Handing Out Hope: Kernersville woman served in Iraq, winning hearts and minds through art

KERNERSVILLE

Kristen Wheeler left Iraq knowing that she had been part of something good.

Wheeler, a lieutenant junior grade with the Navy, worked last year at Camp Bucca, a detention camp just north of the border with Kuwait. There, with the Navy Provision Detainee Battalion-4, she became part of a campaign to help promote the preservation of the Iraqi culture through various forms, including art. She now serves in Norfolk, Va.

On a recent trip to her family home in Kernersville, she talked how her perceptions of Iraq have changed.

In the aftermath of the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib, detention camps in Iraq changed under the leadership of Maj. General Douglas Stone. Members of his team separated hard-core insurgents from the 80 percent or so of politically moderate detainees, she said.

Her battalion, she said, worked to give detainees hope and skills, giving them the opportunity to take classes -- conducted in Arabic -- in reading, writing, math and civics. They were able to study trades such as carpentry and bricklaying. Visitor centers opened in the camps so that detainees could see their families.

Wheeler worked with other sailors to broaden detainee programs on art, recreation and education. Most of the detainees at Camp Bucca had worked for al-Qaida because they needed money for their families or because they were being threatened, she said.

Al-Qaida, she said, "is like the worst kind of Mafia." Al-Qaida took advantage of the poverty and illiteracy among the Iraqi people -- 65 percent of the detainees at Camp Bucca couldn't read or write when they were imprisoned -- and coerced people who weren't extremists to join its ranks.

"Their ideology believes that their mission is to convert all Muslims to their way of thinking," Wheeler said. In the early days at Camp Bucca, extremists mixed with the general population and converted more people to their ranks. The detainees had little to do. She became part of the change that Stone started.

"It was more of a ‘hearts-and-minds campaign,'" Wheeler said, and the campaign offered a message that she stated this way: "We know a lot of crap went on in your country. It's time to start rebuilding."

An important decision

Wheeler, 31, grew up here. She was a curious, strong-willed child, said her mother, Margie Wheeler.

"She didn't follow the crowd. If she had her mind set on something, it didn't matter what the trend was," her mother said. She described her daughter as a creative person who often expressed her ideas in writing -- diaries, poetry, song lyrics.

"She's a thinker."

When Kristen Wheeler graduated from Glenn High School in 1995, she was at loose ends, said her childhood friend, Paige Piper of Randleman. She wasn't ready to go to college, and she wanted to get out of Kernersville.

"I got tired of waiting tables in Winston," she said. "It was fun, but it was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life." With the encouragement of her parents, she joined the Navy two years later.

"Her decision to go into the military really directed her life in a way it would never have gone had she not made that decision," Piper said. Wheeler was serving aboard the USS Cole when it was attacked, and the attack made her think. "It did open my eyes to an entirely different world that we live in," she said. "Before Cole, I had very little perspective on the ‘bigger picture.' Growing up in Kernersville, we really didn't talk much about Iraq or war. After the Cole was bombed, I had a lot of questions. The most significant: ‘Why did the bombers hate us so much that they were willing to die for their cause?'"

The Navy gave her a chance to go to college at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. There, she majored in global studies with a concentration in governance, peace and justice in the Middle East. She wanted an answer to her question. During her studies, she learned a good deal about how colonialism had affected the Arab world. She volunteered to go to Iraq.

"I had to see it for myself," she said.

There, she watched as detainees, who could have become enemies of the United States, as they were given the chance to learn and to make their own choices. She took special interest in the art program. Although she sketches a little, she doesn't consider herself an artist. But she always took art classes in school and carries a deep appreciation for creative expression, she said.

She remembers one man, Najim, who became a courier for al-Qaida in order to pay the dowry for the woman he loved. The woman's family married her off to someone else, and Najim was caught and sent to Camp Bucca.

When Najim first started to produce art, his sketches, in black and white, were depressing and dark. But once he received encouragement and more art supplies, his work changed, Wheeler said. "He went from sad and dark to very vibrant colors." She brought back one of his works, a serene portrait of a mother and child against a backdrop of a red-and-yellow sky.

Another artist, who dubbed himself "Moammed Pecaso," had been imprisoned for petty theft. He stole to pay back a debt to his brother. She especially appreciated one of his pieces -- an outline of Iraq wreathed in ribbons with motifs of the American and Iraqi flags.

"Iraq has only been a country for 85 years," she said. "Nationalism is such a new thing for them. They identify first with family, then tribe, then Islam. Seeing Iraqi art come out is really refreshing.

"If they identify with being a good Iraqi, a good Muslim, we're on the right track."

Pecaso wound up being released and coming back to the camp as a teacher.

"Pecaso risked a lot, working with Americans so closely," Wheeler said. "It definitely put his life in danger."

Another program

Wheeler also was involved in another successful project, "Operation Wainwright," which originated when Wheeler was "adopted" by Dottie Wainwright of Houston. Wainwright, who regularly sends supplies to military members overseas, asked Wheeler what she could send to her. Wheeler asked for school supplies to give to children of the detainees when they visited the camp.

A few weeks later, thousands of dollars worth of toys, clothes and school supplies arrived. Wheeler and her colleagues distributed the supplies to visitors and to Iraqis in the surrounding area.

"It was a goodwill gesture that enabled the security folks to start a dialogue with our neighbors," Wheeler said. At the visitor's center, the women and children who received their gifts responded graciously, "despite the fact that we were holding their loved ones inside the wire."

The detainee population of Camp Bucca is now down to about 7,000, as more and more detainees have been released and gone back to their lives.

Wheeler said she left Iraq feeling hopeful about the country's future.

"I wish other people did," she said. "I care about that country and what happens to it. These are generally good people."

Many servicemen and women have served more than one tour of duty in Iraq. Will she?

"Who knows?" she asked. "Who knows?

"I wouldn't turn it down."

■ Janice Gaston can be reached at 727-7364 or at jgaston@wsjournal.com.