sealed together" in a temple ceremony - would help smooth out the differences he had with the girl's mother. But soon after relinquishing legal custody, he said, they stopped returning his calls.
"He would get so upset, so angry and upset when he couldn't see her," Hamblin's older brother, Flint, remembered. "In the times he did get to talk to her, afterwards he would be so sad. And he wondered if he'd made the right decision."
Heartbroken and confused, Ozro Hamblin returned to school at the University of Utah, then transferred to Utah State University. He wasn't much older than most of the other students in his classes, but he felt it was difficult to relate.
"No one in my classes seemed to get it," he said. "The discussions, they were just so much different than what I was thinking about. I was so bored."
Flint Hamblin said his brother was certainly smart enough and determined enough to get a diploma, but said Ozro didn't want that piece of paper to be all that school was about.
"He wanted it, but he didn't want it like that," Flint Hamblin said. "He was so frustrated."
"I'd just sit there and space out," Ozro Hamblin remembered. "One day, one of my professors pulled me aside and said 'Are you sure you're in the right place?' ''
And Hamblin knew he wasn't.
"I needed something else," he said.
* * *
An avid snowboarder, Hamblin thought a winter on the slopes might help clear his mind. He bought a season pass at Beaver Mountain, then only went a few times during a year of record-low snowfall.
Later he helped his brother, an amusement park engineer, entrepreneur and ardent space junkie, compete in a NASA-sponsored contest to build a tether strong enough to pull a small payload into orbit.
He toured Europe. He attended job fairs. He considered other schools and other majors.
Finally, this past summer, Hamblin took a job on a fire crew near Flaming Gorge, hoping that fighting wildland blazes might quench his thirst for action. He spent 3 1/2 months waiting - even hoping - for the world to burn.
"Nothing took," he sighed.
For a short spell, Hamblin considered following those comrades who had returned to Iraq as contractors. But no longer able to make sense of the war - and fully aware of the risks involved - he dropped the thought.
"So after all that," he said, "it was pretty much like: 'What is there out there for me?'"
* * *
And so here's the latest plan: Four months at the bottom of the Earth as a heavy equipment operator at McMurdo Station, Antarctica - a trip that will set Hamblin well on his way to a goal of visiting every continent on the globe and that promises to give the enthusiastic storyteller fodder for many years to come.
At one point during his first tour of duty in Iraq, soldiers from Hamblin's unit sweated through a 148-degree day.
Today's forecast low temperature at McMurdo: A balmy 4 degrees.
"People say: Man, you really must like life at the extremes," Hamblin laughed. "And I say, 'Well, yeah.' ''
Hamblin left Utah on Oct. 27. He doesn't have any immediate plans to return.
"I don't think there's anything for me here now," he said as he packed his bags at his Logan apartment last month. "At one time, I did. I thought I might be able to settle down and be normal."
"But not anymore. No, not really. Not anymore."
What do guys like Mike Tyson, Andres Galarraga and Barry Bonds have in common with war veterans?
Like some professional athletes, some soldiers just aren't content to stand on the sidelines. Utah National Guard chaplain Gerald White said many soldiers tell him their civilian lives simply aren't exciting enough after returning from war.
"There's nothing like surviving combat," White said. "Everything else becomes almost mundane. Everything else becomes insignificant."
And that, White said, is why many soldiers opt to return to war.