University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Still In Harm's Way
June 16, 2003 | Men's Basketball
June 16, 2003
By Adam Lucas
No offense, but Carolina assistant basketball coach Joe Holladay may not get to your email right away. That's what he explains as he sits in his Smith Center office, a room that has four entirely bare walls except for a framed photo of Steve Hale, which was delivered to Holladay by the building's maintenance crew. Holladay was Hale's high school coach in Jenks, Oklahoma.
Holladay is pointing at his email inbox, which is filled with the bold type of unread messages. Only one message, in fact, is in the regular type that denotes a read message. The header lists it as being from "Capt. Mathew Holladay."
The coach looks at you and smiles. "That's the only thing I look for when I check my email," he says. "There's a lot of junk there. But I'm so excited when I get one of those emails."
Holladay has not talked to Capt. Holladay, his only son, since early March. He was not able to spend Father's Day with him. Mathew is somewhere in Iraq, serving his country as an Army Ranger. So these emails are the only connection Joe Holladay has to his son.
Which explains the smile.
"He told us that he wouldn't be able to tell us when he went in," Holladay says. "He's on a security alert, so he told us we would just see it on CNN. I thought he was kidding. But that's exactly how I saw it. I saw him jumping into Iraq on CNN."
Most of us are not equipped to understand exactly what "jumping into Iraq" means. It's not like "jumping into the bathtub" or "jumping in the car" to go to Wal-Mart.
Jumping into Iraq is different. Let Capt. Holladay explain it.
"When you parachute at night it all depends on the illumination of the moon," Capt. Holladay writes in an email from Iraq. "It can be incredibly difficult to find your group of 20-25 people that you are working with when they were probably on 10 different planes and scattered across a patch of ground about two or three miles long. Sometimes you spend all night trying to link up together. However, I can assure you that in combat, the darker the better. If you can't see anything, then that means they probably can't see you, and hence, can't shoot at you."
The "hence" is important. Not being shot at is a worthy goal. Especially when you have a father and mother at home who are following the conflict's every move, who are checking their email in the hopes that your name might pop up in the inbox, and if it doesn't, not bothering to read any of the rest of the messages.
Joe Holladay attended a press conference in Chapel Hill on April 14 to announce Roy Williams as the new Tar Heel head coach. A little over two weeks earlier, his son--who has 24 jumps--had parachuted into northern Iraq.
"The conditions on the ground were miserable," Capt. Holladay writes. "The area we were in was flooded, and extremely muddy. We had very minimal gear, and no tents or shelter for the first week or so. I know everyone thinks it is hot here all the time, but there was snow on hills around us when we arrived, and we FROZE for about the first three weeks until it started to warm up at the end of April."
What kind of person wants to do that? What kind of person volunteers to go to Army Ranger school?
The kind who has several people try to talk him out of going to West Point, but finds that instead of being dissuaded, it only makes his desire stronger. The kind who finishes Officer Basic Course after graduation from college and declares their candidacy for Ranger school, which lands him in a special group of "pre-Ranger" students supervised by a Ranger more fiery than Gary Williams after a technical foul. That group started at 5:30 every morning for five months.
Of those who made it through the five months, the top 12-15 received a slot at the Ranger course in Ft. Benning, GA. There are three phases: at Ft. Benning, in the mountains of the Tennessee Valley Divide, and in the swamps of the Florida Everglades. The course takes 70 days.
After one week, Holladay's class of 300 of the toughest men the Army could find was down to slightly over 200.
"Rangers don't talk about it," Joe Holladay says. "They don't tell you any details. You just know that he starts out weighing 190 and comes back weighing 165. I went to Ft. Benning for graduation, and you talk about a beat-up bunch of kids. But they were so proud."
As his father predicted, Capt. Holladay doesn't reveal many details about the Ranger course. He writes only, "You spent a good deal of time learning that your body and mind are capable of much more than the average person knows, often going days with little sleep or food. All the while you are constantly being tested and evaluated."
The testing can seem endless. But it pays off in times like these, when Capt. Holladay is approaching the three-month anniversary of his deployment into Iraq. He's been busy in the Middle East. Ask him about his daily routine, and he responds this way, with a touch of the sly humor also evident in his father:
"I am part of a Combat Engineer company that has 2 main missions. First, we jump in somewhere with our equipment and repair damaged airfields so that following forces can enter the theater of operations. I am still amazed every time I see 30 and 40 thousand pound bull dozers and graders falling out the back of an airplane 2000 ft up. Initially, we were maintaining and repairing the airfield in north, which opened the northern front for the U.S. Secondly, we provide demolition and explosives expertise. In offensive operations, we spent time blowing opens doors of buildings or walls and creating surprise attacks for the infantry. While we have been here, we have also spent a great deal of time destroying Iraqi military equipment and weapons caches with our explosives. We get a lot calls from people with unexploded bombs in their backyard that need to be destroyed."
That's a call you don't want to make. Or receive. Unless you're a Ranger.
What's amazing is that Capt. Holladay delivers this description without the slightest hint of complaint. He's just describing his job, talking about destroying unexploded bombs like the rest of us talk about going to work in a cubicle.
Although the war in Iraq has slowly slipped off the front page of American newspapers, it's still a very real event for Capt. Holladay. Three days ago, two mortars exploded 100 meters from where he was standing. Last week four of his men were shot and had to be evacuated.
Capt. Holladay plans to make a trip to Chapel Hill once he returns home--when he's looking forward to "food that does not have a shelf life of over seven years, weather that is not over 100 degrees by 10 in the morning, and being able to walk down the street without a bulletproof vest and helmet"--in December, and his dad still reads most every article he can find on the conflict, hoping to get any nugget of news while also hoping to avoid getting too much news. It's like trying to hide your eyes when you pass a car wreck, only to always have them peek through. You want to know, but maybe sometimes you don't want to know.
So when you are flipping through the paper today and skimming over the latest reports from the Middle East, offer up a quick word for Capt. Mathew Holladay (who closes his email message with "Go Tar Heels!") and the rest of his compatriots still in harm's way. There's a Tar Heel over there who appreciates the sentiment. And a Tar Heel over here, sitting at his desk in the Smith Center checking his email, who appreciates it as well.
"I can be as hawkish as anybody," Joe Holladay says. "But I'm ready to get those guys out of there. I just want to get him home."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly, click here.
