Nine weeks that made a kid a man, and a mom proud

Jason Scowden was a screwup. Now he's a U.S. soldier.

By BEN MONTGOMERY, Times Staff Writer
Published September 1, 2007

Jason Scowden marches during his Army boot camp graduation last month. He's training to become a multichannel transmission systems operator at Fort Gordon, Ga.
	[John Amis | Special to the Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [John Amis | Special to the Times] Jason Scowden hugs his mom, Sue Scowden, after his graduation from Army boot camp at Fort Benning, Ga., last month. About this story This is the second installment in an ongoing series that tracks Tampa Bay military enlistees from the recruiting office to deployment. Click here to read the previous installment.

FORT BENNING, Ga. -- On a cloudy Thursday, the day after sixteen more American soldiers died in Iraq, the day after President Bush compared the war there to Vietnam, a red rental car from Tampa pulls into a parking lot at Fort Benning and Sue Scowden steps out.

She walks past ARMY MOM T-shirts for sale and finds a seat in the crowded bleachers.

Grenades roll toward the crowd spewing smoke. Gunfire tats in the woods. Soldiers creep from the trees.

"Ladies and gentlemen," a man says into a microphone as music rises, "you are about to see America's secret weapon ... it's the American soldier!"

Families cheer and from the forest march squads of young men, hundreds of them, moving together toward the crowd as cameras flash and people point.

Sue Scowden searches for her son. She can't pick him out.

The boy she prays for looks just like the rest of them now -- shaved head, hard stare. The son she felt so close to losing is lost in a field of gray-green.

Nine weeks have passed since Jason Scowden boarded a bus in Tampa for basic training, nine hellish weeks of hikes and pushups, blisters and blood in the Georgia hills.

The kid who grew up playing PlayStation and watching Jackass learned to kick down doors and roll grenades, to fire antitank missiles and sniper rifles.

The man marching past his mother now, marching closer to war, is not the kid who got on that bus.

* * *

Go back nine weeks. Jason Scowden, 18, stands on the hotel balcony the night before he leaves for basic. He's smoking his last cigarettes and drinking Mountain Dew. The past few months he has shacked up with friends to survive until he gets Army pay.

The middle child of five in a broken home, he got attention any way he could. His friends called him Skee McGee. He was always pulling stupid stunts to win their approval.

He grew up idolizing his dad, an Air Force mechanic. When he was little, Jason pretended his bunk bed was a jet in need of repairs. Now the two rarely speak, Jason says, and when they do the conversation is short.

His friends got jobs and his parents quit putting up with his behavior. He found himself alone; then he found the Army.

* * *

Sue Scowden cries in the bleachers. Lots of parents do.

Jason stands with the 192nd Infantry Brigade, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment, soldiers from places like Lakewood, Ohio, and Rocky Mount, Va.

The man on the microphone says 25 percent of mothers and 34 percent of fathers support their children who want to join the military. "That's way down in recent months," he says. He thanks the parents who are here.

Sue supports Jason. Of course she was worried when he told her he was joining. She still does, but won't tell him that.

"If he has to worry about me, he won't be safe," she says.

She buys a lapel pin that says "Pray for our troops."

Her fears of him getting hurt or killed -- and she has thought about that -- don't outweigh the very real concern she had before: that Jason would waste his life.

An incident when he was 11 is burned into Sue's brain. A police officer told her Jason was under arrest for vandalizing a school. Jason said it was another kid, and he had just been playing football on the playground.

It's hard, she said, to see your 11-year-old arrested. She thinks her divorce pushed Jason over.

He bounced from high school to high school, Pinellas Park to Tampa Tech to Freedom. He moved in with his father, then got kicked out and quit school.

His mother wanted the best for him, but she felt betrayed. She wanted him to change. In person, she was tough, but she cried when she prayed, she said.

* * *

The soldiers are shouting now, hundreds of voices echo across the place they call Sand Hill.

"I am an American soldier! I am a warrior, a member of a team!"

Jason tattooed his arms -- IRISH down one forearm, PRIDE down the other -- and his legs. He listened to the Insane Clown Posse and built homemade water bongs and landed low-pay jobs at a body shop and Little Caesars.

"I will never accept defeat! I will never leave a fallen comrade!"

He drifted from his brother's place to a friend's spare room.

"I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills!"

He said he felt as if he was standing on a dead-end street. Then he signed up, and changed his cell phone voice mail. "You've reached Private First Class Scowden," it said.

"I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America. ... I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life!"

The bleachers empty. Sue finally finds Jason. "I'm so proud of my boy," she says.

* * *

Watch Jason Scowdenmarching though the hot hills of Georgia, a few weeks before graduation, six weeks into basic training. His legs burn against the weight of a 50-pound rucksack, helmet, canteens, weapon, six magazines of ammo.

His foot hurts from a stress fracture. His back aches from the rucksack bending his spine.

It's past 1 a.m., a few miles into an 18-mile hike when Pfc. Scowden starts to think about how far he has to go. Some are struggling, but he's hitting a wall. Once, the master sergeant -- a man Scowden came to respect -- tied a rope around the waist of a lagging private and pulled him to the end. Nobody wanted to be that guy.

Coming into basic, Jason trained with laps around the block and pushups on the driveway, but nothing prepared him.

He arrived here in June. Heads were shaved, dog tags issued, medical papers signed. With new boots and a rifle, he stepped into the whirlwind designed to turn civilians into soldiers.

In the first three weeks, the goal is to break you down. The kid who sometimes slept until noon was up at 4 a.m. Pushups, running, pain, more running, and Scowden made it, even impressing some instructors.

The second three weeks he trained for urban combat and fired the M203 and MK19.

And here he is in the final three weeks, on an 18-mile hike, struggling to keep moving. He wanted to prove to his dad that he could do something good and show his friends that Skee McGee could change. He wanted to prove himself to his mom, who wrote him every week and mailed him cookies for his 19th birthday.

That's when he stopped looking up and started watching his feet hit the asphalt. He focused on one step, one step, one step.

He concentrated so hard that he lost his sense of time and place, and before long, the whole unit was back at the barracks.

Pfc. Scowden fell asleep with a new lesson: If you don't know where you are, you don't know how far you are from your destination.

* * *

Sue Scowden can't stop hugging her son.

"I'm so proud," she says. In her arms is a man she barely recognizes. He's ten pounds heavier, can run two miles in 13 minutes, but it's more than that.

"He's a whole new man. He has a purpose now," she says. "He used to have so much hatred and anger built up.

"I don't see that now," she says. "I see pride. I see a future."

Jason changes into his dress uniform and his mother takes him to the Texas Steakhouse off base. He orders a 12-ounce sirloin and pours A1 onto his plate.

She keeps telling him how proud she is.

He's uncomfortable, not because of her, but because it feels strange being back in the civilian world.

"I feel like a house-trained dog that gets put outside," Jason says. "The Army changes your whole mind-set. The way you see everything. The way you are. They break you down and then rebuild you into something else."

He has a picture in his bag from home. He's wearing a bandana and smoking a blunt. The old Jason Scowden. Skee McGee.

The Army has changed him. It's also changed the woman at the table.

"I used to worry about the knock on my door at night," she says. "Now I don't have to worry about a knock on the door."

Then she stops.

"I'd rather that knock be for something that I can be proud of."

In the morning, he's off to AIT, advanced individual training, at Fort Gordon, Ga., about four hours away. He'll train for 15 weeks to become a multichannel transmission systems operator. Then, who knows.

A few weeks ago she begged him to designate his religion as Catholic, so his dog tags could be pressed, just in case.

As they leave, Scowden tries to hold the door for a civilian.

"Go ahead," the man tells him. "You earned it."

Sue drives him back to the barracks.

"I gotta go, mom," he says.

"All right," she says. "I'll walk you up there."

He grabs his bag from the trunk. They walk toward the barracks, and he stops short.

"I love you, Mom," he says.

"I love you," she says.

She kisses him on the jaw and he joins the other soldiers in his squad in formation. He drops his bag beside him. Inside is a plaque from his mother.

Son, your life is everything a parent could hope and dream it would be. I am so proud of the man you have become.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (813) 661-2443.

[Last modified August 31, 2007, 22:45:49]