Special to The VOICE, Part 3 of 8
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Zacery Blaisdell, formerly of Ravensdale and Selleck and a specialist in the United
States Army, suffered severe injuries one year ago when his convoy came under enemy
attack in Afghanistan. He has spent most of the past year at Walter Reed Medical
Center in Washington, D. C. and it is expected that he will require another year
of treatment there. This is his story, presented in serial form, in eight parts.
THEY ENCOMPASS SUCH FLEETING TRANSITIONS. THOSE MARKERS BY which the stages of a
life are framed and measured: childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, civilian
life, a young man in the Army fighting overseas for his country. Like most soldiers,
Zac spent his formative years a world away—seven thousand miles to be exact—from
the battle zones in which he was to become so immersed.
Born in 1990 in Redmond, Washington, Zac lived with his parents and four older sisters
in the Selleck and Ravensdale districts outside Maple Valley. As a boy his first
love was baseball and his second was the military. At the age of about nine, he
began playing in Tahoma Little League on a team called the Hobart Hornets. His coach,
Bill Lovlien, remembers Zac as “one of those kind of guys that you just gravitated
towards.” An “obviously gifted athlete,” he was “very quiet,” “very, very strong,”
“tough” and “highly coachable.” Possessing a “fabulous crazy cannon” for an arm,
he was slotted in as a pitcher as soon as Lovlien “saw what he could do with a baseball.”
Another “tremendous bonus”—for Zac and for the entire team—was the unbounded support
of the Blaisdell family. At every game some combination of Zac’s parents and his
sisters always “showed up just to cheer him on.” The Blaisdells, according to Lovlien,
were “very tight” and extremely protective of one another. For a season or two Zac
also participated in Wolfpack Wrestling. And although he showed “absolutely outstanding
on the mat, as a guy who was not really confrontational,” it was a sport that in
Lovlien’s assessment held considerably less appeal for him than did baseball.
Boundary rules that permitted him to play athletics in Maple Valley required him
to go to school in Enumclaw. So Zac attended elementary school there until his parents
divorced when he was eleven. Along with their mother, he and his sisters relocated
to Circle Pines near Minneapolis while their father remained behind in Ravensdale.
Once in Minnesota, the Blaisdells moved into a house that shared a driveway with
the home next door and that driveway became a bridge joining two families: the Blaisdells
on one side and the Kreimans on the other. Eventually they became an almost blended
household.
The summer before the sixth grade and with few other boys their age in the neighborhood,
Zac and Jimmy Kreiman became instant and fast friends. They did everything together.
“They’d come home and eat dinner at my house,” Jimmy’s mother, Sandy Kreiman, remembers.
“And then they’d play for a while and go next door and eat again over there.” Says
Jimmy of Zac: “He has always been a nice guy, so much so that my family would sometimes
let him come over for dinner even when I wasn’t home for dinner myself.” Almost
every day after school it was basketball at Jimmy’s house and in the summers it
was football in the field behind the school. Fishing and hunting were yearlong obsessions,
including ice fishing in winter. Wherever the Kreimans went Zac went too. Sandy
has memories of the boys jumping on the trampoline in the front yard, swimming together
in the pool, riding their bikes everywhere, and snow forts and fights in winter.
When Jimmy sometimes assisted his father performing janitorial chores, Zac always
stepped up “to help out so that [Jimmy] could be done earlier and [they] could hang
out some more.” As they grew older, Zac and Jimmy were so close that at different
times they even dated the same girlfriend. “They were like brothers and would do
anything for each other,” Sandy recalls. The Kreimans adopted her son as “just another
one of Sandy’s sons,” Zac’s mom relates. In describing Zac, Jimmy characterizes
him as “a pretty quiet guy—unless you get him talking about the Seattle Mariners
or hunting—and an honest guy who could care less of what people think of him—even
though anyone who knows him would say they love him.”
Both families fostered in their children a strong love of country. “There is just
a lot of home pride in Zac,” Sandy explains, but she could just as easily be speaking
about her own kids. Zac came from a family with a tradition of military service.
His maternal grandfather had served stateside during the Korean War and one of his
uncles had been stationed in Germany in the 1980s. His stepfather had been born
on a military base in Fort Worth, Texas, and his step-grandfather had served in
Vietnam and passed away from cancer contracted through his exposure to Agent Orange.
The Kreimans could recite a similar history. And so, when the enlistments started,
one followed the other. Jimmy’s older brother, Matt Monjes, led the way. He enlisted
in the Air Force. Jimmy went next, joining him in the same unit (because of their
familial ties, they are not permitted to fly together). Their cousin and another
friend of Zac’s, Corey Stedje, also enlisted in the Air Force. Zac grew up watching
his cousins coming of age as well and, one by one, almost all opting for military
service, as did one of his sisters and his stepbrother. They both enlisted in the
Minnesota Army National Guard. According to Zac’s mom, “it was not like they knew
when one joined the other was going to too, but that is exactly how it went.”
It therefore came as no surprise when, on his seventeenth birthday and following
in the footsteps of Lee LeGrande, an older cousin from Selleck, Zac decided to go
Marine Corps. But when he went down to talk to the recruiter, he was told that it
might be several years before he could make Airborne, which he had his heart set
on. Unfazed, Zac simply turned around and cut a beeline for the Army recruiter in
White Bear Lake. Assurances that he would be allowed “to attend Airborne School
right away” clinched it. Zac remembers just one thought running through his mind:
“Yeah!” There was a hang up, however. Because of his age, the signatures of both
parents were required for him to enroll in the delayed entry program. His father
recalls a very matter-of-fact conversation about it. “Are you sure this is what
you want to do?” he asked his son. “Sure is,” Zac responded.
The Blaisdells were now all-in Army. With equal passion and commitment, the Kreimans
were all-in Air Force. Sandy Kreiman recollects a memorable pick-up basketball game
during which the competition between the two branches of service rose to new heights.
One day they were all out in front of her home shooting hoops. As they were playing,
she could hear loud hoorahs ringing out back and forth—one side for the Army and
the other side for the Air Force—as they sank their shots.
August 14, 2008. Two weeks after his eighteenth birthday and trailing two months
on the heels of his high school graduation, Zac left the familiar confines of home
and family and boarded a commercial airliner for Fort Benning, Georgia. There, nine
weeks of basic training were followed by another six weeks of Advanced Individual
Training (AIT). Zac specialized as a mortarman and he trained in urban warfare.
He took lessons in kicking down doors, removing occupants from rooms, and identifying
the injured and providing them with medical assistance. Zac then completed three
weeks of Airborne School during which he practiced parachuting out of airplanes.
He was not disappointed in the experience. “Airborne was fun,” Zac asserts, “and
the instructors shared with us all they knew about what to do—and what not to do.”
When he made his first jump, there was no hesitation on Zac’s part. “I just jumped,”
he says.
In March 2009, two weeks after finishing Airborne School and the pinning of his
Jump Wings, Zac joined his unit in Vicenza, Italy. He was assigned to a 136-soldier
company that with five other companies made up the 1st battalion, 503rd Parachute
Infantry Regiment (I-503) that with six other battalions comprised the 173rd Airborne
Brigade. From the start the troops knew where they were headed. After their arrival
in Italy, the members of Attack Company were brought into an auditorium. In the
presentation given, senior officers laid out the next eight months for them. It
was almost wholly to consist of training in preparation for their eventual deployment
to Afghanistan, the date of which would be changed several times, but was finally
set for November 2009. On the day his disposition orders came through, Zac phoned
home. “Mom, I’m being deployed to Afghanistan,” he declared, before soothing her
fears with the words: “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“I was just excited,” Zac says in recalling his emotions as he was flying into Afghanistan.
“I felt strongly about what I was doing for my country.”
Landing at Bagram Airbase, Zac took note of the Afghan landscape, which appeared
different from anything he had seen. “It was unreal,” he says. “There were mud huts,
camels, sheep, cows, and dogs” dispersed in any number of kaleidoscopic arrangements.
From Bagram by helicopter his unit was transported to COP Sayed Abad in an area
of Afghanistan that looked to Zac “just like northern Arizona where it gets snow.”
At the COP, Zac and the other newbies joined about three hundred American soldiers,
not all attached to the 173rd. Included were a number of Special Forces as well
as members of the Navy and Air Force. For the next ten months of a scheduled year-long
deployment, Zac and Attack Company spent the bulk of their time traveling out to
villages, talking to tribal elders and checking on what they needed, providing security
for the construction of schools and orphanages, and charting the whereabouts of
the enemy.
On his first call home, Zac offered a sanitized version of his duties: “Mom, I don’t
want to worry you,” he said. “I just go out on missions.” Another time, about halfway
through a two-week home leave, Zac suddenly announced: “I can’t wait to get back
to Afghanistan.” At first the comment hurt his mother’s feelings, but over time
she came to appreciate why he had said it. Her son yearned “to be back with his
men, to do his job, and keep them safe.”
During his deployment, Zac garnered the enduring respect of his fellow soldiers.
“We saw each other every day,” SPC Schultz remembers. “Blaisdell was an awesome
soldier. He never got in trouble. He was always joking, always carried his weight,
and never complained. He was an all-around good soldier who I would be glad to go
to the front lines with anytime.” Zac had two months remaining to complete in country—a
mere sixty days—until his scheduled return to Italy.
And then, on a routine call similar to ones he had been on scores of times and which
had brought him continuously under enemy fire, he drove into the village of Shekhabad
with the Combat Wombats of third platoon.
