Page 87 - Cityview Jan-Feb 2017

VETERAN SPOTLIGHTMAGINATION CAN HARDLYhold all the adventures that turned a boy from Tennessee into a man of the world. At 19 and fresh out of high school,Madisonville resident Lieutenant Colonel G. Larry Hartsook was drafted into the Army Special Forces in March of 1968. “It was around 40,000 that they drafted that month,” he says. “It ended up being 27 years, 4 months, 19 days and 5 and a half hours later that I retired. So, you never know where life is going to take you.”His father was in the Navy, stationed out of Pearl Harbor during WorldWar II. But as a teenager in the1960’s, Hartsook definitely had not considered a military career. Starting as a Private, his experience ran the gamut: infantry, artillery, armor, medical, logistics, intelligence and more. “After my first three years,” Hartsook says, “I figured ‘I can dothis. This is for me.’ But if someone had told me that three years earlier, I would have said ‘There’s no way.’”TRANSITIONING WITH FAMILYAt 21 Harstook was married with a one-year old son, and the decision for Hartsook’s next career step was not an easy one. “Special forces is not really good for families because a lot of times you literally go to work, and you don’t come back—you deploy.” A sponsor would call his wife 24 to 48 hours later and let her know her husband had been sent to an unspecified location for an unspecified amount of time. “That was pretty much the standard gig for a while,” recalls Hartsook.In 1972, with his family’s futurein mind, Hartsook began attending college classes on-base. He graduated in 1976 with a degree in Organizational Management and then went to Officer Candidate Schoolin 1979. “I had achieved almost the top of the enlisted rank within eight years. I looked around one day, and I said, ‘I’m not going to go anywhere.’” A year later, Hartsook graduated officer candidate school.DONNING THE BERETDuring the late 70’s and early 80’s, Harstook says, “I did a lot of counter- terrorism before it became popular.” Describing what he calls the “normal stuff,” Hartsook says, “You’ve got adrenaline pumping when you kick that door open, because you do not know what’s on the other side. And that happens a lot in all special operations.” He continues, “I wouldn’t swap it. I got to go places and do things and see things that you literally, even today, could not pay to do. I kept an active mind, looking at it as a paid vacation with lots of adrenaline.”Harstook was sent to Nicaragua during the Contra War in the 1980s. That country was in the midst of revolution, and the U.S. and Russia used it as a Cold War battleground. The Russians backed the le ist/socialist Sandanistas, and the U.S. backedthe supposedly right-wing Contras, whom Harstook was assigned toassist. He recalls it, saying, “We went on a training mission and we came under re and we were in a re ght.I sent out a message for support, andI immediately got a message back.” But, he says, the message just didn’t make any sense. “I called a cease re and we set up a load signal to meetat a di erent location.” But then the unexpected occurred: “I met another me.” That is, Harstook met another U.S. Special Forces o cer assigned the same job but with the Sandanistas. “With the State Department, which is where your three letter agencies work out of, they support both. And that’s where you start seeing the corruption,” he seethes. “There’s only one reason we support both sides. It’s a win-win. It doesn’t matter who comes into power, does it?”FACING CHERNOBYLIn 1986 Harstook was embedded in Eastern Europe with an intelligence group gathering information on enemy infrastructure for what the military calls target folders. “In the event of a war, I could literally handit to you, a non-service member,and it would be so simplistic,” explains Harstook. “You could go to that utility site and destroy it. They were done all over that part of the world.” Harstook’s cover was as a grad student doing research for Ford Motor Company on the possibilityof building a new plant, possibly in Russia. One day, there was a flurryof activity with military vehiclesand personnel were flying about. “I didn’t know what was happening,” he recalls. Not knowing whether they’d been compromised, his team split up and headed in different directions.“With all the activity, you have a perception that the activity is there looking for you,” says the soldier.“If you’re compromised, you don’t know. It’s fear of the unknown. They have every right under the Geneva convention to kill you.” Harstook and his company didn’t find out until weeks later that the commotion wasI WAS AT CHERNOBYL WHEN IT MELTED DOWNcaused not by them, but by the fact that Chernobyl was melting down.Nonetheless, their flight from the country could never have been fast enough. Within 18 months, 6 of the12 men on that mission had diedfrom various cancers. “One of my sergeants, within a few months, had bubbles the size of quarters: big, black, purple bubbles on his face and his body.” The sergeant was takento Fort Bragg, where the boils were removed. “They said it had nothing to do with Chernobyl,” Hartsook wearily relates. “My blood is still weird.” Harstook contracted Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP),JANUARY FEBRUARY 2017 85