End Zone to War Zone
August 24, 2009 • By Amy Gwaltney, The Breeze
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Mickey Matthews blog on Richmond-Times Dispatch
There’s the old sports cliché that teams prepare for war. Especially in football, words like battle and attack are thrown around as often as the pigskin itself.
But a trip away from the gridiron to an actual war zone can be quite the reality shock.
Mickey Matthews learned this firsthand when he traveled to the Middle East this summer.
As part of a goodwill tour, the JMU football coach visited soldiers during a nine-day trip in scorching-hot July. He traveled between the tiny Arab emirate of Qatar to Kandahar and Sharana in Afghanistan with four other college coaches.
The trip began with a 13-hour plan ride to Qatar’s capital city of Doha from Virginia’s Dulles Airport. After a day-and-a-half stay, Matthews then boarded a C-130 military transport plane to Kandahar. It was during this flight Matthews saw what he described as one of the most amazing sites he’s seen. Peering below from10,000 feet above ground, he described seeing three or four massive rows containing about thirty tankers each lined up for oil along the Straits of Hormuz.
“It was just kinda stunning when you saw it from the air, all those lights on those ships,” Matthews said.
The reality of the war zone continued to sink in as scheduled items for the coaches were cancelled the first day due to a suicide bombing the night before at the entrance of the airbase.
“I thought it was a thunderstorm,” Matthews said.
On his way to a workout in the morning, Matthews stopped to talk with a few soldiers and found out that the attack had occurred about 800 meters from his sleeping quarters.
During visits to the local American hospital, Matthews spoke of a child brought in after being shot that morning. Matthews also said the hospital was holding a suspected member of the Taliban they intended to interrogate. They covered the man’s eyes and kept him in shackles to hide the operations from him.
Along with the surprisingly young ages of the soldiers, Matthews found many more NATO officials in some areas than he had expected. He was also “surprised to see so many women in the military.” Most of the soldiers were in the age range of twenty to twenty-five and since he interacts with college students every day, Matthews said “I was very much in my element.”
As described by Matthews, the media misrepresents the attitudes of U.S. soldiers towards the war. “In fact, I know they do, after you go over there, you really feel that way,” Matthews said.
All the soldiers know how long their deployment contract is and Matthews said “I didn’t talk to one soldier who didn’t think what he was doing wasn’t worthwhile.”
Matthews may have been overseas, but he wasn’t too far from home. He had the fortune of meeting several JMU fans. “Practically every JMU person we talked to were JMU football nuts,” Matthews said.
He also made a connection with a current duke’s brother. Senior defensive tackle Sam Daniels’s brother is a soldier whom Matthews met during the trip. While eating one day in the cafeteria, Daniels introduced himself to Matthews and presented him with a plaque.
Sam Daniels expressed his gratitude and defined Matthews as more than just a football coach. “I love coach Matthews anyway, I call him my dad. It’s just fun how he said ‘I’ma find him man’ and went over there and found him. That really made my brother’s day.”
Matthews loved visiting the hospital and soldiers and said traveling there satiated much of his curiosity about the Middle East. Watching the soldiers and seeing their young age, Matthews said “you really develop respect for what they’re doing over there, if its Sam’s brother, whoever it is.”
Though the traveling and time difference exhausted him, “there were a hundred reasons not to go, and only one reason to go: because it was the right thing to do,” Matthews said. “There’s a lot of people that have sacrificed a lot for our war efforts in the Middle East. I haven’t had to sacrifice, all I had to give up was some golf time.”
Contact Amy Gwaltney at breezesports@gmail.com
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