Vengeance belongs to God alone, but I understand Corporal Johnson completely.

A father re-enlists to avenge his son's death in Iraq. What was the Army thinking?

Joe Johnson wanted to serve with his son in Iraq
A bomb in a Baghdad slum stole his Justin. Would he get revenge?

AL-ASAD, Iraq - In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin.

It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson's Georgia doorstep with the news.

Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who'd gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb planted in a Baghdad slum.

May God have mercy on his brave soul.

Today it's Joe who mans the M-240 atop a Humvee, warily watching the sides of the road. He's an unlikely Army corporal at 48, a father who came here for revenge, a Christian missionary on a crusade against Islam, and a man who, after six months at war, is ready to go home.

"I shouldn't even have come," he now says.

Mr. Johnson should be sent home...

He wasn't there when the news arrived in Rome, Ga. The self-employed house-builder was in Fort Lewis, Wash., trying to qualify for a place in a Washington National Guard unit ticketed for Iraq.

With six years of long-ago Army and Navy service, Johnson had joined the National Guard in 2003, wanting to serve his country again, this time in combat, and to go to Iraq while his son was there. A year with husband and son at war would be easier on Jan than two years separately, he reasoned.
The death of Justin, a 1st Cavalry Division machine gunner, stunned his parents.

At that point, Johnson said, "I decided it was too soon to leave home." Jan was too distraught.

But last April 11, a year and a day after his son was killed, Johnson told his Iraq-bound Georgia National Guard unit, the 48th Infantry Brigade, he was ready to join them. They ended up at this dust-blown base in Iraq's far west, pulling escort duty for fuel convoys on the bomb-pocked desert highways from Jordan.

Why did he do it? The wiry, lean Georgian, an easy-talking man with a boyish, sunburned face, tried to answer the question that won't go away.

"It's a lot of things combined," he said. "One, a sense of duty. I was p----- off at the terrorists for 9-11 and other atrocities. Second, I'd only trained. I wanted combat." And then, he said, "there's some revenge involved. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't."

But there was more on the mind of this man who has done Church of God missionary work as far afield as Peru and the Arctic. "I don't really have love for Muslim people," Johnson said. "I'm sure there are good Muslims. I try not to be racist."

But somewhere along the way, his passion cooled, as the over-aged corporal, like tens of thousands of other American soldiers here, faced the reality of Iraq.

Was it last Christmas, when roadside bombs rocked his convoy one after another, and Johnson thought he was next? Or was it when speeding civilian cars passed the Americans' Humvees and Johnson failed to level his gun and open fire, which "I think anyone else," fearing car bombs, "would have done"?

Mr. Johnson should be sent home...

"I really don't want to kill innocent people," he now says. "I don't want to live with that the rest of my life."

...immediately.

It might have been the calls home to Jan, who was dealing not only with depression and other health problems, but with the prospect that their elder soldier son, Josh, 26, might be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.

"I don't like that Joe's there," Jan Johnson said when called by satellite telephone from al-Asad. "But it's something he felt he had to do. People heal in different ways. This is how he heals after Justin's death."

War is too dangerous and too important for personal vendettas. I hope he hasn't (and doesn't) get any of his buddies killed.

Johnson's battalion leaves Iraq in early May, when his enlistment term expires.

Once home, he'll remove the silver-toned bracelet he's worn on his right wrist throughout his deployment, bearing Justin's name and date of death.
His mission is accomplished.

"I got it out of my system," he said.