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How did you get that pear in the bottle?

Buffalo/Sudan

On the road to Koiyom in Southern Sudan, they must have seemed an unlikely pair — this gray-haired Catholic priest from Western New York and the 31-year-old Sudanese man he calls his son. But there they were, together — Father Ronald Sajdak, the gregarious pastor of an East Side church, a man whose eyes seem to brim with laughter, and Fidele Diing Dhan, six-foot-six, amiable but reserved, a war survivor who grew up in refugee camps before moving to America in 2001.
This spring, the companions traveled from Buffalo to Sudan for the groundbreaking of a medical clinic they are working to build in Koiyom, an isolated village. For Sajdak, the visit to Africa was an adventure that reaffirmed deep-rooted convictions. For Dhan, the voyage was a homecoming, a return to the place and people he had left as a boy fleeing violence.
For both, the journey strengthened a special bond they had shared since meeting years before. In photographs of the ceremony at Koiyom, they stand side by side, encircled by a crowd of villagers under a sky brushed with clouds. It is a moment to remember. They are two men sharing in a common dream.
If you are a person of religion, the story of their friendship is perhaps a story about faith, even miracles. If not, theirs is a tale about serendipity, about the ways in which chance and fortune conspire, reaching across time and distance to draw people together.

*

They became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan — thousands of youths made homeless by a two-decade civil war that began in 1983 and pitted the country's largely Muslim north against its predominantly Animist and Christian south. Fleeing the conflict, these children and teenagers walked from southern Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, a thousand-mile odyssey.
Dhan was among them. He says he was 9 when his villaged was attacked.
"I was just playing outside the compound," remembers Dhan, a member of the Dinka tribe. "I heard the sound of the guns and smelled the smoke from the burning huts. ... Leaving Sudan was not something that was planned, like I'm going to move tomorrow to New York City. You have to run."
"From where I am, it's four months walk — four months walk from my village to Ethiopia," he recalls.
Today, Dhan is in good health, with a full but slender build — a man who looks years younger than he is. While not outwardly emotional, he has dark, expressive eyes that on occasion betray his feelings even when his other features stay flat. His accented English is a clue he is from Africa. But neither his demeanor nor form suggest a history of trauma.
But it was 1987, by Dhan's account, when he made the journey with other Lost Boys. They drank rainwater from puddles, ate leaves and wild fruit. Sometimes, older youth or sympathetic soldiers from the south's Sudan People's Liberation Army would hunt and share antelope meat with the boys. Other times, the children went days without food. Many died of hunger or drowned along the way.
Dhan would be among the fortunate, if you can call them that — those who reached their destination. He would spend the remainder of his childhood in refugee camps. He was baptized at Pinyudo, one in Ethiopia where he took up residence in a compound run by Catholic nuns. In Kenya's Kakuma camp, where he lived from 1992 until he came to America, he went to school and practiced English. He built himself a house with brick walls and a roof of plastic sheeting and palm tree leaves. Through the Red Cross, he sent a letter to family in Sudan and learned his parents and siblings were alive — that he was not an orphan.
His life changed in 2001, when he became one of thousands of Lost Boys to gain asylum in the United States. America was foreign, Dhan says, but "Sudan was a country in war, and going back there, there was no hope. We never think of going back while the war was going on. If there was some place safe, that's what we were looking for — to have a safe place for the time being."
He settled in Syracuse in a three-story house with more than a dozen other Sudanese youth. He passed General Education Development tests, worked blue-collar jobs and became a certified nurse aide. Hoping to earn a bachelor's degree, he applied to the University at Buffalo and learned in 2003 that the school had accepted him.

*

Sajdak, 54, pastor of St. Martin de Porres Parish, grew up in Sloan, N.Y. A man with a silver mustache who speaks often and excitedly of God, he was ordained in Buffalo as a priest in 1996, three years after returning to the region from Washington DC, where he had lived since 1979. He smiles so often the expression seems ingrained in the lines of his face, in the deep, cheerful wrinkles that explode, like fireworks, from the corners of his eyes each time he grins.
The first time he heard of Sudan was in 1995. While visiting his aunt at a Western New York nursing home, he met a Sudanese refugee interviewing for work at the facility. The priest invited this new acquaintance to share his story with Catholic youth taking part in a fasting program so they could, in Sajdak's words, "put themselves in the position of other people throughout the world."
The pastor and refugee became friends, and churchgoers who knew Sajdak began donating household items to the Sudanese man's family. Soon after, Sajdak established Reaching Out 2 Africa, a ministry focused on assisting African clergy and providing humanitarian help to Africa and African refugees.
In summer 2003, an old college classmate who knew of Sajdak's work called to say a young Sudanese man from Syracuse was moving to Buffalo for school and needed somewhere to stay. Sajdak offered the student a spare room in the two-story rectory house on Wyoming Avenue where the pastor lived.
The neighborhood was rough. The home would be burglarized a few times in the next few years. But Dhan showed up at the door in September 2003. As he explains, cracking a smile, "It was the only offer that I have. I was not going to turn it down."
The day Dhan arrived, Sajdak invited him to watch a recording of a Dateline NBC program on the Lost Boys of Sudan. After seeing the episode in 2001, the year it aired, Sajdak began showing it to community groups to raise awareness about conflicts in Sudan.
In a grainy shot near the start of the video, a boy sitting amid other youngsters in what appears to be a refugee camp gazes at the camera with a sleepy expression.
"He had a very curious look on his face, and I started laughing," Sajdak remembers. "But then he moved my heart, too, and that's when I prayed. I was thinking, 'Child, you are so far away, but if you were in this country, if this were happening here somewhere, there would be a way we could meet, and you'd be in (our) house.'"
Watching the program in 2003, Dhan, who had not seen it before, became excited as the camera lingered on the boy who had moved Sajdak. Dhan pointed to the TV, shouting for the pastor to stop the recording. Sajdak rewound the tape. They watched the scene again. "That's me," Dhan proclaimed. God, Sajdak says, had answered his prayer.
Rebecca Haggerty, producer of the Dateline episode, said via e-mail that because the image featuring the youngster was stock footage, she did not know when or where it was shot. But Dhan is certain the boy is him. The child has his hairline, his flat nose, his high cheekbones.
For the next three years, Dhan and Sajdak lived together along with several other refugees. They came and left the house at different times, dined at separate hours.
Nevertheless, Sajdak says, "Throughout the years that we were on Wyoming (Avenue), there was always a special relationship between Fidele and I, only by nature of the fact of how we met, because we knew it was graced encounter. We knew it was no accident. We didn't know what the future would bring."

*

In 2005, Sudan's north-south civil war ended. More than 2 million people had died, according to United Nations figures. But Dhan's family had survived.
In 2006, after finishing his studies at the University at Buffalo, Dhan sold his car so he could afford to visit Sudan. He met one of his younger brothers in Khartoum, the country's northern capital, and the two journeyed south together. The bus they were riding collided with a cargo truck. Dhan was injured, his brother killed.
Friends including Sajdak urged Dhan to return to safety in America. Dhan refused. Nearly two decades had passed since he fled his village. In Koiyom, his mother and six other siblings waited. The family reunion, though tinged with sadness, would be an occasion for joy. The visit would also change Dhan's life in unforeseeable ways, inspiring him to take on an important project that would require Sajdak's help.

*

Back in Buffalo in early 2007, Dhan shared a story with Sajdak. In Koiyom, Dhan said, villagers with medical problems sought him out. One morning, a mother woke him to ask if he could help her son, who had caught his mouth with a fish hook. While Dhan works as a home health aide, his bachelor's degree is in psychology. He could not provide the care his people needed.
Dhan knew Reaching Out 2 Africa had completed humanitarian projects abroad, including raising money to build a dormitory for a Uganda school. He wanted to know: Could Sajdak's ministry construct a clinic in Koiyom?
"I told him," Sajdak says, "that if we accept this clinic operation, he would have to really commit to be the poster person for it. ... That meant a lot of work together, and he understood that and off we went."
The project got a push in April 2007, just one week after Dhan had approached Sajdak. As part of a Holy Week service and education program hosted by the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, the pair spoke to a few dozen students about the Lost Boys. In an unrelated exercise, the youth calculated their spending on luxury items such as Starbucks coffee or extra cell phone minutes. The group's annual total came to about $35,000, says Marcy Perez, one participant.
"We figured there's got to be a way to put this to use," remembers Perez, who graduated this spring from the Nichols School. She and a handful of peers organized a fundraising drive for a charity project in Sudan, setting $35,000 as their target — money they later earmarked for Dhan's clinic. By collecting spare change in jars they kept at home and holding events such as walkathons, the teenagers reached their goal early this year.
"When you see those ads on TV for kids in Africa ... it's really easy to just tune that out, because it's a TV screen. You can just turn it off. But Fidele was right there," Perez says, explaining why Dhan's talk affected her deeply.
Recognizing that power, Dhan and Sajdak have spent two years meeting with civic groups and high school classes — anyone who will listen — to share Dhan's story. Including funds from Perez's group, Reaching Out 2 Africa had raised over $65,000 for the clinic as of mid-August. A Sept. 24 benefit dinner Dhan and Sajdak are planning with Joan Ersing, the ministry's executive director, should bring in more money.
Sajdak says the clinic will cost about $208,000 given its size, an estimate an engineer in Sudan provided. The facility would provide basic care and focus on prevention of diseases such as malaria, cholera and HIV. A Sudanese bishop has agreed to accept a suitable candidate from Koiyom to a Catholic-run health training institute if Reaching Out 2 Africa sponsors the student, Sajdak says.
He says he and Dhan visited Sudan this April "to keep the hope of the people alive."
"The people in Koiyom are desperate for help, and they have people who constantly come and promise things and never deliver," Sajdak says. "And I thought it very important to make sure they know that Fidele is not alone, that he has a group of people with him to support him in this project."

*

From Buffalo, they flew first to Sudan's southern capital of Juba and then to the city of Wau to the northwest. From there, they went by car to Aweil, a community more than two hours from Koiyom on dusty, arid roads.
Along with Reaching Out 2 Africa, Sajdak helped cover Dhan's travel expenses. But during their trip, it was Dhan who served as Sajdak's protector, making sure the pastor was as comfortable as possible. One night, upon discovering that a guest room where they planned to stay contained one fan, intermittent electricity and no mosquito net, Dhan addressed Sajdak using the Arabic term for "Father": "Abuna," Dhan said, "I'll sleep here; I'll find somewhere else for you."
For the pair, the visit to Sudan was one step in a journey that continually brings them closer together.
"He calls me, 'My son,' so I can put it that way, you know?" Dhan says of Sajdak. "Like a father, son. ... With the clinic, he's helping a lot. And I can say that he understands the Sudanese more than other Americans, and he open himself for them. Every time someone comes to him and asks for something, he's there."
Of Dhan, Sajdak says, "I've always been incredibly proud of what Fidele went through in this life. Incredibly proud that he never gave up. Incredibly proud that he survived. ... He needs to do to advance himself and not only to take care of himself but to care for his family, and his whole village back home. And I've seen miracles happen because of him. And I'm so proud to have known him and I joke around and I call him my son, but I really feel that."
"I am always surprised, over and over and over again, by the unexpected miracles that happen in regard to this clinic," Sajdak adds. "We had a woman at the door today. I was just talking to Joan about the cost of doing the (fundraising) dinner. ... Where's this money going to come from? And a woman comes to the door (with a) check, and she wasn't a person from our parish. We never saw her before, and she comes to the door and says, 'I've read about what incredible things you were doing.'"
"The same thing happened when I was moving," Dhan says, excitedly.
"He calls me in the morning," Sajdak says.
"I said, 'I need a stove and refrigerator,'" Dhan says.
Then Sajdak: "I tell him, 'Fidele, I'm going to pray about this.' ... I walk into the church building, and I meet a man that I haven't seen in years and he comes up to me and says, 'Father Ron, I've been holding this check for you for a number of weeks. I want to give this check to you for your ministry.' And it's a check for five hundred dollars."
"Ever since we came together to do this clinic," Sajdak continues, "these things have been happening again and again. ... Fidele and I lived every one of these experiences. Again and again. So what does it mean to me? It means always being surprised by the generosity of people.
"Always being surprised," the pastor says, eyes closed briefly, "by the way things work out."

Las Vegas III

A rare snowstorm

Christopher Gallagher

Christopher Gallagher, 26, U.S. Marine Corps corporal, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, served in Iraq three times: In 2003 during the invasion; In 2004 at Haditha Dam; In 2005 in Fallouja. These are letters he wrote home, photographs he saved. A story on his time in Iraq is posted separately under the heading, "This is what you will remember"...

—


Marines prepare "final letters" to send their families in case they don't make it home alive. Below are Christopher's, to his parents, older sister Shannon and younger brother Matt.







—


Apr. 2, 2003: “I am writing this letter from a fighting hole, behind my machine gun. I am fine for now. How is everyone back home? The first couple of days the Iraqi soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds. I have heard reports of American POW’s being murdered. What have you heard? The first hundred hours of this war I was awake. It is hard finding time to sleep out here.”





—


From Iraq.

Christopher, right
Christopher, left

Christopher, back row, far right



—


To his brother Matt.





—


A postcard bearing the image of the Apr. 11, 2003 front page of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The headline “Baghdad falls to U.S. forces” ran large down the right-hand side, set against a photograph — an iconic image — showing the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down.

This is what you will remember

This is what you will remember when you get back: your cramped foxhole, the stench of your unwashed body, MRE menu item No. 2, Jamaican pork chop. You’ll remember the way the sand of the Kuwaiti desert would drift into your eyes, your ears, everything, giving you reason to clean your weapon twice a day as you waited to cross the border. You’ll remember calling your mom, nervous but proud, after finding out in January 2003, at the end of holiday leave, that you would be going to Iraq.

Iraq.

What will you remember about Iraq?

Friends you lost. Survivor’s guilt. You’ll remember how Iraqis lined the streets to cheer your arrival in Baghdad, how the people of Fallujah just wanted you to leave. You’ll remember how different you were when it all began. Remember? You were once in favor of the war.

—

This is Christopher Gallagher’s story. Christopher Gallagher, U.S. Marine Corps corporal, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. Service in Iraq: 2003, the invasion; 2004, Haditha Dam; 2005, Fallouja. One soldier among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, one among millions.

—

Apr. 2, 2003 — “I am writing this letter from a fighting hole, behind my machine gun. I am fine for now. How is everyone back home? The first couple of days the Iraqi soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds. I have heard reports of American POW’s being murdered. What have you heard? The first hundred hours of this war I was awake. It is hard finding time to sleep out here.”

This letter is from your first deployment. It was the first time you had ever traveled overseas. You wrote your family (Mom, Dad, Matt, Joel, etc.) in Farmingdale, NY, where you grew up before moving to Las Vegas, on military stationery. A single sheet of paper with the Marine Corps emblem — eagle, globe and anchor — printed up top.

—

In the invasion of Iraq, your batallion fought from the town of Safwan on the Kuwaiti border through Basra and onto Baghdad. You didn’t shower for two months. Fellow Marines secured oil fields and airports. Your job was setting up radio communications and conducting security operations: “A machine gun post set up on top of a hill, or something like that. Guarding a small area around yourself.”

Your battalion was the first Marine unit to enter Baghdad, and you remember it well: “The people invaded the streets and were lining the streets of Baghdad, saying, ‘Saddam bad, Bush good.’ At the time we were considered liberators.”

People everywhere, watching, cheering. But you couldn’t talk to them. That was “off-limits.” The day after your battalion took Baghdad, however, you sat down for breakfast at the Palestine Hotel with reporters including an Iraqi woman, around your age, a graduate of Baghdad University. You remember the meal — pita bread with tea and honey. But you can’t quite recall the specifics of what you discussed.

You were 20.

That was back when the Palestine housed all the journalists who came to cover the war, 2 1/2 years before a truck bomb shook the building. Who knows what happened to those people you met. That Iraqi journalist, where is she now? Maybe she is still covering the war. Maybe she fled her country. Maybe she’s dead.

—

Part of what you will remember about Iraq will come from photographs. Snapshots like the one taken in 2003 of you and eight members of your platoon, posing on the concrete roof of a building in Baghdad. Behind you rise thick columns of smoke, black and tilted, carried across the smoldering city on the wings of the wind.

Five years later, sitting in your Las Vegas living room, you point out that you are the only one in the picture wearing a helmet. In Iraq, you were always careful, always on the lookout. You became, in your words, “less trusting of humanity.” In that way, the war stayed with you even after you returned home. Back in Vegas, you say you are still “hyper-vigilant, always more cautious. Kind of like — in a way, almost like a minor paranoia. I’m less trusting of people, because the people over there, they smile at you one minute, and the next day they’ll be shooting at you.”

Even so, despite the nerves and fear, in 2003 you were optimistic about the war. Writing home in on Apr. 2, you told your family the weather had been comfortable. You wished your mom a happy birthday, said you were thinking that the two of you and your grandma could visit Atlantic City when you got back.

This is how you ended your letter: “Tell everyone I will see them soon after the Marines have killed Saddam and the war is over.”

—

At home, Americans watched the siege of Baghdad on CNN, marveling with sick wonder at the fireworks display — the buildings exploding, the red and yellow tracer rounds flying across the sky, shooting stars endowed with bullet speed. Magazines and newspapers carried pictures of the carnage, bodies floating in marshes, refugees fleeing.

Your mother Catherine Jackson worried, unable to watch the news while you were abroad.

“I became very depressed,” she remembers. “I checked the mailbox every day, religiously. I cried every day, religiously. I was just worried about him and his health. Would I get him home? Would he come home? And when he did come home, would he come home in one piece? I didn’t know what to expect.”

To her, your letters meant a lot. They meant that somewhere thousands of miles away, her son was still alive.

—

Meals, Ready-to-Eat.

Thai chicken: “A bowl of snot with some water chestnuts, little pieces of chicken.” This is your description. You also offer these choice words about MREs in general: “I remember them all, all very unfondly. ... It comes in a sealed package. And imagine a piece of chicken in there. It looks like a piece of chicken, I don’t know if it is. They had a variety of food, but none of it was good for you. It had so many preservatives in it.”

By your estimation, the only good thing that came in those rations was the candy — Skittles, Charms or M&Ms. Marines would trade with one another, Skittles for M&Ms and vice versa. Charms ended up in the garbage. They were, by tradition, bad luck.

—

MREs aside, living conditions at Haditha Dam were good in 2004.

You slept in a bunk bed, lifted weights, showered twice a week, sometimes with hot water. Your family sent you snickers, cigarettes and powdered Country Time pink lemonade.

On occasion, when townspeople protested outside, airmen “would fly fighter jets over the top of them, really low to scare them.” You never saw that yourself, but that’s what you heard.

In March, you wrote home to your mother and Joel, telling them you’d received a package they had sent. The postscript reminded them that you smoked Parliament Lights. The message was scrawled in black ink on the back of a postcard bearing the image of the Apr. 11, 2003 front page of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The headline “Baghdad falls to U.S. forces” ran large down the right-hand side, set against a photograph — an iconic image — showing the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down.

“Do you remember this day almost a year ago when Marines from taskforce 3/4 took the statue down,” you wrote.

In Haditha, you were a radio operator, part of a skeleton crew of Marines guarding the dam. Most of the men in your battalion had been called to Fallujah to fight in Operation Vigilant Resolve, the first major battle there. Some never made it back. You lost a couple of friends.

“One minute they’re there. One minute they’re gone.”

—

Some of the letters you’ve kept were never mailed.

“To Shannon,” one such note to your older sister begins. “Hi I am sorry for this tragic event you are going through, you helped raise me when mom and dad were not around. ... All you have to do is close your eyes and pray, I will be there. I wanted to be a good uncle for James and Alyssa. I would have liked to see them grow up and live a good life.”

And to your younger brother: “I wish I could be there for you Matt. I love you so much and you will never know how much the time that we have spent together hanging out since I enlisted meant to me. If you have noticed all the extra gifts I have gotten for you, it was to try to make up for my absence.”

In your final letter to your mother and father, which they would have received had you not come home alive, you wrote that you loved them, that you’d watch over them in heaven alongside Grandpa Rich, Grandma, Grandpa Jackson and Uncle Joe.

“Let everyone know I died with honor, keeping all Americans free from foreign dictatorships,” you wrote.

“I was not always the best kid to have, I joined the Corps to straighten my life out and find direction. Mom you were my best friend and were a great emotional support. Dad you were always there, from the time you taught me to bowl until I got on the bus for Parris Island.”

“As I write this letter and look back on my life I only remember how much i enjoyed living it. They say ‘Everyone dies but not everyone lives.’ I just hope I turned out to be a respectable and upstanding person like you raised me to be.”

This is the letter your mother said she could never read.

—

“By the end of the third deployment, I’d say I was wondering what we were doing there. Because we were essentially driving around just waiting to be blown up. Nobody wanted to be there anymore, everybody just wanted to come home.”

The Iraqis, you said, didn’t want you there either. You remember the disgust, the anger in their eyes.

“There was no point to any of the patrols,” you said. “We were told that Al Qaeda was causing all the trouble, but yet, it was mostly the people living in these towns. It was Iraqis.”

In Fallujah, you served as radio operator for an 81 millimeter mortar platoon. You worked at a checkpoint outside the city, a job you likened to herding cattle. Everyone coming through had to have their retnas scanned. Everyone had to get an ID card. Everyone had to be searched. To find out if anyone was carrying a weapon, everyone had to pass through thermal imaging scanners that didn’t work properly because it was too hot out.

Your schedule was eight hours on duty, eight hours off. When you weren’t manning the checkpoint, you did patrols, in vehicles and on foot, sweating under a scorching Iraqi sun. You searched people’s homes, felt no guilt, no remorse. You became angry when you gave information on a firefight to your higher ups only to find out later that “the report that they filed was not what I said.”

You wondered why you didn’t have proper armor. During your first deployment, you didn’t have plates in your vest to protect you from bullets and shrapnel. Until the end of 2005, you said, your humvees had what you called “hillbilly armor,” a piece of metal in the shape of a door hanging off the side of the vehicle.

“I was pissed off I was in Iraq,” you remember. “I removed my emotions. I supported the war and supported the troops. I thought they were one and the same. I didn’t want to be there anymore, but I supported the mission.”

You slept on a cot in a wooden hut housing 20 guys. Fellow soldiers on patrol found propane tanks and 30- or 40-gallon drums and used them to fashion a makeshift shower. Once a week, you got hot food — prime rib, beef stew, “something generic like that.” It didn’t make you sick like the other meals or the dirty, substandard water you said the military gave you.

—

It’s 2008. You are 26 now. You have been home, on U.S. soil, for three years.

You have no regrets. Back in May, 2001, as a senior in high school, you signed up to join the Marines to see the world, to “become someone.” Your mother worried, afraid of what might happen even though it was a time of peace. On Sept. 11, you were at bootcamp at Parris Island, South Carolina. Training together in the humid Southern summer, you and your fellow recruits knew war was coming.

Looking back, you say the Marines made you a better person. You are more focused, more disciplined. One of the worst students in your high school class, you pulled a 3.5 grade point average in the short time you spent in college before leaving school to learn the trade of an electrician. You make good money, help support your mom. You can take direction, but you also have leadership skills. Along the way, in Iraq, you made lifelong friends, some people you normally wouldn’t hang out or talk to. What brought you together?

“We were willing to die for each other.”

—

You were once in favor of the war. Remember?

How much things have changed.

After returning to America, you read about the war, watched movies about the war, talked to friends about the war that left you with so many memories.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. You felt the country’s leaders had lied to you. You learned as many U.S.-paid civilian contractors were stationed in Iraq than troops. You read about how war brings profit, raining fortune upon steel companies, food companies, rubber companies... the list goes on. You believe the government was responsible for September 11, a view many people consider radical. But you, you believe it’s the truth. People like to believe in what’s easiest to believe, you say. You’ve read more about the terrorist attacks than many fellow Americans.

And the Soldiers, the Marines, the Airmen, the young people like yourself who fought abroad? You felt when you came back, the country, the Veteran’s Administration, abandoned you. A friend of yours who was shot in the leg saw his disability benefits reduced. Other servicemen and servicewomen struggled to get care when suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“These are people that their friends blew up in front of them,” you say. “They still have a lot of death and destruction (on their minds), and they’re just messed up.”

You are disgusted.

“The defense department recently came out with a memo saying all troops must remain apolitical about their views in Iraq, saying that you’re a soldier, you have no opinions, you don’t count. I think soldiers should have more of a voice, be able to speak out.”

So you started Nevada’s branch of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

—

Some of your memories of Iraq are hazy, as if obscured by bleached sheets of hot desert sand. Others are clear — crisp and sharp as the crack of gunfire splitting cold night air. There are some things you don’t want to talk about. For you, the war is over, now. You won’t be going back. But Iraq will stay with you, always — in your photographs, in your letters, in this story, your story.

the year he became a banker

.

HENDERSON — History books will commemorate 2008 as the year America faced what some people are calling its greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Stephen Christoffersen, 23, will remember it as the year he became a banker.

As such, he belongs to a curious breed of people — a generation of financiers entering their profession at a time when once-revered financial firms are meeting their ruin one by one, plummeting from mile-high pedestals back to earth.

Five years ago, when Christoffersen began college, investment banks such as Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers were the kings and envy of Wall Street, posting record profits and handing traders multi-million-dollar bonuses.

Fortunes have shifted with astonishing speed. Lehman, where Christoffersen applied this summer to work, declared bankruptcy in September. Merrill, where he interned from May to August, is being sold to Bank of America.

The crisis has so sobered some of UNLV’s 500 or so finance students that they’re wondering if they chose the right field.

But for Christoffersen and fellow stock market junkies, the most important aspects of Wall Street haven’t changed. The exhiliration of a good trade, the thrill of a gamble, the excitement of winning profits — all of that remains.

In the past few weeks, as other Americans watched their retirement accounts shrink, Christoffersen saw his grow by 45 percent.

“It’s an everchanging thing,” said Christoffersen, who graduated from UNLV in August and is training to be a financial advisor at a local firm. “It’s always exciting.”

“There’s always a bull market somewhere,” he added, quoting a Wall Street adage. “It’s challenging, it’s time consuming, but it has its rewards, and I’ve been able to feel what it’s like to get the rewards. You go out there, you spend hours and hours and hours, reading and reading and reading, and you make an educated decision and you get the reward.”


*


The downfall of Wall Street’s titans holds lessons for young finance professionals.

Robert Chatfield, director of UNLV’s MBA programs, thinks newly minted bankers will, in general, adhere in the near-term to more conservative investment strategies, taking fewer risks. How long that caution will last is up for debate.

“Unfortunately,” Chatfield wrote in an e-mail, “many people have short memories and are all too willing to jump on the bandwagon as times change. Just look at how many companies invested in those risky bonds backed by subprime mortgages because they didn’t want to miss out on the high returns.”

But not everyone will be quick to forget the mistakes Wall Street made.

Of the mortgage trainwreck, Christoffersen said, “You get a good understanding of what not to do. If something’s too good to be true, it probably is.”

“It was fascinating for me learning about mortgage-backed securities from professors who knew it front and back, and having them almost predict what would be the ramifications of the subprime boom.”

At UNLV, his teachers explained how financial companies, eager to create and sell securities backed by mortgages, purchased mortgages en masse from lenders. That alleviated banks and brokers of financial responsibility for loans they made, including those given to aspiring homeowners who had bad credit or provided no proof of income.

“It opened the door for greed,” Christoffersen said.

“No one was assuming responsibility. Back in the olden days, the bank was assuming responsibility for the loan. What happens when the bank didn’t assume responsibility?”


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Despite the turmoil ravaging Wall Street, Christoffersen is upbeat about his career prospects. As long as people have money, he explained, they’ll need people like him to help them manage it.

“It’s not something you can just learn overnight,” he said.

Christoffersen made his first stock trade at 17, investing in a golf club company using $500 he made cleaning golf carts at a course in Broken Arrow, Okla., outside Tulsa. He reeled in a 28 percent profit over two years and says he’s been “more or less addicted” to playing the stock market ever since.

As a college freshman he bought an $800 stake in an oil and natural gas pipeline company and more than doubled his money in under two months.

Even with markets jittery as they await a House vote on a bailout plan asking taxpayers to buy up to $700 billion of risky assets including mortgage-backed securities from financial companies, Christoffersen believes there are still winning bets to be made.

Many profitable businesses got pummeled recently as panicked investors fled stocks. It’s companies like these that have low debt and lots of cash that could be a good purchase as their stock prices bounce back, Christoffersen said.

Investing in firms such as Walmart and Proctor Gamble that sell staple, low-cost products could also be smart, he added: “It doesn’t matter if it’s World War VII. People are still going to have to buy toothpaste.”

“This is what I wanted to do,” Christoffersen said of banking. “For now, I know it’s long hours and I know it’s a lot of stress, but I love the challenge. ... Every day is different. It’s not all one thing. What was three weeks ago is not the same as today. It’s crazy.”

So despite the barrage of bad news slamming Wall Street in recent months, he’s not ready to abandon the industry he chose to make his own. He still dreams of one day managing hedge funds — “If,” he said, “they’re still around.”