Sat 18 Mar 2006
Ben Kamilewicz ‘01, currently serving in Iraq, earns a mention in an article about the biathalon.
Biathlon is a war game. Soldiers who ski fast and shoot straight have historically made up its personnel. But at these Olympics, the military is nearly missing from the team sent here by the world’s mightiest military competitor.
Tracy and Lanny Barnes, 23-year-old twins, are shooting and skiing for America in the Italian Alps. They trained on a new trail in Fort Kent, Maine, built by a nonprofit rural-development project, the Maine Winter Sports Center. Though they were “approached several times,” they say, the twins didn’t follow the tracks of past U.S. biathletes to the National Guard’s sports outfit, based near the Army Mountain Warfare School in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
“Our mom strongly opposed us joining for fear they would send us to war,” the twins write in a jointly signed email. Another mother, Gretchen Kamilewicz, knows the feeling. “I’m not a lover of the military,” she says. “When Ben told me he was joining, I felt sick.”
Her son, Ben Kamilewicz, skied cross-country for Williams College and taught high school until the National Guard recruited him onto its biathlon team. That was early in 2001. For four years, he trained full-time, learning to cross-country ski his heart out, pause to let his heartbeat drop, and then fire a rifle at a target. In 2004, he raced for the U.S. at the World Cup in Alberta. He had hopes of making the Olympic team.
But his unit was called up last summer, and now, at 29, he is spending his days on Humvee patrol in Ramadi, Iraq.
“My experience in the sport of biathlon,” he writes in an email from Ramadi, “has been filled with many wonderful adventures that have led me to many exciting places, and at the end of my journey, by some twist of fate, to the wretched war zone of Iraq.”
“This wasn’t in the cards,” says his father, Dexter Kamilewicz, a real-estate man in Maine. “Ben had a passion for the sport. He wanted to compete. Now his focus is on surviving. That takes as much effort and concentration as it does to be a world-class athlete.”
Or more.
Comments:
1) Don’t join the military for the, uh, sports.
2) The National Guard needed to get its priorities in order. War is good that way.
3) I like to imagine that Ben’s outlook on military service is more positive than the writer portrays it in this article. It would be interesting to read the whole e-mail.
4) It would be nice to hear more from Ben. Perhaps Dick Quinn will write a story about him. See here for a marvelous one about Marine Jerry Rizzo ‘87.
5 Responses to “I Felt Sick”
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Ben was graduated from Williams for Christ’s sake. He was easily old enough and intelligent enough to have assessed appropriately the risks (along with the rewards) of joining the National Guard and consequently to have assumed those risks. When as individuals in American society are we going to return to taking personal responsibility for our actions?
yes frank, and lets start with our commanders in chief.
I hold no brief for the position of POTUS or, as a general proposition, for authority of any kind. As the old cliche goes and as we are so often reminded, “they put their pants on one leg at a time”.
Ben was class of ‘99 at Williams, not ‘01. I was on the nordic ski team with him for three years. The Vermont National Guard biathlon training facility up in Jericho, VT is one of the best in the country. Their goal, as I understand it, is to train athletes to compete in the World Military Games and the Olympics. It seems to me to be entirely counterproductive for them to be forced to send those same highly-trained athletes to Iraq.
Ben’s current outlook on military service, is, in my opinion, entirely justified. He has been away from his wife and family for over a year, stationed in Ramadi, one of the worst places in Iraq, facing a hostile enemy population while not receiving the necessary equipment and support from his own military. It is my dearest wish now that the situation in Iraq improves, and that he will be able to return home soon, and keep skiing.
Are you suggesting we change the Vermont National Guard into an Olympic training center where the members are exempt from military service?
If taxpayer dollars are meant to support an Olympic Development Program, why not set one up for solely that purpose? Having biathletes in the VT National Guard does make sense, as it is fantastic conditioning, and a great way to maintain morale amongst those involved in the program. However, at the end of the day, is this the primary purpose of the National Guard?
I sympathize with the frustration of anyone serving in Iraq. The tours must be incredibly daunting. I am thankful for those who are willing to serve.
Nonetheless, 00haj’s claim that we shouldn’t be sending those in the biathlon program seems strange to me.