By Matt Day
Luke Walker doesn’t like being in the spotlight. Even at his own wedding. “I don’t like to be the center of anything,” he said. “I kind of like to be in the background.”
On Oct. 4, 2006, Walker and Whitney Tinney were married in his parents’ back yard in Stayton. Just graduated from Army airborne school at Ft. Benning, Ga., he had returned home to marry Whitney and say his goodbyes to friends and family before heading overseas with his Army regiment. The ceremony was limited to the couple and both sets of parents – Walker called it “my wedding,” promising Whitney that she would have a big wedding as soon as they could afford it.
While at home he may have skirted the spotlight, but he didn’t escape it overseas. Assigned to one of the most remote places on earth: the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, his unit was the focus of constant attention from both the news media and the Taliban.
Walker’s unit – Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 503rd Infantry Regiment – spent 15 months in Afghanistan beginning in June 2007. During the deployment, two journalists spent weeks with the troops in their outpost. Living with the soldiers, they chronicled life and death in the Second Platoon with cameras and tape recorders, writing articles for Vanity Fair magazine, filing reports for ABC News, and producing a documentary. The film, Restrepo, was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It will air on National Geographic TV network later this year.
Though he tried to shy away from the journalists’ cameras, Walker’s image and story found their way to Oregon before he did. After a tour in Afghanistan, two stints in Italy, and training at Army posts in the States, he got to come home last December for the first time in more than three years.
The road to enlistment
After graduating from Stayton High School in 2003, Walker enrolled at Oregon State University. Two terms later, he found that college and his intended major – computer science – weren’t for him.
“It turns out that I didn’t do so good after high school,” Walker said. “I wasn’t in the right state of mind, and I had problems just like most young kids do in a small town.”
Walker left school and tried his hand at jobs around Stayton. He says he worked about 20 jobs after high school, eventually landing in construction. “I kind of got stuck,” he said.
Though he comes from a military family, the decision to become the fourth generation of Walker men to serve was his own. Luke’s great-grandfather Walter E. Walker was active during World War I. His grandfather, also Walter E. Walker, was a career Air Force officer who served in Vietnam. His father, Walt, was with the U.S. troops that liberated Kuwait in the Gulf War.
“My dad wasn’t always for me being in the Army,” Walker said. “He wanted me to go to college and succeed that way. I learned the hard way I guess.”
He found his way out of the series of dead-end jobs by enlisting in the Army in the spring of 2006. His performance on an aptitude exam opened up a range of jobs in the Army, but he chose the path most likely to send him into combat: airborne Army infantry.
Whitney visited him twice during breaks in his training. On the second trip, he proposed. It was just short of three years after the two had met on a camping trip near Detroit Lake.
“We’d talked about it before,” Whitney said. “The engagement wasn’t as long as we had planned it, it was about a month or two. We did rush it a little bit.”
From the small wedding in Stayton, the newlyweds traveled to an Army base in the 2,000-year-old city of Vicenza, Italy, a city of 100,000 people located an hour west of Venice in the northern part of the country.
“That’s the first time I’d ever been outside the States,” Whitney said. “I was moving there and I had just turned 18.”
Living the war story
The 503rd Regiment had been part of the initial invasion force in Iraq in March 2003. It deployed to Afghanistan in 2005. Before the Walkers arrived in Italy, the regiment had orders to return to Afghanistan.
In June 2007, eight months after arriving in Italy, Luke Walker said goodbye to his wife and flew with his unit to the Koregnal Valley in eastern Afghanistan on the front line in the fight between the Taliban and American troops.
“It was hard,” Whitney said. “Kind of overwhelmingly lonely. It was the greatest thing to hear from him when you get a chance.”
That chance came about once a month for the soldiers in Second Platoon. The unit was stationed in a primitive forward position with no electricity or running water, and every fourth week Walker’s squad would return to an established base for supplies. There they would get about an hour of telephone use.
Walker used the time to hear about life away from the war, listening to his family more than he talked. “I love you and I can’t wait to see you,” he would tell Whitney and his parents. “That’s pretty much it. I mostly listen to them talk.”
“He was able to call every once in a while,” his father, Walt, said. “He didn’t say much. He really wasn’t able to tell us much, and didn’t want us to worry.”
One day Luke called his parents with something to say. He told them to get the January 2008 issue of Vanity Fair – it would include an article by a journalist embedded with the platoon, he said.
Walt and his wife, Billie, picked up a copy and opened it to find an article titled “Into the Valley of Death.”
“We looked at each other and said, ‘Oh boy,’” Walt said.
The nearly 7,000-word article told the story of the first months of Second Platoon’s deployment in excruciating detail: soldiers working through 100-degree heat in full body armor to build an outpost with pickaxes and sandbags while under attack daily. Friendly territory ended as soon as soldiers left their meager fortifications. Patrols were ambushed. Soldiers took fire from the hills around them and villages in the valley below. Hours of boredom were interspersed with frantic firefights and fears of being overrun.
Walker said the article captured the reality of being there as much as any writing could, but said to really understand the war, you have to see it firsthand. The journalists didn’t just relate the scene in words, they captured it on film, too.
“I’m probably not in it very much, so that’s not bad.” Walker said of the resulting documentary. “I’ll see my friends though. It’s supposed to be very good.”
Walker liked Vanity Fair photographer Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger. Both were veteran war reporters who worked to integrate themselves into the platoon. They lived the way the soldiers did, save returning fire when attacked. Walker called Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, one of the “coolest people” he’s met in his time in the army. He said the reporters weren’t a distraction from Second Platoon’s mission.
“You don’t really care about anything else, except the friends right there next to you,” he said. “You don’t care about the political side. You think about family. That’s about it.”
Walker is supportive of the American goals in Afghanistan, and sees the Army’s role as protecting those in the valley who want to be left alone to farm and raise livestock.
The danger at the Second Platoon’s firebase, named Restrepo in honor of a medic killed early in the deployment, was constant. One U.S. soldier in the Korengal was shot while sleeping on his cot. The valley was the scene of a well-known 2005 Taliban ambush that claimed the lives of three Navy SEALs. The helicopter sent to rescue the men was shot down, killing an additional 16 commandos.
“It was terrifying, yeah, but you didn’t think about it too much,” he said. “I mean, it was in the back of your mind. It was basically ‘get behind cover’ and you do it without thinking about it. One second you’re getting shot at and the next you’re behind something and you don’t know how you got there.
“Most of the time when you were behind something you were good, but there were a few cases in which some people were and they still got shot, which is unfortunate and it happens. You can’t go to war and think it’s not going to happen.”
Walker returned safe to Italy with some hearing loss and a set of bad ankles and knees, but without the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder common among soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, something he credits in part to Whitney. All soldiers returning from combat are required to see an Army psychiatrist. Walker said it wasn’t necessary for him. “Most of the time I talk to my wife about those things,” he said.
“[The psychiatrist] was a good person to see, but I have my wife to talk to. She is far more than I’ve ever imagined she would be.”
He paused when asked how Whitney could stay so supportive while living the lonely life of an Army wife overseas.
“I have no idea,” he said, in awe of the woman who had followed him across the world. “I couldn’t even imagine. But she does. And she’s waiting for me every time I get back.”
‘I just like my job’
Following his stint in Afghanistan, while training the next set of troops to deploy in Italy, he was recruited to join the Special Forces. Walker flew to Ft. Bragg, N.C., in January 2009 to complete the two-week assessment course that determines if soldiers are good enough to be considered for Special Forces training.
Even though he was far from Afghanistan and the media microscope, Walker’s story would again make it to Oregon before he did.
A Discovery Channel crew happened to film a documentary, Two Weeks in Hell, about Walker’s class of Special Forces candidates. It premiered in December, days before Luke came home.
His dad, Walt, who has been with Edward Jones investment company in Stayton since retiring from active duty in the early 1990s, said he saw his son in the film five or six times.
“It’s kind of surreal,” Walt Walker said of the media coverage Luke’s company received. “So many kids are going into the military from the area and so many stories don’t get told.”
Luke’s time at home was another short visit. He had passed his Special Forces entrance test and re-enlisted for another six years, this time to serve as a combat medic.
He said that after so many civilian jobs, he is confident he found his calling in the military.
“I just like my job,” Walker said. “It’s never the same, every day is different.” He said for him the Army means camaraderie, financial security and confidence that his wife will be provided for if anything should happen to him.
Luke and Whitney Walker spent the second half of January settling into a rented house near Ft. Bragg.
“It’s gorgeous,” Whitney said. “I fell in love with it the second I saw it.”
Luke continues to keep his home and work separate. Just as the home he and Whitney made was off-base in Italy, their new house near Fayetteville, N.C., is a comfortable few miles from Ft. Bragg. “Every place we’ve lived so far, we’re off-post,” he said. “Living and working on-post is not for me.”
The house will be home for at least the next two years, as Luke, now 26, goes through extensive training before joining his Special Forces group. In the meantime, Whitney plans to go back to school with the goal of working in physical therapy, a job that would keep her employed no matter where in the world she and her husband wind up.
As Luke works to make his career in the Army – “for however long my body will handle it,” he said laughing, “and how long my wife will stand me being there” – Whitney hasn’t forgotten about “her” wedding.
“I still want my big wedding,” she said. “And I have a feeling I’ll be getting that on our 10th anniversary.
