There is a tiny percentage of Americans who share a bond that few others can grasp — a bond that may be defined by heart-pounding fear, tearful love, stomach-churning anger or boastful pride.
These are the military families, separated from most Americans by a harsh reality: They know that an enemy may aim at any moment to change the course of their lives.
For nearly 10 years, this unique group has existed in an alter world.
At home, there may be a clock set to the time in Kandahar. Their computer Web browsers may be bookmarked for the weather in Kabul or Mosul.
There may be a sign on the door: “No solicitors” or “Do not knock.”
Why? They fear the “we regret to inform you” visit, and don’t want the neighbor or mail carrier to send their hearts racing by mistake.
How many are there?
The Ohio Army and Air National Guards say more than 18,000 from Ohio have served at least one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Defense Department says it is unable to easily break down the number of Ohioans who are active military or reservists who have done the same. Nationally, slightly less than 1 percent of the American population is in the military.
The casualties, however, are known. From Ohio: 198 killed in action, 1,762 wounded.
Below are stories of the people who have represented the other 99 percent of Americans by wearing a uniform, and the stories of friends and family who have agonized with each send-off, each knock on the door and each news report of new casualties.
Who will go?
As Americans struggled to comprehend what was happening in those first hours of Sept. 11, 2001, one question weighed heavily on 10-year-old Andrew Dilbeck’s mind.
“Will Dad have to go to war?” he asked his mother in a soft, worried voice as she drove him home from an early school dismissal.
“No, honey. Dad will not be sent to war,” Rebecca Dilbeck assured her son.
It never occurred to the New Franklin mom that her son might be sent to war instead.
In September 2008, Andrew was coming of age when he announced he was joining the U.S. Marine Corp.
“I am not pleased,” his mother said as she thought back to that day. “I state to him that we will get you through college. My husband [who had served in the U.S. Air Force] states, ‘Bud, you do not want to join now.’”
But Andrew’s next words silenced them both.
“If everyone thought that way, then who would defend our country?”
Lance Cpl. Andrew Dilbeck has not been deployed overseas, but his family lives daily with the possibility.
“He has showed so much courage and commitment to our country. I continue to be amazed at his unselfish behavior,” his mom said.
Mike Kovack
For others, war wouldn’t wait.
Mike Kovack’s eight-year military career had effectively ended in 1993. But when he left, he signed up for a little-known program called “individual ready reserve.”
“You didn’t get paid. You didn’t drill. You just kept your [military status] and they’re basically saying, if we ever go to World War III, we’ll call ya back,” he explained.
Eight years later, he got the call. He was headed toward his 40th birthday when he was told to report to the nearest recruiting station.
“By January 2002, I was back in uniform, and in February 2003, I was shipped overseas for the invasion of Iraq,” he said.
Kovack has been Medina County’s elected auditor for 18 years; he retained his post throughout his service, staying in touch largely through email.
His personal sacrifice went deep. He married the year before the attacks, and lost his wife to cancer in 2008.
At the end of 2009, it struck him that he had just completed his first full year at home since being recalled.
“You don’t think about it much while you’re going through it, but when it’s over, you look back and you know something’s different. Something has changed,” said Kovack, who is still a commander with the Navy Reserves. “...With the constant deployments, training for deployments and threats of deployment, I and many others had a lost decade here at home.”
Scott Roberson
Sally Roberson of Stow remembers when her son, Scott, told her days after Sept. 11 that he “wanted to make a difference and do something good for his country.”
His family thought he was already doing that as a detective in the Atlanta Police Department.
He took a position with the United Nations to train police recruits in Kosovo, then joined a unit responsible for protecting high-risk political officials going into war zones. After completing training with the CIA, he was made a special agent.
He left home for a mission in Afghanistan with the same words he always spoke, knowing his family feared for his life: “Remember, no regrets.”
On Dec. 30, 2009, a spy detonated a suicide vest, killing Roberson and seven others.
Roberson’s wife gave birth to their only daughter a month later.
She will come to know of her father through others, like the couple who attended one of the services for Roberson to say that he saved the life of their only child during a mission in Iraq.
Sally Roberson struggles with her still-fresh grief, and seeks comfort in her son’s refrain: “Remember, no regrets.”
Saundra Hunt
Saundra Hunt already was a military mom and before Sept. 11, she was in the throes of organizing a family support group.
Hunt, 56, of Akron, had a daughter, Jasmine Hunt, in the Air Force and son, James Hunt, in the Marines.
When the towers fell, “I thought, oh, my goodness, we are going to go to war and I had two kids” in the service, she said. “It was frightening to me.”
The first meeting was held several weeks after the attack and the Falls Coffee Shop was packed, she said.
In nearly 10 years of meetings of the Families & Friends Connected Military Support Group, Hunt estimates that more than 1,000 families have been represented.
“It was so important to find someone to identify with,” she said.
For awhile, they met twice a month. Locations changed, and now they meet 6 to 8 p.m. on the second Friday of the month at Panera Bread at 689 Howe Ave. in Cuyahoga Falls.
Hunt said there is pride in the decisions made by family members to serve.
Neither of her children had to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet Hunt remained steadfast in her goals.
What was essential, she said, was to let others know that they were not alone in dealing with the worry of having a loved one at war and to let them know “that there is someplace we can come to call home and when you look across the room, you see somebody just like yourself.”
“There is nothing we can do other than pray,” Hunt said. “We can’t get to them. We can’t know what’s going on unless they tell us and they can only tell us very little.”
She said she is surprised, though, that there remains such a need for her group.
“Who would have thought that after 10 years, the war would still be on?” she said.
(Hunt can be reached at 330-208-0662 or saundrahunt@ sbcglobal.net.
Antoinette DeSimone
Not long before graduating from Norton High School in 2000, Antoinette DeSimone wondered whether she was up to the Army challenge.
She joined the Reserve in her senior year, hoping she could see some of the world — Germany would be nice.
She never expected a war, let alone Iraq, twice.
Her plans were to serve in the Reserve, go to college and become a teacher.
She was a private first class in the Army Reserve’s 447th Military Police Company by Sept. 11, 2001.
“I immediately knew something big was going to happen,” said the soft-spoken DeSimone.
It happened quickly.
“My squad leader called and said be ready,” she said.
That fall, she and her unit were deployed to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., where they provided security for the Army base for a year.
Then, after missing an entire year of school, she was enrolled to return to UA in early 2003 when her unit was deployed, this time to Iraq.
She remained in Iraq until December 2003.
On the first tour, her unit built detainee Camp Bucca and guarded prisoners there before moving to Abu Ghraib for guard duty.
“It’s a surreal experience,” she said. “You sleep with weapons. You go from being home to something totally that you can’t even imagine.”
She said that on her first tour, she was never afraid. She volunteered for a second beginning in June 2007 and served another year with a Columbus unit. That time, she was a staff sergeant responsible for the lives of other soldiers, and that had its moments.
After all the deployments, De- Simone finally graduated from UA in May 2009 with a degree in early childhood education, working as a Summit County Jail registrar and a tutor for Akron schools.
In April 2010 she took the Basic Officer Leadership Course, became an Army Reserve officer and today is a first lieutenant.
Now 29, DeSimone was hired recently as a Barberton police officer, which she calls her dream job.
If someone had told her a decade ago that she would go to war twice, she said, she would never have believed it,
The Army changed her.
“It made me a much stronger, confident person for sure.”
DeSimone said she plans to get a master’s degree in school administration, to keep open the option that she may someday get into education.
“I’m just trying to get somewhere. I don’t know where yet,” she said. And as for the Army, it was “the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.”
Adam Poppenhouse
Adam Poppenhouse was a sophomore at Cuyahoga Falls High School when the Twin Towers fell. He knew this would be a defining moment for his generation, but had no idea how it would redefine his life.
Other than seeing movies that glorified war, he had given little thought to the Army — until Sept. 11.
“That was an eye opener,” he said.
Poppenhouse, now 25, is a double amputee who works full time for the Wounded Warrior Project, traveling across the country, speaking about the organization and working to help other wounded vets.
The road from 10th grade to the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has been a hard one.
“I wanted that firsthand experience,” he said, “and good or bad, I definitely got a lot of that.”
On Dec. 3, 2006, he lost his right leg above the knee in a roadside bombing, and injured his left foot. Thirty operations later, the left foot was gone, too.
What wasn’t gone was the post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I went down a rabbit hole,” he said. “I went to a pretty dark place.”
He was self-destructive, didn’t care about anything and didn’t want help.
He was married at the time, and had a daughter.
His mother, Kim Poppenhouse, sought Falls native Joseph Gross, an Army vet and an amputee working for the Wounded Warrior Project.
Gross stopped by Poppenhouse’s home and left his business card.
Last summer, Gross knocked on the door and waited for hours on the porch, knowing Poppenhouse was inside.
Finally Poppenhouse opened the door.
“That was the beginning” of the recovery, Poppenhouse said. He was introduced to other veterans with similar injuries, and soon was attending Wounded Warrior events.
“I wanted to be part of that club,” he said.
“It inspired me to get off my ass and make something of myself and become somebody and have something to say. I wanted to have a story to say.”
In March, he was hired as a spokesman for the Wounded Warrior Project’s Warrior Speak program.
Today, he is divorced and trying to build his relationship with his daughter Rylee, 5, who is in Washington state with her mother.
And he lives with the consequences of his decisions after Sept. 11.
“Every day when I wake up and I pick my head up and I look at no toes, I will remember things I experienced because of that event,” he said.
“I know the good I have done and the people I have helped. To this day, I’ve always said, I still believe I would do it again.”
For now, his mission is to help others like him, and to be the one who knocks on the door.
“It’s all about the next guy,” he said.
(Poppenhouse can be reached at 330-296-7350, 330-383-0978 or apoppenhouse@woundedwarriorproject.org.)

John Nemec
In the past decade, Kent Theodore Roosevelt High School football coach John Nemec has seen several former players off to fight the war on terror.
At last count, eight of his former Rough Riders are serving their country in a combat zone.
One, unfortunately, never made it back home.
Nemec helped rally the community this May to grieve for U.S. Army Spec. Adam S. Hamilton, 22, who was killed in Afghanistan after his unit was attacked with a bomb.
Hamilton, a popular 2007 Roosevelt graduate, played football, hockey and lacrosse when he was at Roosevelt.
Nemec, 65, was watching TV in his Kent home when he heard his wife screaming upstairs.
“John,” she told him, “Adam has been killed.”
Nemec had seen Hamilton off for his deployment in Afghanistan just two months earlier. The two had been close ever since Nemec talked Hamilton into going out for the team.
The football coach was asked to speak at his player’s funeral.
“My wife and I are having a difficult time dealing with the loss of Adam,” Nemec said, his voice choked with emotion. “He’s just one of the greatest guys I know.”
For Nemec, losing any former player is like losing a member of his family.
Nemec has been head coach of the Kent football team on and off for 27 years. He also teaches students who are in jeopardy of not graduating from high school.
“Some people don’t understand the emotional involvement you have in a team,” he said. “It really is an extended family.”
He knew immediately after the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, that some members of that extended family would go off to war.
“I have a little part of all those kids in me,” he said. “I worry about all the kids. They’re always in our thoughts and prayers.”
Nemec feels a parent’s sense of pride when members of his football family sign up to serve their country.
The former Army officer was taught by his father at a young age the value of service to country. His brother is a retired colonel, and his two nephews are both career military.
“I’m a great believer in the value of the military,” Nemec said. “I believe it serves not only our nation but it helps young men and women grow and mature.
“I believe service to something greater than yourself is an important part of the maturation process.”
But he also can’t help feeling a gnawing sense of worry when he says goodbye to a young man heading overseas to a combat zone.
“When they’re going into the service, it doesn’t bother me as much as when they go to a combat zone,” he said. “When they’re going to a combat zone, I struggle.”
Peggy Buryj
Often, Peggy Buryj is asked whether things are getting any easier.
“Yes, some days,” is how she answers.
But she goes on.
“I still cry. I miss my boy.” On May 5, 2004, her only son, Army Spc. Jesse Buryj, 21, was killed in a controversial incident of friendly fire in Iraq.
“My life is not the same ever since the day Jesse died,” said the 57-year-old mother. “This is the new normal and it is not normal.”
Her family was initially told that the Canton McKinley graduate was killed when he was thrown from his vehicle in a collision with a dump truck.
Later, the family began to hear different accounts.
At a campaign appearance in Canton on July 31, 2004, she and other Gold Star families met with President George W. Bush and she asked the president to find out what really happened.
In February 2005, the Buryj family learned that it was friendly fire that killed the young man who had dreamed of being a Canton police officer.
Coalition troops fired on a vehicle that failed to stop at a checkpoint, and his death certificate indicates he was shot in the back.
Two and a half years after her son was killed, the government apologized.
The Army inspector general visited their home and said, “Anything that could have gone wrong, went wrong,” both in the investigation and the communication with the family.
She is not angry that her son died of friendly fire, but she is angry that the truth took so long and that no one in her son’s unit came forward voluntarily.
Families who have not experienced what she has cannot understand what it is like, not just having a child in a war zone but losing a child in war.
She feels alone.
“When Jesse was killed, it was almost a relief because I didn’t have to worry about him anymore,” she said. “It is awful.
“Some days you try to keep busy and you try to go through life, but still there are some days when I’m paralyzed with grief and you can’t even move. But you’ve got to go on.”
When members of her family goes to McKinley football games and sees the band on the field, they think of Jesse, who played trumpet and baritone.
She misses him.
“I want my boy with me,” she said. “I am proud of him. He was a good kid. A good kid.”
(The story of Buryj’s death will be told along with three other friendly-fire deaths in the documentary A Second Knock at the Door, directed by Christopher Grimes, at the Canton Film Festival, 8:30 p.m. Oct. 13 at the Canton Palace Theatre.
Ryan Groves
In early 2001, Ryan Groves had a deep feeling that he needed an abrupt change.
A sophomore at Mount Union College, Groves was carrying a 3.7 grade point average.
But the Southeast High School graduate liked guy stuff. He broke an ankle playing football and missed the camaraderie of the team.
He yearned for the “manhood stuff and getting out and getting dirty and learning how to fix stuff and learning about my own primal instincts.”
So he quit school and joined the Marine Corps in the spring of 2001.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Groves arrived at his Marine base in Hawaii at 3 a.m., 8 a.m. Eastern time. He had just completed Marine infantry school.
As he was putting his sea bags in his locker, he heard people start banging on doors.
The planes had hit the towers.
“I’m not going to forget where I was,” Groves said.
Three years and one month later, Groves was badly wounded in a rocket attack in the Fallujah area of Iraq.
He lost his left leg above the knee and his right leg was badly injured.
Now 31, he is a senior at Ohio State University Law School and finishing a master’s degree in public policy and management. He graduated from Georgetown University in 2008 with a degree in government.
Groves lives in a downtown Columbus condominium with his girlfriend, Megan Taylor, and his Olde English Bulldogge Trigger.
He has undergone nearly 40 operations on his right leg, which is fused in a straight position.
He said he has adapted well to his new life. He wears a prosthetic left leg and walks with a cane.
“I can’t go on the long hikes I used to but I probably walk more than 30 or 40 percent of Americans,” he said.
This past summer, he was an intern with Booz Allen Hamilton, a firm that provides professional services primarily to U.S. government agencies in the defense, security and civil sectors, as well as to corporations, institutions and non-profit organizations, and he is still working for them as part of the firm’s health team.
Groves hopes to work for Booz Allen Hamilton when he graduates next year.
“I keep piling stuff on to do and it keeps me going physically,” he said. “I have to work hard now because I don’t know what the future will bring physically.”
As Groves talks about his life, Trigger jumps onto the couch with him and he grins as he grabs his dog.
“I have big plans,” he said.
Meanwhile, he is searching for answers.
Groves said he has studied much about the Sept. 11 attacks and has lingering questions.
“I kind of feel a duty still, a different duty, not to just back up generals and politicians, but to find the truth,” he said.
He is concerned about the costs in human and economic terms of the wars since then.
He worries that like the former Soviet Union, which left Afghanistan after a decade to find its economy in shambles, the United States could be heading in the same direction.
“We are fighting terrorists,” he said. “They don’t aim to kill us all. They aim to hit us where it hurts.”


Jim Carney can be reached at 330-996-3576 or at jcarney@thebeaconjournal.com.
Cheryl Powell can be reached at 330-996-3902 or chpowell@thebeaconjournal.com.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com.