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Bronze star honors for Manteca man serving in Iraq

Jun-23-2005 » Filed Under: Homefront

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After a year in war-torn Iraq as an international police liaison officer, Manteca resident Gerald Krein came home with a civilian version of a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart.

Cold comfort for saving the lives of more than three-dozen American soldiers and Iraqi police officers from a crazed suicide bomber in Mosul in an incident that happened just last month.

And colder comfort still for the memory of seven American soldiers from Ft. Lewis, Wash., who have protected him while he was there and whom he had befriended. Six of them perished in one of the deadliest suicide bombings that rocked Iraq during the months leading to the elections in January when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a military mess hall in Mosul where American and Iraqi solders were getting ready to eat. The seventh soldier from the same military outfit lost his life in January.[...]

Krein signed up with the State Department for the yearlong stint in Iraq following his retirement in Jan. 2004 from the Sheriff's Department where he had worked for 23 years.

"The State Department needed people to train Iraqi police," he explained, and he was one of those who volunteered for the job.

"It's the right thing to do. It's time to give something back and help the (Iraqi) people develop democracy. They are the nicest, most generous people you'll ever meet," Krein said of his motivations in signing up for the job sting with the State Department.

Prior to deployment, he went to Virginia for basic training that included cultural understanding - "things of that nature," he said. That was followed by military training at Ft. Bleiss in Texas. Pre-deployment training totaled three weeks.

Overseas, he worked for a month at an academy in Jordan, followed by a month in Baghdad, eight months in Mosul, and the last few weeks of his contract in Tal Afar, a city near the border with Syria.[...]


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