CHRIS ROBISHAW: John was the most experienced guy on the team, having already fought in Iraq, and that experience can’t be replicated. It’s invaluable to a commander with a relatively—though talented—inexperienced team. So, he was in a lot of ways my sounding board—or, at least, I could gauge his reaction or just outright his feelings—or advice—on what my plans were with the team.
As an example, the night before a mission, I would issue the guys—you know, the mission, what we’re going to do that day—and they’d all kind of gather around, you know, rather informally, around the hooch. And I’d look over at John, always, because again, he was kind of my validation. And I would look over at him, and based on his facial expressions—or if he told me it was a dumb idea, well then, you know, he’d certainly say that. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those—but I totally, absolutely relied on his experience—I keep going to that word, validate—to validate my plan, my intent—that not only was it a smart thing to do in terms of appropriate for what our mission was, but if it was a smart thing in terms of our self-preservation, due to the insanely kinetic nature of our tour there in East Baghdad.
So, that’s what I relied on: his wisdom, based on his experience, and his very brutal, honest assessment of some wazoo ideas I came up with. I mean, it could just be something as simple as a nod, or a slight smirk, but if he put his hands on his hips, and he looked down at the floor and shook his head ever so slightly, I knew I wasn’t going in the right direction, so I would re-approach the problem, or I’d be like, “John, so what do you think?”
BALSAM ALJOBORY: I came to America, and I joined the Army, and I’m a Sergeant First Class in the U.S. Army because of John. Like, even though that I was the civilian linguist in the team, I never felt—like with John or with the rest of the team—that I’m, like, not part of the team. And during the time, like 2007, it was a really rough and difficult time, but John always had that smile and always there’s a joke, no matter how difficult the situation is. He always made you smile, so, I can’t really even count—it's like a daily thing—and, I mean, that’s the reason, like, John is the reason, the immediate reason behind people like me that they came to the United States and they joined the Army right away, because Johnny is a great representative of the U.S. Army overseas. He was very commanding to the mission, helpful, honest, and professional. All this combination, like, in Johnny, really made me look like—it's the biggest dream in my life is to be a servicemember of the U.S. Army. And it happens.
JOSH DENTON: He had grit. Yeah, he knew his stuff, he was reliable. He had a great sense of humor: we were in a pretty bad situation, and he found ways to make us laugh and make light of it.
BIN JOHNSON: And just like, he was like a natural instructor. He wasn’t a flashy guy, like he wasn’t--John was more of like, “Let’s get this really done, I don’t care if I get credit for it, I’m going to teach people how to do it right.” And he always did that, he just was kind of like a natural—he was like the perfect NCO. He just did things. And he didn’t care, and he was never, like, above doing, like, the dirty work, but he was also—he was really smart, and he had this laugh—I'm sure everyone’s told you about the laugh.
He had this awesome mustache, and this laugh where just like—I don’t know, he just, he did have a cool presence about him, and it was really—it was really fun to have him around, he just—and then, those kind of guys, he was also very brave under fire.
JOSH DENTON: He was always up in the turret, and either I was driving, and I was a horrible driver, and Jeff would be TC, which, I guess—truck commander, the person riding shotgun, giving directions, where to go—or it'd be reversed, where Jeff would be driving, I would be the TC, and John would be in the turret. So, I got to know him and his stories essentially through that. And he was an outstanding guy, and a real soldier.
ALEJANDRO CERVANTES: He was never afraid to put himself out there. Like, I have one of his last letters that he wrote, and he just talked about—you know, the only thing he wished for is for the rest of us to be safe. So, I mean, that just goes into his character, and that’s just how he was: like I said, any time we went out, he was the one in the gun, always watching our backs.
CHRIS ROBISHAW: As a professional soldier, he was always worried about us. And, so many examples of that—the one that sticks out is, on our team we would rotate positions in the gun trucks. Every other mission we would rotate, in order to share the risk of being exposed as the top gunner. So, in our gun trucks, in the Humvees, the top gunner was relatively exposed—there was a small cupola of armored stuff on three sides—but, at the end of the day, not nearly the protection that the other two guys in the truck, the driver and the shotgun, would have. Well, that was the team rule, you’ve got to rotate, you’ve got to share the risk. And the guys were cool about it: In fact, gunning is arguably as fun, if not more fun, than driving, so there was no issue, but John was a real stick in the mud, he wouldn’t rotate off the gun.
I don’t remember ever—and he did a lot of missions—I can’t think of a time I didn’t see John on the gun, meaning standing up in the truck, you know, exposed out the top of the roof. He preferred the 240 machine gun over the 50 cal. Anyway, that’s how I’ll always remember him, in the turret, in the truck, because he cared too much about everybody else to give it up. And even—I mean there’s a few times where we commandeered a couple of hotel rooms, because we were doing a late-night mission with our Iraqi unit, and we all rotated up to the hotel rooms so that we could take showers—definitely to sleep—and rotate, and, John-O's favorite word—or at least, in my mind, I remember it is, “I got this,” “I got this,” “I got this,” to the point where he never came off the gun the whole night—he let everyone else sleep.
Now that’s—I mean, that’s not heroic, that’s not different than what a lot of guys do at any given time, but that really exemplifies John: “I got it, don’t you worry about it,” “I got it, don’t worry about me, I have it,” “You rest, I’ll take it.”