By: Anna Wozniak
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
anna@thevillagereporter.com
“I like being a soldier, that’s why I keep doing it,” shared Lieutenant Colonel Thompson. A 1987 Hilltop gradu-ate, Lynn Thompson found himself at a dem-onstration in Washington D.C. in 1989 while attending Huntington College in Indiana, where he graduated from in 1991.
The protest was held in solidarity with those massacred at Tiananmen Square by the Chinese government for protesting.
“A bunch of college kids, they got run over by tanks, I mean they got slaughtered. So, I went to this war protest in D.C., and nothing happened. You know, the cops were like, ‘don’t block traffic, don’t beat each other up, don’t do bad things.”
“Besides that you’re cool, do whatever you want,’ and after that, I was like, ‘hey, America is kind of cool. I should do something.’ So, I ended up joining the Army in 1994.”
Between his graduation in ‘91 and his arrival at Fort Leonard Wood in ‘94, Thompson worked as a paramedic and ambulance driver.
This experience would come in handy when he deployed, as his first role was as an ambulance driver in Korea along the DMZ, or the “demilitarized zone.”
It was shortly after ar-riving that he came upon a stroke of luck, and realized his command-ing officer was none other than fellow Williams County resident Richard Augusta, who helped Thompson to feel at home within the dangerous, new world where he found himself picking up the dead, injured, and captured on a regular basis.
In 1995, after his year of service, Thompson returned to the continental U.S., and arrived at Fort Lewis in Washington state, where he worked as a medic during his battalion’s jungle operations training.
In 1998, Thompson came back home, and met his would-be wife, Lori Sander, who worked at Hilltop as a teacher. Life calmed down for Thompson, until the terrorist attacks on Septem ber 11, 2001.
“I joined the National Guard, was a Weekend Warrior, part-time sol-dier that was supposed to settle down, get married, and have a regular life. Do some fun stuff on the weekends. And then, 9/11 happened.”
“I was in my apartment, sleeping in be-cause I didn’t have to work that day. My boss called, and wanted to know where I was going, when I was going to be gone, and for how long I was going to be gone.”
“Like, I had no clue what she’s talking about. But then, she’s like, “turn on the TV and call me back.” I didn’t have a TV, so I went to my girlfriend’s house on the other side of town to watch her TV for five minutes and, you know, the World Trade Centers coming down, and the Pentagon is getting attacked, planes crashed into Pennsylvania. Yeah, so within a couple of weeks, I got activated, and I ended up doing Homeland Security.”
“You know how we have Homeland Security now in the form of the TSA? Those guys didn’t exist.”
And so, a day af-ter Lori became Mrs. Thompson, Mr. Thompson left from Fort Wayne to take his first step of many in his plight to help fight the war on ter-ror, and “stood in for the TSA until Homeland Security was set up in chief so everybody could sleep well at night.”
It was in 2003 that Thompson got activated to take another step in fighting religious extremism in the Middle East, and was deployed to Iraq for the first time.
At this point, he was serving as an infantryman second lieutenant, or 2LT, support platoon leader.
“So, my job was, one day I would drive from the port in Kuwait, up through the desert area of Iraq, and drop off the supplies the next day. Drive back to the port, pick up more supplies running back and forth constantly. My callsign was Road Runner, like we literally never stopped moving.”
It was during this part of his tenure he earned the name “Turn Around Thompson,” because whenever he got lost, he would turn right back around to where he could recognize his surroundings.
At first, his men mocked him a little for being so cautious, but that quickly changed.
Private First Class Jessica Lynch was captured by enemy forces, with Thompson sharing that those that “got captured,” “got lost and then they got captured. We didn’t get lost.”
“Every time I thought we were getting lost, I would just do a u-turn to get back to where I knew. My guys weren’t exactly loving it, like they would call me “Turn Around Thompson,” and would jokingly sing Bonnie Ty-ler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart with extra em-phasis on the line “turn around bright eyes.”
“And then, Jessica Lynch got captured, and nobody complained ever again.”
He was there a month before the actual invasion started, and was there for the initial ground strike.
“We were right there when the war started, the ground invasion. 3rd ID was a funny story.”
The 3rd ID (3rd Infantry Division) were gearing up to attack Baghdad at this time, in order to overthrow Saddam Hus-sein’s regime and destroy Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” under the direction of President George W. Bush.
“The 3rd ID was staged up on the border in Northern Kuwait, you know, just waiting to go. And our anti-tank company was up there with them. Then, my commander is like “hey, you need to go get a bunch of anti-tank missiles,” and they’re big.”
“He was like “you need to go get those and run them up to the border because everybody’s waiting on them.” I was like ‘yeah, okay, you know, whatever.’ So, we go get the missiles, and it takes us all day.”
“I got there, and at first, it was like everybody was taking a nap. Everybody was chilled out, like it was Mexican siesta time. And I’m like, “hey, I got your missiles. I’m here with your missiles,” and everybody ex-ploded.”
“Everybody was running around. They were tearing down tents, load-ing up trucks, and started tearing into the missile crates.”
“Me and my guys, we then ended up driving back South to Kuwait, and spent the next week and a half just shuttling people up into Iraq. We were like right behind the lead, just feeding guys in there.”
“We ended up at Taeil Air Base, just outside of Israel. And that’s where our battalion consolidated, and we defended that whole area.”
After that, Thompson served as what he called a “guard bum,” filling in with military duties across the continental U.S. while most troops were sent to the Middle East.
It was in 2008 that he found himself in Iraq for the second time, this time working in logistics at a joint base, handling the release and presentation of information during the coalition force’s crackdown on Shiite militant uprisings.
One of the largest is-sues he covered were the open burn pits that eventually led to the Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit (AH&OBP) Registry.
It was by these open burn pits, which were lit-eral pits emitting plumes of smoke, that Thompson got shot at the most.
“They would give peo-ple 20, 30, 50 bucks just to take potshots at us. Somebody shot an RPG at me, and that was fun.”
“I was driving, and the RPG came in like, right past me. Like a comet, right by my window. I watched it blow up in my rearview mirror.”
In 2009, Thompson returned home, joined the National Guard, and worked as a reporter for The Bryan Times.
“In 2012,” Thompson shared, “I got certified in information operations for the army,” which is when he started to work relaying information while working with those representing the army as a whole.
“But I didn’t do it for real until 2019, when I went back to Kuwait,” and worked as Direc-tor of Information Op-erations for Task Force Spartan, which worked hard to bring stability to the Middle East with regards to religious ex-tremist groups attacking minorities, U.S. allies, and one another.
It was during this period that Thompson shared “all hell broke loose,” when Iranian general Qasem Solei-mani was blown up with a cruise missile.
“Soleimani staged a protest against the U.S. Embassy, and that was supposed to trigger an-other war in Iraq. Yeah, well we ended up taking them out with a cruise missile, and everything erupts.”
“It was all about ‘what’s going on,’ ‘what are people saying,’ ‘how do we respond to it,’ ‘what is the truth,’ and then getting the truth out so people would know.”
It was after a year in Kuwait that Thompson returned home, and to a solemn sight.
“I didn’t even think COVID was a big deal. And then, when we got done, we went to the big headquarters building, where the grass is always clean, like you can’t even walk on the grass. But as soon as we got there, I saw that it hadn’t been mowed, with monster thistles that were like three feet tall. That nev-er happens on an army base. Everything in the Army has to be perfect, everything has to be per-fectly clean. When I saw nobody had mowed the grass, I was like, “holy crap. This is Armaged-don.” That’s when I knew COVID was real.”
He was then quaran-tined for two weeks be-fore returning home to his wife and two sons, Sam and Ben.
“You know, it was al-most like a POW camp. You can’t cross the line, you can’t leave the bar-racks, we couldn’t even order pizza! They really didn’t want to cross con-taminate.”
Once the world start-ed peeling away their masks, Thompson got vaccinated and arrived at Camp Atterbury, Indiana to depart for Kosovo, but tested positive for COVID, and was quarantined for five days.
Kosovo is a landlocked country, and the smallest belonging to the Balkans.
“The Cold War ended, and the USSR went away. Yugoslavia was then the country for that region. Yugoslavia failed, and when it became a failed state, all of the country’s little ethnic groups formed their own countries. Serbia was the biggest one.”
“Serbia broke away from Yugoslavia, and then Kosovo broke away from Serbia. And then, Serbia absolutely mauled them. Like genocide, ethnic cleansing, daily atrocities. The U.S. intervened and bombed the crap out of Syria.”
Due to this history, the residents of Kosovo are extremely thankful to U.S. troops for their stabilizing presence, with Thompson sharing how wonderful he was treated there.
“If you want to know what America is supposed to be like, just go to Kosovo, because they have that dream, the American Dream, and everybody aspires to that.”
“It was phenomenal. And like all of their major highways are named after US presidents…like the Fourth of July here, no big deal. I mean it is nothing compared to what they do over there.”
It has only been a couple of months since Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Thompson returned home from Kosovo, and he currently serves with the National Guard. When not activated, he works as a journalist for The Herald Republican newspaper in Angola.
Thompson has served under many positions and titles such as medic, ambulance driver, transporter, company commander, logistician, and Director of Information Operations; with ranks ranging from enlisted all the way up to Lieutenant Colonel, and doesn’t have plans to quit any time soon.
Thompson stays ready to return to duty, sharing that although he is “ancient by military standards” at 54, “nobody knows what’s going to happen, so I watch the news and wait for the phone to ring.”
