I bounced in the back of a helicopter on the way to the border between Jordan and Syria. We were the first group of Americans allowed to visit the distended displaced persons camp known as Rukban. Not far from this isolated camp in the northeast tip of Jordan stood a remote military outpost named Tower 22 used by U.S. and Jordanian forces to prevent ISIS smuggling through the open desert. Americans became more familiar with Tower 22 on 28 January 2024 when three U.S. soldiers (Sgt. William Rivers of Carrollton, GA; Specialist Kennedy Sanders of Waycross, GA; and Specialist Breonna Moffett of Savannah, GA) were killed by a one-way attack drone, courtesy of an Iranian-backed militia group.
As we flew to the Rukban camp in 2017, swelled to over 100,000 souls, the threat was ISIS. The war still raged in Syria and Iraq, threatening to spread further. The Ambassador was not yet allowed to visit Rukban, due to the threat of ISIS infiltration into the camp. That left a small group of U.S. Embassy representatives; as an Air Force lieutenant colonel working in the Embassy’s Defense Attaché Office, that included me.
On the journey, I took some time to get to know my fellow embassy mates. We were not the biggest U.S. mission in the world, but we had grown considerably, absorbing what had once been the U.S. Embassy in Damascus and housing folks who worked Iran. It was common to know faces, but not always names of everyone jammed into the too-small chancery building.
I made it a point on this trip to get to know our embassy escort from the Regional Security Office (RSO). Now a member of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security corps, his bearing spoke former military, as did his shades and extra gear. He was young, which told me he’d likely done tours somewhere nearby in the war on terror. I learned he’d been a Marine, spent time in Iraq.
I asked him where he was from originally. He said Kentucky. I smiled, telling him I was also born and raised in Kentucky. A small town up north. One most people had never heard of, called Union. He told me he was from Union.
Here we were, heading out to a remote part of the desert, to a massive camp of displaced persons hiding in the open no-man’s land between Syria and Jordan. And I ran into someone from my small town in northern Kentucky.
When I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, Union rated no high school or middle school. Just a small, multi-story, gray stone elementary school called New Haven. A mile down the hill we had a single gas station with glass pop bottles and candy bars – EZ Stop – the way you’d spell those shops. Years later, I’d learned Union grew, sprouted a high school called Ryle. Our embassy escort was young, much younger than me. I said to him, “You must have gone to Ryle High School, not out of town to Boone County like me.” We prepared to land; he checked his gear. “No, I went to the other high school in Union.”
We buried my brother in Kentucky in 2021. He’d died over 20 years earlier. It took us a while to give his remains a proper burial.
With my parents and I sharing a car, we decided to drive around, see our old Kentucky home. None of us lived in the Bluegrass anymore. It was like driving in a strange suburbia. Subdivisions supplanted fields. Track homes took over farms. Hybrids replaced horses. We neared our home on Sycamore, but couldn’t reach it. A cross-road cut us off, and there was no way to get from here to there. Even the GPS was stuck in the past.
We wandered, found a route, and parked across the single-lane street from our house. What was giant in my child’s mind was small now. A youngish man came out, wondering what we were up to. I shared I’d grown up here, in this house. The gentlemen’s wife joined him, and he said, “So did I.”
The young man was visiting his mom, having grown up in this exact house, a few families after we’d left. We talked about the former farms just through the woods across the street, how we’d walked those fields for hours. I recalled wooded tree forts, now backyards. I pointed out the window that’d been my room; he pointed to my sister’s room, said that one was his. We laughed at our shared childhood. He and his new family would be getting back to California soon, me back to North Carolina.
We drove away, glad we’d stopped. I have no doubt that later in our adopted homes, we’d separately share shared memories of our old Kentucky home to our kids, even as our children built memories for their later years.
I was born and raised on Sycamore Drive in Union, Kentucky. A small town with fields and woods and horses. But a yearning grew inside me, a desire for more. To see more, experience more, grow more. It led me to college in Colorado, to the Air Force, to a life all over the country and, eventually, the world. It led me to live in Israel and Jordan and visit dozens of other countries. Places like dreams – Saudi and Syria, Samarkand and the Silk Road.
But it started in Union. The small town that isn’t. And my life now. A simple life that wasn’t. I’m grateful for the echo of the fields, the lure of the woods, the floating flare of lightning bugs. I’m glad for what it gave me as I traveled the country and met my townspeople the world over. Sharing stories over Syria, remembering Kentucky. It was a great beginning.