PHOTO PROVIDED / THE VILLAGE REPORTER
FAMILY … Robert Lee (right) holds his oldest son, Mason (middle), and is pictured with his wife, Kelli Lee (left), a Bryan High School graduate, following a military ceremony during his 14-year career with the U.S. Army.
By: John Fryman
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
john@thevillagereporter.com
Growing up on the west side of Cleveland, Robert Lee was in his first year of college when he made the important decision to serve his country in the United States Army.
Lee, who is now 41 years old and currently resides in Bryan, had joined the U.S. Army and reported for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where his 14-year military career began.
After enlisting one month after the Iraq war had started in 2003, Lee would spend 17 weeks at Fort Leonard Wood and graduate from special unit training.
“I knew what I was getting into, and that’s why,” said Lee. “I just graduated from high school (Lakewood) and went to Cleveland State for one year.
“I really had no purpose in life because I was the youngest of four siblings. And my siblings weren’t going down the right path, nor the rest of my family. So that’s why I left Cleveland.”
He then added, “It just gave me a purpose, and I still had a lot of struggles with stuff that I went through growing up. It just got me out of that environment, which was most important. Then it threw me into about eight straight years of war.”
In 2004, he reported to Bamberg, Germany, where he was deployed into combat deployment duty in Iraq and southern Baghdad at a time when the Iraq Conflict had already begun.
“It was a pretty rough deployment, I would say, probably my worst one out of the three,” he said. After arriving in Iraq in 2004, Lee was there for the first election in Baghdad,
“It was a very crazy time with a lot of violence going on as well as with a lot of suicide bombers,” he admitted. “There were constant attacks on the base where we were right outside of Sadr City.”
Lee spent his time at Camp Cuervo, which was near Sadr City. He described it as a really famous bad area in the region.
“I remember going to a marketplace where I would be driving by a suicide bomber with body parts on the road,” he said. “That was a daily occurrence in Baghdad.”
He had arrived in Iraq with his company in April 2004 and remained there until one year later in 2005. “Being 21 years old at the time, I just didn’t know because I was so young back then,” he commented.
He credited the skills he learned in basic training for helping him survive and perform effectively during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s called basic training for a reason,” said Lee. “Just the basics of shooting, tactically moving, and then I think the biggest thing of basic training – it’s the breaking you down and building back up and realizing, ’Hey, you have a new purpose’ and it’s not about you anymore.”
Following his initial tour of combat duty in Iraq, Lee returned to Germany as he turned 21 years old at the time.
After further military training, Lee was deployed to Afghanistan, where he spent a full year working with detainees and transporting Taliban soldiers.
“Before we left Iraq and southern Baghdad, they had brought us in the chapel there and told us they had already slotted us to deploy to Afghanistan,” said Lee. “We essentially came back to Germany, went on block leave for 30 days, and then immediately started training to go to Afghanistan.”
Lee spent one year in Afghanistan from February 2006 to February 2007, where he was stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and was with the Third Special Forces.
“That was a crazy deployment,” he admitted. “I was doing detaining work involving prisoners of war or detainees from the enemy forces. We take them into custody, and then we keep them and prove a case against them.
“I did a lot of face-to-face interactions with the Taliban guys. I would fly out at 0100 in the morning on Chinooks or black hawks and go out to these fire bases all over the mountains in southern Afghanistan and just pick up these detainees.
“I would bring them back into the main detention facility in Kandahar, which would be like the CCNO (Corrections Commission of Northwest Ohio) of southern Afghanistan.”
Dealing with the Taliban was a ruthless experience for the 14-year Army veteran. “Something that I said over the years to people is that the Iraqi insurgence versus the Taliban insurgence, you just can see it in their eyes,” said Lee.
“They’re just a different type of evil, and if you take their Flexicols off, they would try to rip your eyeballs out. They were just more doing it…either being forced into it, or doing it for money, or being paid to plant roadside bombs. And the Taliban truly hated us for doing.”
After changing duty stations following his second tour of Afghanistan, Lee returned to the United States in February 2007, where he reported to Fort Drum, New York.
From there, he fell into a unit that was going to be deployed back to Afghanistan, where he was a staff sergeant at the time. Nine months later, he returned to Iraq for 15 months in November 2007.
“It was just very bad luck, I guess, as far as deployment tours,” admitted Lee. “But it happened to a lot of people back then.
“That was happening during the surge in Iraq, and a lot of people like I did, had to do back-to-back deployments. Essentially, like a five-year window, I had spent almost three years in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He returned to Fort Leonard Wood, where he was an instructor at a leadership academy for two years. He then enlisted for two more years and attended Airborne School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, becoming a jumpmaster in 2011, and he later went to drill sergeant school.
“That was probably the favorite time of my entire military career,” said Lee, who had spent the next four-plus years jumping out of planes. “I also became a platoon sergeant there and worked with the 82nd Airborne.”
Lee, along with his wife, Kelli (Rau) Lee, who is a graduate of Bryan High School, had encountered major health issues resulting in a medical disability discharge in 2017.
Their two sons, Mason, 10, who is a fourth grader, and Kodi, 8, who is a second grader at Bryan Elementary School, had complications from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
They also have twins, a son, Robert, and a daughter, Raelynn, who are six years old and in kindergarten at Bryan Elementary School.
He met his wife after his third deployment, when she had recently graduated from Bowling Green State University and was living in Cleveland at the time.
Lee is currently studying at Northwest State Community College and plans to attend BGSU to pursue a career as a middle school social studies teacher, reflecting his strong interest in history.