Iowa Army National Guard recruiters really earned their pay in December 1998 when I enlisted. My unit, the 834th Engineer Company, in Davenport, Iowa, was packed with PFCs and buck privates. We were young, inexperienced, and overconfident.
Through the years, Staff Sgt. Eric “Mac” McArthur and I served in the same squad, participating in the same combat or explosives training and stuck on the same crappy work details. McArthur was a soldier’s soldier. He was an accurate marksman with his M16, and he’d mastered our machine guns. He understood the layout and function of our explosives systems, and he was proficient in the tedious but crucially important detonation cord knots upon which those systems depended. He was deployed two more times after he and I served a year in Afghanistan. He earned a bronze star.
But what his service record doesn’t tell you is how much he supported his fellow soldiers and took care of the troops he led.
“No matter how bad we were in the suck, I never heard Mac complain. He had that much positivity that even in the cold, rainy, sleep-deprived days, he was someone you wanted on your team,” retired Staff Sgt. Allen Callender said. He is absolutely right. I remember a cold, hard rain on one training exercise. McArthur wouldn’t rest until he was sure all his soldiers had a relatively dry place to rack out.
Once, McArthur and I were assigned to check on one of our old Army trucks.
“Yeah, it looks like a leaky inhiberator,” I told him. McArthur, like me, was not a mechanic and noted the fictional part I’d made up on the maintenance form. He was a good guy for jokes, but he also helped with the serious stuff. I was 20 years old when I enlisted, and my father was killed in an accident not long after. My struggle with grief affected my service, but Mac offered kind support and encouragement.
He was a dedicated soldier and later a police officer.
“The guy was f**king awesome. His love for his soldiers was something that every good leader should have strived for,” said SSG Jacob Pries, also a former soldier and police officer. “I remember when he called me when he got hired as a police officer … he was so f**king proud and excited, and you couldn’t help but feel that joy and excitement yourself. He was infectious with how he loved those around him, but make no mistake, Mac was a f**king fighter. He definitely could throw down to protect those around him.”
All of us soldiers sometimes got on one another’s nerves during training or living with zero privacy in a big open bay barracks. But that close, constant companionship, especially when it involves mutual trust and dependency in difficult situations, produces a special kind of friendship. This life that once saw us together for training, meals, and living led us apart in later years, and I hadn’t spoken to McArthur nearly as frequently as I had during our service. But when we were in touch, he was always happy to talk or help.
McArthur was only 45 years old when he died. I’ve waited too long to write about it. Sometimes words are inadequate, and it’s hard to know what to say. Or maybe I just don’t want to believe it’s true. He had a wife and two children who undoubtedly miss him deeply. But he also had a second, larger family, consisting of the hundreds of soldiers and law enforcement officers who served alongside a good soldier and a great man. It was an honor.
Trent Reedy, author of several books, including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.