Great Army story and how important the NFL is to them overseas

[NYG27]

Trust me, it's not a Giants story but more so a behind the scenes view of how important the NFL is to our troops fighting in Iraq. A great human interest story overall to those interested in reading it....

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MARCH 26, 2008

EAST RUTHERFORD - Dozens of people were gathered around the television, their emotions churning as the Giants and New England Patriots traded the lead in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLII. When Eli Manning threw a big completion or the defense sacked Tom Brady, the room erupted in cheers. After Randy Moss put the Patriots ahead with a late touchdown, quiet concern enveloped the room. A few minutes later, when Plaxico Burress caught Manning’s game-winning touchdown pass, a wild celebration erupted.

That scenario played out in thousands of places where Giants fans gathered to watch their team’s upset victory in the Super Bowl. But this congregation of Giants faithful met not in New Jersey or New York or any other familiar location where fans usually get together. Instead it was in Bagdad, where Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the former Commander of the Multi-National Corps in Iraq, packed almost four dozen people into his office to watch his beloved Giants. Odierno was second in command in Iraq to Gen. David Petraeus.

“I have an office in Baghdad and we had a nice TV,” Odierno said today during a visit to Giants Stadium. “I had about 45 people in there watching the Super Bowl and in the other office was my Chief of Staff, who is a New England Patriots fan. And he had three people in his office - I just want to point that out. It was really funny. Everybody was yelling, it was like we were at the game. Everybody was very excited, yelling, and screaming. That is the way it was throughout Iraq, people got together to watch the Super Bowl.”

None watched more intently than Odierno, who became a fervent Giants fan while growing up in Rockaway, New Jersey, a community about 30 miles from the stadium. Odierno met Tom Coughlin through Mike Sullivan, the Giants wide receivers coach who, like Odierno, is a graduate of West Point. Odierno frequently writes Coughlin and he has visited Giants practices. Last August, at the Giants’ annual kickoff luncheon in Manhattan, Coughlin read a letter he had received from Odierno which said, in part, “I wish you the best of luck this year. You will have a fan here in Iraq and I will be watching whenever I can. Push them hard and remind them, ‘Team First.’”

At Coughlin’s invitation, Odierno and his son, Tony – also a West Point graduate who served in Iraq – today lunched with the coaches, toured the stadium and had their picture taken with the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

General Odierno recently left Iraq after serving there for 30 months. Though they are in a danger zone thousands of miles from home, the men and woman of the armed forces are hungry for information about the NFL.

“Throughout the week during the football season everybody talks relentlessly about their favorite team and what it means to them,” Odierno said. “It is something that takes their minds off many of the tough situations that they are in with their love for their team, their love for their individual player on that team, and the banter that goes on between individuals really releases a lot of the pressure that is on a lot of our great soldiers and Marines while they are deployed. The NFL plays a huge role in that.”

Those serving in Iraq can watch NFL games on the Armed Forces Network. The kickoff times force dedicated viewers to alter their schedules. When it’s 1 p.m. on the East Coast, it’s 10 p.m. in Iraq. Sunday and Monday night games being at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning.

“The soldiers get up to watch them religiously to see their team play,” Odierno said. “Soldiers, when they can, get together in large groups to watch games. They would show three or four games every Sunday. Of course, with the time change, most of them are in the middle of the night, but many soldiers get up to watch them when their favorite team is playing.”

“It is a big deal because it is kind of like a little taste of being back home,” said Tony Odierno, who lost his left arm on Aug. 21, 2004 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his Humve. “When you are over there fighting, anything you can get that resembles what you enjoyed back in the United States you love. Football is one of those things. It is just something that reminds you of home and brings you a little closer while you are over there.”

Gen. Odierno said he was able to watch four Giants regular season games in 2007, plus all of their four postseason games. Like every other NFL fan in Iraq, he also followed the fortunes of his team on the internet. And though he was in the middle of a war, Odierno said his emotions regarding the Giants were the same there as they would be if he was sitting in section 112. He was delighted when the Giants won, downcast when they lost.

“The other thing you get to do over there is talk trash to your friends,” Odierno said. “That is very important. I was telling Coach Coughlin earlier that my Corps is in Texas, so when we beat the Cowboys that was a really big deal for them. And my Chief of Staff is a big Patriots fan, so when we won the Super Bowl that was a big deal. You get to boast a little bit about your team, but that is what makes it fun. The banter that goes on is very, very important, I think. Emotions, sure, you have the up and down emotions with your team over there as well.”

Odierno’s earliest Giants memories are listening to Marty Glickman and Al DeRogatis on the radio broadcasts in the 1960s. He used to attend the annual preseason game the Giants played against the Philadelphia Eagles in Princeton’s Palmer Stadium. Odierno also went to several regular season games in Yankee Stadium.

The general believes many parallels exist between the armed forces and football.

“To get anything done in the military you have to work together,” Odierno said. “It is not a game of one individual doing it, it is about team, it is about having total dependence on the person to your right, the person to your left, the person behind you, the person in front of you, and it is life and death. Football is the same way. To be successful in football it is not an individual game. You have to be totally dependent on and understand completely that person next to you who is going to help you be successful. I think football and the military parallel each other a lot, even in the strategy: air game, ground game, mixture of both, how do you mix it up, how do you get effects, it is all very common. It is also about sacrifice and leadership. It is all the same things.”

The champion Giants, of course, had another important Iraq connection. U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Greg Gadson, who lost both of his legs in May when an IED (improvised explosive device) detonated while he was serving in Iraq, was introduced to the team by Sullivan. He spoke to the Giants prior to their first victory of the season, in Washington, was an honorary captain for the NFC Championship Game in Green Bay and was on the sideline for the Super Bowl.

“I know Greg Gadson very well,” Odierno said. “Greg Gadson was a Battalion Commander in Iraq, so obviously he worked for me there. I remember the day he was injured. I have talked to him since he was injured, so I absolutely followed it. First of all, Greg Gadson is an extraordinary human being, an extraordinary leader, was as a Battalion Commander and still is today. I did read about (Gadson’s role with the team) and I wrote both John Mara and Coach Coughlin, thanking them. And they thanked me back because of everything Greg did for them, which didn’t surprise me.”

Odierno has been nominated to be Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. He has to testify before Congress next week at his confirmation hearing. Odierno will not return to Iraq in the near future.

“I will be stationed in Washington D.C.,” he said.

Oh no, it’s the heart of Redskins country. He’ll have to invite some fans over to watch Giants games on his television.

[NYG27]

Again, for those interested, here's the background story on Lt. Col. Greg Gadson, who was mentioned in the article above....

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His name is Lt. Col. Greg Gadson and he used to wear No. 98 for the Army football team and was with the Second Battalion and 32nd Field Artillery, on his way back from a memorial service for two soldiers from his brigade when he lost both his legs to a roadside bomb in Bahgdad. It was the night of May 7, 2007, and Lt. Col. Gadson didn't know it at the time because he couldn't possibly have known, but it was the beginning of a journey that brought him to Lambeau Field Sunday night.

He was there as an honorary co-captain of the Giants, there on the sideline at Lambeau because this Giants' season has become his season now and he wasn't going to watch from some box. This is a Giant at the Super Bowl worth knowing about, as much as any of them.

"Me being a part of this team," Gadson was saying Monday night from his home in Virginia, having made it back there from Green Bay, "really starts with the team I played on at West Point."

He played at West Point between 1985 and 1988, and one of his teammates was Mike Sullivan, who played cornerback and some safety and is now one of Tom Coughlin's assistants with the Giants. When Sullivan and so many other of Gadson's teammates found out what had happened on the night of May 7, found that Gadson had first lost his left leg to arterial infections and then his right, it brought that old Army team back together.

"My injury turned out to be a catalyst event," Gadson said. "These were guys who hadn't talked in years, but now were rallying around me, and my family. Some of us had stayed in contact, but not to any great degree. But now an incident in a war reminded us that we were still brothers."

Sullivan visited Gadson at Walter Reed, came back in June, this time with a No. 98 Giants jersey, Gadson's own name on the back, signed by several Giants players. When Sullivan left that day in June, he said to Gadson, "What else can we do?"

Greg Gadson said he'd love to take his family to a Giants game.

It was the Giants-Redskins game, in Washington, third Sunday of the season, Giants 0-2 by then. The tickets were arranged and then the Friday before the game Mike Sullivan called and asked if Gadson would be interested in addressing the team on Saturday night.

Gadson's wife Kim drove him to the Giants' hotel. Lt. Col. Greg Gadson, Second Battalion, 32nd Field Artillery, old outside linebacker from Army, spoke to the Giants. And just as no one knew that the Giants would begin a 10-game road winning streak the next day, just as no one knew this could ever become a Super Bowl season, no one in that room including Gadson himself knew that the soldier in the wheelchair was joining the season that night.

"I just spoke from the heart, as a soldier and as a former football player," he said, "for about 10 or 15 minutes. I talked to them about appreciating the opportunities in their lives, how special and privileged they were, how everybody needs to understand what they truly have. And I talked to them about the power of sports in people's lives, especially soldiers' lives, how many times I'd watched soldiers get up in the middle of the night after a 12-hour shift if there is a chance to watch a game, or how soldiers would do anything to watch a game before they went on that kind of shift.

"I told them that of course after all the exteriors had been stripped away, they played the game for themselves. But that they had to play the game for each other. Then I talked about myself, how my old teammates came to my need, and how I was reminded again the power of a team, the emotional commitment teammates have for each other, that when a team finds a way to do things greater than they thought they could do, that they couldn't have done individually, that a bond is formed that can live forever.

"I told them that truly great teams usually form that bond by going through something together, and how whatever they were going through at that point in the season that no success ever came easy. And finally I reminded them that nothing is promised to anybody in this life, starting with tomorrow."

The Giants won the next day against the Redskins, and began a six-game winning streak, and began that road winning streak that now takes them on the road to Super Bowl XLII. It began Greg Gadson's road to Lambeau, and being wheeled out by his 13-year old son Jaelen as an honorary co-captain of the Giants along with the great Harry Carson.

"I can't even remember the last time I was actually out on the field," he said. "Maybe when I played."

Gadson had been on the sidelines when the Giants won their first playoff game against the Bucs. The team wanted him in Dallas, but he was having more surgery, on what is left of his right leg, and his right arm, which had also been damaged by the IED. But he was well enough to travel to Green Bay, and strong enough to spend the whole game on the sideline with his son, the players calling him what they have all along:

Sir.

"I wouldn't say I was warm," he said. "But I was comfortable enough not to be hugging one of those heaters all day."

He watched from the sidelines at Lambeau as the team he met at 0-2 played the way it played against the Packers and played itself to the Super Bowl, watched as the Giants came back from that missed field goal at the end of regulation, finally saw Lawrence Tynes kick it through from 47 yards out.

"When the ball went through, you could feel the elation on our sidelines, and hear the stadium go quiet at the same time," Gadson said. "It was like the air being let out of a whole state's soul. And then the next thing I saw was my son jumping in the air and running on that field."

The boy ran for both of them.

[Old School Bolt]

Wow! What a story! Having been stationed overseas for many years, you really appreciate hearing/watching a game from home. When you are in a hot spot, the game is even more important. You get a break and think about something else for awhile.

I hope that all fans appreciate what our troops and veterans are doing and have done for this great country. Next season, when you're sitting at home, in a bar or stadium watching a game, toast the troops. They deserve it.

[striking light]

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Originally Posted by Old School Bolt

Wow! What a story! Having been stationed overseas for many years, you really appreciate hearing/watching a game from home. When you are in a hot spot, the game is even more important. You get a break and think about something else for awhile.

I hope that all fans appreciate what our troops and veterans are doing and have done for this great country. Next season, when you're sitting at home, in a bar or stadium watching a game, toast the troops. They deserve it.

I wonder if Sirius has a satellite that covers that region of the continent. I can't imagine missing a single CHARGERS game for the rest of my life. That makes me feel kinda like a d-bag when I think of all of the sacrifices those brave men and women make to provide us the safety and freedoms we often take for granted.

[h8raidernation]

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Originally Posted by striking light

I wonder if Sirius has a satellite that covers that region of the continent. I can't imagine missing a single CHARGERS game for the rest of my life. That makes me feel kinda like a d-bag when I think of all of the sacrifices those brave men and women make to provide us the safety and freedoms we often take for granted.

Sirius doesn't even hit Hawaii so I doubt in Iraq or Afghan. As far as missing games, in Iraq we had AFN west so I saw more games in Iraq than in the states, until I got the Sunday Ticket. Also jsut to give them props, Budweiser donated, yes donated 2 beers to every soldier in Iraq for the SB in 05. Not a big Bud fan but they support the soldiers alot.

[RJones61]

Ive read the story on LTC Gadson...Hes all over most Army publications...Did you know he has the Football of the last pass that Bret Favre threw?...Whoever it was that picked off Favre...gave the ball to Gadsen...Who would have known that was going to be Favres last pass

[NYG27]

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Originally Posted by RJones61

Ive read the story on LTC Gadson...Hes all over most Army publications...Did you know he has the Football of the last pass that Bret Favre threw?...Whoever it was that picked off Favre...gave the ball to Gadsen...Who would have known that was going to be Favres last pass

Yes, that was Corey Webster who had that INT and gave it to lt. Gadsen out of respect. He had a HUGE influence in the Giants locker room from what I've been told and read.

[RJones61]

Didnt know who picked off the pass...Im sure Favre does....Before the SB started they ran a 5-10 minute segment about Gadsen and his influence on the Giants...I call them "Feel Good" stories...and this was a good one