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Operation Compassion is an ongoing mission that has one goal in mind, healing through compassion. Before my time in Iraq I had very little compassion. I thought that if you didn’t make it you were just a quitter and I had never lost anything that I had truly cared for until I met this young man, Shawn Pahnke. I was in PLDC (Primary Leadership Development Course) when 9-11 went down, I was actually in a test which my instructors interrupted so we could watch the towers burn and fall on tv. I looked around and almost everyone was crying. All that was going through my mind was we are going to war. I stood up and said, “We are going to WAR!”. One of my instructors brought me into a private room and asked me to chill out, at that time I still did not understand compassion, even after watching people jump out of windows from so far up trying to escape the fire.

I got back to my base after school and it was on Defcon 96, it didn't even look like the same base; all the housing areas looked like prison camps with wire and guards. Still, it was just the cold facts that were in my mind, we were going to war, I was probably going to die. So I said my goodbyes to my family on the phone, detaching from this reality and focusing on becoming the best so I could get us home. Then he showed up, Shawn Pahnke. They put him on my tank. I do the right thing by getting to know him, where he came from and some of his personal life, as much as he felt comfortable with sharing. I find out he has a baby at home that he has never seen, his wife delivered while he was in Basic Training.

We were gearing up for War, no one was getting out, no going home no matter what. But, I felt he needed to go see his kid cause all I could think about was every movie I had ever seen with this same scenario, so I pushed, and pushed hard to get him home. The leadership devised a plan to have a PT test so they could see where everyone's fitness level was at, by regulation since Shawn just showed up and hadn’t been to the unit for the acclimation period, he failed his run by 30 seconds and they wouldn’t let him go home. Of course, I had the regulation book in my hand and the whole time I was arguing to my company commander and first sergeant, and again at battalion headquarters with the sergeant major and battalion commander using the open door policy, at which I was advised against using the next higher level of open door policy or my career could be in the balance. At that time, it already was since I just earned some UCMJ ending up in a field grade article 15 which was hidden from records. So I backed down, Shawn ended up getting killed just a few months into Iraq, never seeing his child.

To me it was my failure not pushing hard enough for him to go home, it has

Operation Compassion

By Dennis W Duell Sr

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