Iraq shapes the Assyrian cadet's background, future

Lance Cunningham wants to be an officer. He wants to lead troops, like his grandpa did. He wants to serve the U.S. in his mother's homeland.

By REID FORGRAVE
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
DesMoinesRegister.com

December 10, 2006

Lance Cunningham, muscle-bound and a shade over 6 feet tall, looks in the mirror in the foyer of his parents' home in West Des Moines.

The cadet smooths his crisp gray dress uniform, straightens his service cap and then heads for the front seat of a Toyota Highlander. An Air Force cadet is driving, and a Naval Academy midshipman is in the back.

The Valley High School graduates are headed to Dowling Catholic High School, one of five area schools they will visit to tell students about military academies.

The story Cunningham can tell these high school students is impressive enough. He gave up a promising college soccer career when he felt the higher calling of joining the military. He aims to lead infantry troops on the front line after he graduates as a second lieutenant in 2009. He is studying the Arabic language to prepare for what he calls the inevitable: heading to war in the Middle East, probably Iraq.

But it's beyond the surface, in tracing Cunningham's bloodlines, when his story becomes more intriguing.

Each year, the United States Military Academy at West Point in upstate New York admits 1,300 of the nation's finest high school graduates. Only 800 will graduate from its grueling program.

Like Cunningham, whose paternal grandfather retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Marines after flying fighter jets in two tours in Vietnam, many cadets have relatives in the military.

But it's the other side of his family where Cunningham's bloodlines make him unique. His mother's grandfather - an Assyrian Iraqi - was a soldier in the Iraqi army when it was under British control in the 1930s. His mother, one of 14 children in a Christian Iraqi family, left for the United States just before Saddam Hussein began his rule.

As he goes from class to class at West Point, where statues of Washington and MacArthur and Eisenhower dot the 16,000 acres along the Hudson River, it's almost like Cunningham - competitive, focused, a born leader - was destined to walk this path.

And despite reports from Iraq showing a deteriorating security situation, the thought of being deployed to Iraq doesn't weigh heavily on him.

"I want to go to Iraq," he said. "I feel like I'm part of those people. ... Part of me realizes how serious this is, and I could die doing it. But do I want to die driving to soccer practice? Or do I die jumping on a grenade to save a buddy's life?"

Lance knows which way he'd prefer to die.

Leaving Iraq

Lance's story begins decades before his birth, when a family living in the largest city in one of Iraq's most important oil-producing regions added one more daughter.

The year was 1955. Juliet Geeso - later Juliet Cunningham, who would become a vice president at a Des Moines structural engineering company - was the most recent addition to this Kirkuk family that ended up with 14 children.

When she was 8, the Baath Party swept to power in a bloody revolution. She was in high school when Baathists nationalized the country's oil companies. But even with Baathists in power, the country retained a sense of modernity. Cunningham has pictures of herself wearing high boots and miniskirts, cheering on her college basketball team, drinking cognac with friends.

Her father, a chef who worked for British expatriates, died in 1977, the same year Geeso graduated from the University of Baghdad with a degree in petroleum and mining engineering. She needed work, and so, even though she didn't want to stay in Iraq, she took a prestigious job with the Iraqi National Oil Co. in Kirkuk, immediately becoming the family's breadwinner.

Cunningham wanted out of Iraq.

"There was no future in Iraq because the government controlled everything," Cunningham said. Christians "were a very small minority, maybe 5 percent back then, and even less now."

She had dreamed of living in America. It was, she'd heard, a place of great opportunity for hard workers like herself. As Cunningham waited in Jordan in the summer of 1979 for her immigration papers to be processed, news came out of her home country: Saddam Hussein had ascended to the presidency and was executing Iraqi leaders who opposed him. The next year, Iraq began its protracted war with Iran.

"I had no idea this was going to happen," she said, speaking of Saddam's rule. Cunningham knew she didn't want to return to Iraq.

"It was like being released from prison. I just felt Iraq wasn't the best place for me and my family."

She went to Newport News, Va. There, the engineer took a job waiting tables. She married an Iraqi who was a naturalized U.S. citizen after he agreed to help her get citizenship.

She took a drafting job at city hall, where her boss was a young engineer from southern Missouri named Colby Cunningham. Between work and studying for their master's degrees together, they became close. But because she was married - however unhappily - he kept his feelings to himself.

When Colby Cunningham moved to Houston, he left behind a phone number - just in case.

Two years later, after leaving her first husband, Juliet called him for help finding a job in Houston.

She came to visit. He took her out for the nicest dinner he could afford. They went on a road trip to San Antonio. During her visit, Cunningham let his feelings slip - "I love you" - and Juliet knew he was sincere.

Five months later, he proposed. On Aug. 18, 1984, they married. A year later, James Lance Cunningham was born.

Family history

When Lance Cunningham was growing up, he learned about his ancestry.

At home, his mother cooked stuffed vegetables, curries and kabobs - his favorite. The recipes came from a favorite cookbook, "Delights from the Garden of Eden," which included the history behind Iraqi cuisine.

In 1989, when Cunningham was 3, the family visited Iraq. Not long after their visit, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

As she sat in Iowa and watched the first Gulf War on television, a queasy feeling sat in his mother's gut. All five of her brothers were fighting for Iraq.

After the war - all of her brothers survived - the rest of her family began leaving Iraq. Some applied for a U.N. refugee program and ended up in New Zealand, Switzerland, Denmark. Her mother immigrated to the United States in 1992.

Over the years, others in her family came to America. Lance got to know Iraqi customs and meet Iraqi family members, but his Iraqi heritage was never a big deal. Iraq was merely some place his mom once lived.

Far more interesting was his paternal grandpa, a Missouri farm boy. Larry Cunningham flew fighter jets in Vietnam and loved telling his grandson stories about his 23 years in the Marine Corps.

"It all started with Grandpa," Lance Cunningham said of his own military career. "Just being around these type of stories, it always sounded like a pretty cool thing. He's got a never-ending book."

Grandpa talked about going in the Naval Aviation Cadet program in 1954. He talked about being a Marine captain in the 1960s and living in Japan. He talked about the exhilaration when his Marine squadron beat an elite Air Force unit in flight exercises at an Air Force base. He talked about his two 13-month tours of Vietnam, when he flew two to four sorties a day supporting Marine and Army troops on the ground. He talked about planning the recovery of a captured U.S. container ship at the end of the Vietnam War.

"It was like you never had to grow up," Grandpa would tell Cunningham of his military service. "You're playing a team game out there."

It wasn't the thrill of blowing things up that excited Cunningham. It was the idea of his grandpa leading other men.

In 2003, when he was a junior at Valley High School, his mother's family gathered around the televisions to watch American troops depose Saddam. They watched with optimism as Saddam's statue was brought down in Firdos Square.

Cunningham was excited, too. He never imagined, though, that he could be heading there with the military.

Altered passion

In high school, Cunningham was focused on soccer.

He wanted to play collegiate soccer, then continue to professional soccer.

He was injured in a game during his junior year at Valley, eliminating his hope of earning a scholarship to play in Division I, the highest collegiate level of athletics. He went to Drexel University in Philadelphia to play soccer without a scholarship.

During his freshman year, Cunningham lived in a dormitory with dozens of students in the ROTC. He was training for soccer three hours a day, and here were these guys, training just as hard to be military officers. Cunningham's lifelong soccer dream started sounding empty.

"These guys are so focused on making the world a better place, and I'm so focused on soccer," Cunningham recalled thinking. "There's got to be so much more in the world than being good at soccer."

So he joined the ROTC and followed their routine: waking up at 5 a.m. daily, taking ROTC classes on top of a regular class load, spending one weekend a month at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

At the same time, he kept hearing his sister, a year younger than he, talk of narrowing her college choices.

Sarah Cunningham, a track athlete, was deciding between two schools: Yale and West Point. She had a letter of guarantee from West Point as well as a nomination from Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa. All her talk about West Point was getting under her brother's skin.

When he came home for Thanksgiving, he took his father aside.

"Dad, I belong at West Point," he said.

And so, after Thanksgiving, Cunningham got the courage to walk into the Drexel soccer coach's office.

"With the recent events happening around the world, and with my ethnic background, what's taking place in the Middle East is really important to me," he told his coach. "And I've decided that becoming the best military officer I can become is one of the most important things in my life." The coach called the West Point coach, and soon, Cunningham accepted a transfer.

Sarah Cunningham decided on Yale, where she is a sophomore. Her West Point nomination was transferred to her brother.

What Lance Cunningham had realized was that his lifelong passion for soccer wasn't really a passion for soccer at all. It was a passion for working together as a close team - the same thing he loved from his grandfather's war stories.

"That's what West Point is all about: developing future leaders," Cunningham said. "I just love that team aspect. I thrive on that."

And what team is more close-knit, he thought, than the Army?

West Point life

At West Point, Cunningham's Iraqi ancestry is a big deal.

"They all ask me about it," Cunningham said, "because, inevitably, we will be deployed out there."

Cunningham, now in the middle of his second year, has been on the West Point dean's list every semester, even though he was a B student in high school.

At West Point, there's a military grade, a physical fitness grade and an academic grade. Cunningham has taken classes on boxing and Brazilian jujitsu, on psychology for leaders and on Shakespeare, on American politics and debate. His favorite class was one on close-quarters combat. He plays for the soccer team, and teammates have a nickname for the quick, physical Cunningham: They call him Scud.

During military training this past summer, Cunningham lived in the forests near West Point for two months. It was an intense training camp with realistic scenarios from Iraq, run by a battalion from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had recently returned from action. Soldiers set up checkpoints, checked for improvised explosive devices, and reacted to ambushes with laser guns and blank rounds. They sought out weapons caches and rolled into hostile situations with a quick-reaction force. They learned Iraqi culture and basic Arabic from Middle Eastern immigrants. They were dropped in a landing zone by helicopter and took control of a pretend Iraqi town.

"It was like controlled chaos," Cunningham said. "And it really taxes on you."

During the academic year, cadets average less than six hours of sleep a night. They typically work out for two hours between the end of classes and dinner. Cadets are loaded up with homework. The social life is nil.

It's all preparation for the future, when Cunningham plans to spend his five-year military commitment in one of the most demanding jobs in the Army - an infantry officer on the front lines.

His parents are proud. They worry about his safety, sure, but they know whatever will happen will happen.

His grandpa feels differently about Lance heading to Iraq.

"It bothers me more than I can tell you because it's such a poorly run war," Larry Cunningham said. "We can't win this war. It bothers me greatly that he likely will be going out there."

But Lance Cunningham looks at his grandfather and sees a man who fought in a war many times more dangerous than Iraq. His grandfather and tens of thousands of others risked their lives for the United States. Cunningham can't think of one reason why he shouldn't do the same.

"The last thing we can do right now is straight-up leave," he said. "The fact is, we're there right now. We can stay and win it, or we can leave and make it 10 times worse."

"It's America's sons and daughters," Cunningham said. "It's the greatest job there is. And what's going to bring them back alive? That's my job."