By William Smith
Community Editor
Like thousands of Americans throughout the country, West Burlington native and retired social worker Dan Grinstead was profoundly affected by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“In my mind, that was our generation’s Pearl Harbor,” he said.
Seven years later, Grinstead joined the Iowa National Guard at the age of 57. He had no military experience. His experience with firearms was nil. In his college days, when his hair stretched down to his shoulders, he was against the Vietnam War.
“I was never against the soldiers. They were just doing what they had to do,” Grinstead said.
But Grinstead was a good social worker and could apply his unique skill set to help American soldiers much younger than himself. He knew it was time to join the fight.
Not a typical soldier
A 1968 graduate of West Burlington High School, Grinstead attended Wartburg College, got a job through the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and went on to earn a master’s degree in social work in Minnesota. That brought him back to Iowa City, where he began his career as a social worker in 1975.
“I always knew I wanted to help people, and that was the best way to do it,” Grinstead said.
Roughly 25 years later, after 9/11, Grinstead was waiting for President George W. Bush to call for volunteers. A few years passed, and when that didn’t happen, he volunteered himself.
Grinstead heard there was a need in the service for more social workers, and despite his age, it seemed like a natural fit.
He talked to a National Guard recruiter and learned there was an age waiver for joining.
All he had to do was pass a physical fitness test that consisted of situps, pushups, and a two-mile run.
Grinstead, who always stayed in shape, grinned to himself. He was already running 3 to 4 miles a day. The physical test wasn’t a problem.
“It made me one of the oldest people to join the guard since World War II,” Grinstead said.
Learning to be a soldier
Just like his younger counterparts, Grinstead had to go through officers’ basic training. That meant daily exercise, which he was accustomed to, and learning to use firearms, which was foreign to him.
“I had never fired a rifle,” he said. “In basic training, it was mostly people who were younger than me. And at my base in Camp Dodge, in Iowa, I was by far the oldest.”
After getting through basic in Texas, Grinstead went to Camp Shelby in Mississippi for more advanced training before going to Afghanistan.
Because of the generation gap, Grinstead was a lot different than his fellow soldiers. But he learned to enjoy those differences.
“I lived with a bunch of kids,” he said. “Those kids, they all listened to rap music all the time. They all played video games as much as they could. They called everybody and themselves, ‘Dude’ or ‘Bro.’ ”
Before going to Afghanistan, Grinstead was promoted to captain and learned that he would be running a combat stress clinic at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan
“I remembered that Afghanistan is known for its beautiful mountains. As we got closer to Bagram, you couldn’t see any of the mountains because of the smog. When I got off the plane at Bagram Air Base, I said to myself, ‘What’s that smell?’ It was worse than Cedar Rapids on a hot, sunny day,” he said.
The air base came under a rocket attack on his fourth day, and Grinstead remembers running outside with his fellow soldiers to look for the rockets after the sirens stopped.
“It was just like sitting at home on the porch, looking for the tornadoes,” he said.
After that, Grinstead was transferred to a forward operating base in the middle of the desert, where temperatures typically reached 120 degrees. A 10-foot-high wall of sandbags surrounded the base, protecting the soldiers from occasional bouts of enemy fire.
Grinstead compared it to the wild west army forts, where days blended endlessly.
“Pretty soon, it was hard to remember what day of the week it was. It didn’t matter, because we worked every day,” he said.
Helping out
In April 2011, Grinstead got a call to go to the troop operation center. There had been a bombing at a nearby base called Gamberi.
“When I got to the operation center, there was a live feed coming in from a blimp that hovers over Gamberi, and what we could see was the aftermath of a bombing,” he said. “I knew I had to get to Gamberi as quickly as possible.”
Grinstead had friends at Gamberi and booked a helicopter to get there, knowing it would take a few days for him to arrive. Once he arrived, the plan was to do a critical incident debriefing, which meant talking to the medics and soldiers who survived.
Grinstead learned that a suicide bomber dressed in an Afghan National Army uniform had set off his explosive vest, killing seven people immediately and wounding more. Grinstead talked to the medics first, and that’s when he first learned of the soldiers’ valor.
“(The medic) told me that despite being wounded and having their eardrums blown out, (the soldiers’) first instinct was to help and help somebody who was hurt worse than they were,” Grinstead said.
“The soldiers who ran toward that explosion had a similar attitude. Their thought was, ‘Somebody needs help over there. It doesn’t matter whether I’m safe or not. That’s where I’m going.’ ”
Compared to himself, Grinstead thought of those soldiers as kids. But only in age. Not in virtue or bravery. They were far more than youth with modern hobbies.
“The kids that day, in my mind, grew up,” he said. “They proved they could do their job when they were under pressure. In fact, those kids were just like me. They joined the Army, put their lives on hold, left Iowa, and went someplace they didn’t know to help out.”
The aftermath
Grinstead wasn’t the same after the war. Neither was anyone else he served with. Many of those who survived the attack harbored guilt. They felt like they should have done more to stop the suicide bomber.
Grinstead did his best to help assuage that guilt as he talked to soldiers.
The event happened so quickly, he said, that preventing the bombing was nearly impossible. Instead, he reminded them of their stellar response to such a traumatic event. He reminded them to focus on the current day, to keep their situational awareness, instead of dwelling on past events they couldn’t change.
“I’ve kept track of them over time. They’ve all grown up now. They’ve gone to college and got their bachelor’s degrees. Some of them have gotten advanced degrees. Some have gotten married. Some have started families. They are exactly the kind of people, that if you were an employer, you would want to hire. And the kids are still playing video games,” he said.
Adjusting to home life
With his six years of National Guard service finished in 2014, Grinstead continued as a social worker in Iowa.
Moving back into civilian life is a tough adjustment for almost every soldier, and Grinstead was no exception. While most civilians are aware of that hard adjustment, they tend to think only of post-traumatic stress disorder.
That’s a big part of it, Grinstead said, depending on each individual soldier’s experience.
But there’s also a degree of institutionalization. Grinstead experienced it himself.
“All you did was work, and then in the evening, you were free to do what you wanted. You didn’t have to think about cutting the grass or going down the cereal aisle of the grocery store and having 150 choices. You didn’t have to worry about choices,” he said.
“When it was time to eat, you either did or you didn’t. When you wanted your laundry done, you just dropped off your laundry.”
It got to be a comfortable experience, broken up by the stress of gunfire and enemy attacks.
In social work, Grinstead said, you are taught to look at faces. In the military, you are taught to look at people’s hands.
“It’s the hands that can hurt you,” he said.
Though it wasn’t as much of a problem for him as it was for other soldiers, turning off that situational awareness can be daunting. Having too many choices at the grocery store is overwhelming. But watching the hands of every customer inside that store can be a far worse feeling.
“One of the things we learned was how to spot improvised explosive devices. Looking for anything that is on the side of the road that might harm you,” he said.
A grocery bag on the side of the road in America is likely errant trash. A grocery bag on the side of the road in Afghanistan could be a bomb.
Telling his story
Grinstead kept a diary during his six years in the National Guard, which allowed him to tell his story a few years ago in front of 1,000 people on a stage in Des Moines.
The speech was part of The Des Moines Register’s storyteller project, and Grinstead worked with a reporter on his speech and had to memorize it ahead of time.
Grinstead found his story resonated with people, especially as he injected humor about his age and his pithy thoughts on the generation gap between him and other soldiers. He loves retelling the story of how he first joined the National Guard.
“It was a cold winter day in 2008. I raised my right hand, was about to take the oath of office, and was about to join the Iowa Army National Guard. Before I could do that, my recruiter turned to my mom and said, ‘Is it OK if Dan joins the Army? ’ ” Grinstead said to laughter from the crowd, before continuing his story.
“Now, this was a bit of an odd question, because, at the time, my mom was 82, and I was 57. So, my mom said, ‘Sure, it’s OK if he joins the Army, as long as he doesn’t play with guns or go to war,’ ” he said to more laughter.
In the years since he gave his speech, Grinstead has been working on turning his journal into an autobiography.
He knows his children and grandchildren would enjoy it, as well as his mother, who is now 95 years old.
He’s hoping others can take something away from his story, as well.
“I’m adding more stories and expanding it, to make it something more,” Grinstead said.
“It has been a very positive experience.”