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IRR soldier puts master’s degree on hold

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — All he wanted for his birthday was a new pair of shoes. Instead, he got a letter from the Army saying he was being reactivated and sent back to Iraq.

That is how Chris Higginbotham spent his 28th birthday recently.

Higginbotham, a first-year master’s student in the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has already served four years in the Army. Now he will put his education on hold while he serves up to 15 more months in Iraq.

An aspiring broadcast journalist, he holds one of the school’s prestigious Park Fellowships, which pays tuition and fees for more than 20 incoming graduate students. He also receives a $13,000 living stipend. When he got out of the Army last May, Higginbotham was excited to begin his new experience.

But he had a nagging thought the Army would call him back. In fact, he thought it was inevitable. What surprised him was that it was so soon.

“I certainly didn’t think it would be eight months after I left that they would call me back,” he said. “I thought it would be at least a year.”

Camp Taji will be his destination, an American base about 16 miles northwest of Baghdad, more than 6,000 miles from Chapel Hill.

Not only will Higginbotham have to put graduate school on hold, he will also have to leave behind his wife of four years.

Although at times she feels bitter about losing her husband for a year, Melanie Higginbotham tries to keep a sense of perspective.

“I start to feel like it’s unfair, but when you join the Army, especially after 9/11, it’s one of those things that has to be in the back of your mind,” she said. “Think of the people who go to Iraq for two or three tours.”

The total obligation for enlisted soldiers is usually eight years. Four are active duty, four are inactive. While inactive, soldiers are placed on the Individual Ready Reserve, meaning they can be called back to duty any time.

Almost 90,000 people are on the IRR roster. Of them, about 1,900 are currently serving. The Army recently said that almost 1,900 more will be reactivated by the fall.

Higginbotham enlisted in spring 2003, shortly after getting his undergraduate degree from Appalachian State. He had two major reasons for joining.

“One, I was watching a lot of Fox News at the time, so I was pretty pro-war,” he said. “Two, I liked the idea of being an embedded journalist.”

“I never had pictured him being in a military lifestyle,” said Higginbotham’s father, Dick, chief financial officer for Pinehurst Resort. “Chris was never one to get up and run for five miles. But it matured him.”

Though his father was surprised at his son’s desire to join the Army, Higginbotham’s mother had stronger feelings about his enlistment: She was firmly against it. But when he finished college, she thought it was time to step back.

“When Chris graduated, I still objected,” said Debbie Higginbotham. “But he was an adult, and it was not my place to say anything more.”

Higginbotham was a videographer during his four years in the Army, writing, producing, taping and editing short news pieces and commercials for the Armed Forces Network, the military-funded television and radio provider for servicemen overseas. He had no extended deployments. He got to report from France, Bulgaria, Greece, Belgium and Italy. Despite these opportunities, he was ready to move on when his four years were complete.

He found out he had to go back while on the phone arranging a birthday dinner with his parents when they told him that the Army had sent him something in the mail. He said he still receives voluminous mail from the Army, usually asking him to re-enlist, so he thought nothing of it.

When he saw the letter, he knew it was not the typical piece of mail pleading for him to return.

“I looked at it and knew exactly what it was,” he recalled. “I wasn’t going to open it because I didn’t want to ruin the day, but I decided to open it anyway.”

It was orders telling him to report back to duty to serve up to 400 days in Iraq. Melanie was in the shower and had no idea what was going on. When she came out, Higginbotham’s father told his daughter-in-law the situation.

“I was really shocked,” she said. “Then I started getting angry. How do they have the nerve to do that?”

The Army allows people to delay or avoid being reactivated in some circumstances, and Higginbotham hoped that his pursuit of a master’s degree would delay his deployment until after he finished his studies in spring 2009. He called the IRR hot line. The woman who answered made it sound as though his chances for delaying activation were good.

He submitted all the necessary paperwork and hoped for the best.

“I really thought I was going to get the deferment,” he said.

In early March, while working on a class project, he got a call from the Army telling him that his appeal had failed.

He was ready to go to the registrar’s office to withdraw from classes, but he got another call a half-hour later telling him he could complete the semester. He now has to report to Fort Jackson, S.C., on May 18. From there, he will be sent to Iraq with a reserve unit from Utah to serve in journalism or public relations.

“There was a part of me that was like ‘Well, at least I get to do all that cool stuff,’” Higginbotham said. “But most of me was pretty upset, pretty scared. That’s when a lot of bitterness came into it, too. It just didn’t seem fair.”

The school will hold his place in the master’s program for the length of his reactivation. The orders say for up to 400 days, but an extension is always possible.

Even before Higginbotham received his reactivation orders, he planned on trying to raise awareness of the war around the UNC campus. For the five-year anniversary of the start of the war, he made black T-shirts that read “Fix It” in the colors of the Iraqi flag.