When Thomas Traylor headed to officer candidate school in 2004, his son was 9 months old. By the time Dad returned from a monstrous 22-month deployment to Iraq, Thomas Tayvian Traylor was nearly
DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 7:00 pm
When Thomas Traylor headed to officer candidate school in 2004, his son was 9 months old.
By the time Dad returned from a monstrous 22-month deployment to Iraq that included six months of training in Mississippi and a four-month extension triggered by the 2007 U.S. troop surge, Thomas Tayvian Traylor was nearly 4.
This is the new Nebraska National Guard, no longer a strategic reserve, but a wartime operational force.
And 1st Lt. Thomas Traylor is one of its warriors.
Traylor commanded 42 soldiers as a platoon leader with the Army Guard’s 134th Long Range Surveillance Detachment during 16 months in Iraq in 2006-07.
His soldiers acted as a quick reaction force defending the perimeter of Camp Anaconda near Balad, engaging in combat patrols and sending out small teams to stop insurgents from planting the deadly improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that kill and maim U.S. troops.
“We are succeeding (in Iraq),” Traylor says, and it’s important for the U.S. to remain on the offensive.
Even be “more aggressive at times and in certain places,” he says.
“By going after terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, the United States is assuring its own long-term security,” he says. “We’ve taken the fight to them and that’s one of the main reasons we haven’t been struck since 9/11.
“I’m very glad I went.”
His detachment’s lengthy deployment away from home was shared by the citizen-soldiers of Nebraska’s 1-167th Cavalry.
Traylor was gone much longer.
Except for a 3½-week period, he was away from home for nearly three years. Before his Guard unit was mobilized, he had enrolled in officer candidate school, then completed infantry officer training and ranger school.
Shortly after returning home, he packed his duffel and headed with his unit to Camp Shelby, Miss., for training prior to deployment to Iraq.
Unlike most Guard troops, Traylor is embarked on a military career. He’s added an Airborne patch to his uniform and has his eye on the possibility of flight school.
“I always had that drive to join the military,” he says.
It started when he was a kid in the little Alabama town of Wedowee, where he grew up as an Auburn Tigers fan.
After he graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Army at 19 and was stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., for three years.
In 2000, he and his wife, Jennifer, a Kansas State graduate, moved to Lincoln. He joined the Nebraska National Guard and set out in pursuit of a degree in psychology and sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduating in 2004.
Today, Traylor is executive officer for the 134th detachment and full-time officer in charge of a team spearheading pre-mobilization training assistance.
That’s a Nebraska Guard priority in the new world of troop mobilization.
“I’m a career soldier,” Traylor says. “I plan to stay more than 20 years, ideally 22 to 24 years.”
And, yes, he says, that will mean additional deployments.
“I’m OK with that,” he says. “But the family might not be ready.”
Jennifer has made it all possible, he says, and she’ll have the final say on flight school.
“My wife is phenomenal,” Traylor says. “I had no worries while I was gone because she picked up where I left off.”
More than just wife of the year, he says, “she is the wife of the years.”
With the presidential election year debate heating up over proposals for phased withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, Traylor expresses his concerns.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that there still is work to be done to assure security and stability in Iraq,” he says.
“I do not believe we should put a time limit on it. Or a deadline.”
And what would he recommend?
“I would kick soldiers out into small outposts or patrol bases throughout Iraq, focusing on hostile neighborhoods and other needed areas.
“The overall objective anymore in Iraq is no longer to take a hill or storm a citadel, but to win over the people.
“The challenge we as American soldiers face is that this new way of war needs a new kind of warrior — and lots of them.”
Some soldiers who served with him in Iraq are “getting out (of the Guard) to finish their college education or because deployment was too tough on their families,” Traylor says.
But others are re-enlisting and being joined by new volunteers, he says.
There still is work to be done, Traylor says.
“Would we rather have that threat here or over there?” he asks.
The second World Trade Center tower, he says, needs to be “the last tower to fall in America.”
Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.