Correction Appended
Adam L’Episcopo wrote his admissions essay from inside an armored combat vehicle in Baghdad. On patrol in the middle of the night, he bent over the page with a flashlight and wrote about why he wanted to come to AU.
“I just really want to learn,” he said. “[I] just wanted to go to school, you know, be a total geek and read books all the time.”
L’Episcopo, a senior in the School of International Service and president of AU Vets, started school at AU in fall 2008, after finishing a four-year contract with the U.S. Army. The contract included two years training with his unit in Tacoma, Wash., followed by a 15-month tour in Iraq. While deployed in Iraq, L’Episcopo decided to start college as soon as he returned. He made AU his first choice because of its renowned International Relations program.
“I knew I wanted to go to school because I hated my first two years of the Army,” he said. “It was terrible.”
AU accepted L’Episcopo in May of 2008, and by transferring some of his military training into college credit, he is now scheduled to graduate at the end of this academic year. His graduation was nearly put on hold for an additional year and a half, however, when the Army sent him orders saying he had to ship out again Oct. 5.
L’Episcopo heard the news from his mother on Aug. 24, five days after his 23rd birthday. She cried on the phone when she told him about the orders, he said.
The contract L’Episcopo signed had mandated that he serve four years on inactive ready reserve after completing his original four years of active service. Members of IRR are essentially citizens, but can be called back for deployment if necessary. Because calling people back from IRR is the very last form of recruitment the Army goes through, L’Episcopo said he never thought he would be re-deployed.
His new orders were for 400 days, which included training in Fort Benning, Ga. and a yearlong deployment to Iraq in early 2010.
All L’Episcopo felt at first were shock and denial, he said.
Once he accepted that he might have to go back to Iraq, however, he began doing everything in his power to get out of the deployment. He applied for a delay or exemption of deployment for academic purposes and called his senators, Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo. and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., to explain his case. Both senators agreed to send letters to the Army recommending that L’Episcopo’s exemption be passed.
“I know I could easily do this job, but I could do a lot more for the world if I’m out here and going to school, finishing school and working or doing something for my community,” L’Episcopo said.
After three weeks of fighting to stay in school, L’Episcopo got a phone call before class Thursday morning from an Army representative. He was exempted from deployment.
“I couldn’t really believe it at first,” he said.
L’Episcopo said he does not yet know the exact terms of his exemption, but he thinks it will be for 400 days, the length of time his orders were for. This means he could potentially be called back for deployment until his service on inactive ready reserve ends in 2012.
This possibility is one of the reasons L’Episcopo plans to join an Army reserve unit once he receives his official exemption from deployment letter, he said. If he joins a unit not scheduled to deploy in the near future, L’Episcopo will have to train several days a month, but will not return to Iraq.
“I guess I feel more motivated and more invigorated for school and for life in general,” he said. “I didn’t expect the Army to do this at all, because the Army never does.”
L’Episcopo is still unsure what the deciding factor was that caused the Army to accept his exemption, he said.
Matt Halbe, a junior in SIS who lives with L’Episcopo, created a Facebook group called “Books not Bullets! Save Adam L’Episcopo!” The group currently has over 100 members.
“I guess as a political opinion you could say that inactive reserves shouldn’t be called up for this war because it’s not a national emergency situation,” Halbe said.
Because the military is currently adding troops to Afghanistan but has not yet dropped the levels in Iraq, this is the time when they need the most people. Calling back inactive ready reserves is cheaper than training new soldiers to fill the units, L’Episcopo said.
If his exemption had not been passed, L’Episcopo would have honored the contract he signed and gone to Iraq to do his job, he said. He was 17 when he enlisted, however, and his mindset has changed a great deal since then. He understood in broad terms what his contract meant, but the possibility of getting called back did not matter to him at the time.
“I wanted that experience,” he said. “I wanted to see what was really going on in the world. I was naïve and young.”
L’Episcopo enlisted in the Army in 2004. He had dropped out of his freshman year of high school, gotten his GED and attended one semester of community college in Colorado when the United States invaded Iraq.
L’Episcopo joined the 2nd ID, 3rd brigade Stryker Brigade Combat Team and trained with them in Fort Lewis, Wash. until 2006, when the unit deployed to Iraq. He spent three months in Mosel, Iraq, before receiving orders to move to Baghdad. In April of 2007, the unit’s yearlong tour was extended three months.
“Throughout the whole time, I wanted to go back to college,” L’Episcopo said.
Now that he will be able to graduate from AU, L’Episcopo is trying to decide what he wants to do with his degree. He is considering foreign service, contracting work outside the military, the CIA, the FBI or going back to school for a premedical degree.
L’Episcopo said the possibility of getting re-deployed to Iraq did not scare him.
“You’re just some little kid who has no idea where he is or what’s going on,” L’Episcopo said. “And then, you get shot at, or you get blown up or something, and you just get really scared and paranoid for a while. And then it becomes that [it] just wears on you too much. You’re doing [so] many missions that you just don’t care. It doesn’t really matter. I could get blown up or shot right now; it doesn’t matter.”
You can reach this staff writer at mkendall@theeagleonline.com.
Correction: This story incorrectly stated that Sen. Bob Bennett was a Democrat of Colorado. Bennett is a Republican of Utah. The name of the senator has been corrected to Sen. Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado. The Eagle regrets this error.
