Chapter 2: Army molds a future

During his 20 years in the service, Wesley Batalona built skills that would come into play later for the tough former sergeant.

HONOKA'A, Hawaii -- Wesley John Kealoha Batalona was born into one of the world's lushest landscapes, the rainy Hamakua Coast on the Big Island's rural windward side.

Batalona had eight brothers and sisters, a sprawling family that lived in shorts and flip-flops and said "aloha." They had gardens year-round in the fertile volcanic soil, picked papaya and wild guava, and hunted feral pigs in the dense foliage. They gathered fish with round throw nets, one of Wesley Batalona's favorite pastimes.

Living off the land was a tradition on the Hamakua Coast, and a necessity; the fertile setting never grew many jobs. Tourists headed for the other side of the island, where the climate is dry and the sea calm. Batalona, a combat-hardened former Army sergeant, was commuting to a hotel security guard job there when he heard about big pay in Iraq for people with his skills. Private companies taking over military functions needed more and more contractors who could operate in combat zones.

Military work had started shaping Batalona's life 30 years before.

In high school, he moved in with an older sister, Uilani Shibata, and her husband, Bert, a former paratrooper. Just before Batalona graduated, Bert Shibata sat him down and told him that his best choices were to become a policeman, go to college or join the military. He chose the path Shibata had taken, the Army.

It was 1974, almost a year to the day after the end of the draft, and Batalona was part of the beginning of the all-volunteer military. Melvin Laird, President Nixon's secretary of defense, had pushed to end conscription as the Vietnam War ground to its finish. Before that, Laird had started reducing the size of the military -- from about 3.5 million in 1969 to 2.3 million by January 1973.

Some in Batalona's family had believed the Army was temporary for him, but he took to it.

"I thought it was just a three-year thing, but he turned it into a career," said an older brother, Ka'ai.

'Bata' and the Rangers

Batalona -- dubbed "Bata" by military buddies -- applied to the special school for Rangers, the Army's best-trained light infantry unit. Rangers prepare for arctic, jungle, desert, mountain and amphibious operations.

As for many soldiers of his era, serving mainly meant long years of training.

Batalona was Jeff Goddard's first squad leader when Goddard became a Ranger in 1978. Goddard said soldiers in other units told him they were glad not to be in his squad because Batalona drove it so much harder.

Goddard said they had it wrong. He credits Batalona for molding him into a soldier who became a Green Beret.

"He demanded the absolute best out of all of us in the squad," Goddard said. "Ours was always the last squad in from physical training in the morning, which really made us have to hustle to get showered and changed and over to chow before first formation.

"He would push us to our limits and beyond on everything from road marches to training exercises involving crew drills with our machine guns. He was as tough as woodpecker lips."

In 1989, Batalona's unit was sent to Panama, where it made a parachute assault on an airfield, an operation that began the invasion.

Nearly two dozen soldiers died in Panama, some at the airfield where Batalona fought.

The next year, Batalona was deployed again, this time to the Persian Gulf to fight in Kuwait and Iraq. With him and the other U.S. troops were a few civilian contractors -- often technicians overseeing complex weapons systems.

Contractors were beginning to play a bigger role in the American military, about one for every 60 troops in the gulf war. The future could be seen in Saudi Arabia's military forces -- all of their logistics and support were handled by U.S. companies. And employees of Vinnell, a subsidiary of Grumman, went into battle with the Saudi National Guard troops they had been training.