Mar 20, 2003 By Josh Krysak 4 min read

CHALK HILL – George Sparwasser Jr. leans calmly against the kitchen counter of his Chalk Hill home, tries to quiet the family dog, Mia, with a treat and recalls his last words to his son, Joshua, who departed Monday for an undisclosed location in the Middle East. “The last thing I told him was to keep his gun loaded and keep his head down,” Sparwasser said.

He’s concerned about the safety of his son, and he admits that watching the constant television coverage of the war in Iraq is beginning to take its toll on him already.

“I get so burned out from watching it that I need a break. It starts to get to me. We usually talk to him three times a week, and all of a sudden he’s not here,” he said.

Airman Joshua J. Sparwasser, 20, joined the Air Force after he graduated from high school in 2000 and is now an environmental electronic systems specialist, serving at an undisclosed location in the Persian Gulf.

His decision to join the military was solely his own, and George Sparwasser Jr. thinks that his father, George T. Sparwasser, might have influenced his son’s view of the military.

“In high school, in his junior year, he talked about it, but then in his senior year he just said, ‘I’m going to join the Air Force.’ I’ve never pushed him,” George Sparwasser Jr. said. “He has a tattoo of a purple heart with G.T.S. underneath it, his grandfather’s initials.”

He noted that growing up with that military presence in the house affected him and probably affected his son during his grandfather’s many visits.

“I remember my dad in the summers, when he and his buddies would start drinking, his stories would be so blown up that my mom would go to bed,” Sparwasser recalled.

“They would turn the kitchen table over and they would go through the re-enactments of them storming the beach at Normandy. They would go through this, and just the stories that they would tell, you couldn’t get this from a friend you went to school with or grew up with. It was that you watched my back and I watched your back kind of thing.”

While he said that he never encouraged or discouraged his son’s pursuits, Sparwasser said the effects of the military on his son have been astounding.

“To see the turnaround of a young teen-ager into a gentleman, to see him in the military, it makes you very proud.”

Joshua Sparwasser was deployed Monday from Dover Air Force Base in Maryland after being on a hard alert for deployment for more than three weeks. He told his parents that his unit would be going into a “hot area” and that the communication lines were down. He also told his parents that he had been issued a gun, something he normally does not carry, and that terrorist threats on the area were high.

Sparwasser said that Josh, who works mainly on the electrical systems of cargo planes, probably won’t see any combat, but he and his wife, Pat, are still concerned about their son’s safety.

“I get to talking to Pat, ‘How can a 20-year-old boy, with all these strangers and with bombs in the background, how can this register for him? I know I have a hard time just watching it on TV,” Sparwasser said.

He said his son was not allowed to take his cell phone or his portable CD player but was issued a deck of playing cards by the Air Force, something Sparwasser said he hopes will keep his son’s mind off heavier matters.

While Sparwasser and his wife are nervous for their son, he said they stand behind President Bush’s stance on Iraq and hope the war will prevent future terrorist attacks: “If you show some strength, it might deter a future attack. If something would happen to Josh, I wouldn’t hold it against the United States. He chose to do this.”

In the meantime, he wonders about his son, thousands of miles away, in a hostile world unlike anything he has ever encountered.

With an American flag catching in the breeze outside the kitchen window, Sparwasser’s eyes wrinkle as he looks away and recalls an incident that occurred the last time his son was home.

“He was getting a haircut just before he left, and a lady came up to him and she said, ‘thank you.’ And that really made him feel good,” Sparwasser said. “Those are the things that get to me and make me proud. I can’t imagine being 20 years old and have someone say that to you.”