It's 'normal' in a not-so-normal place

Hank Gola - New York Daily News

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. _ The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass may be the most famous of all the TPC courses. "TPC at Mosul" is the most important.

For the 101st Airborne Division stationed in Iraq, the golf course that 1st Lt. Jesse White scraped out of the rocky, barren desert was a picturesque oasis. It may have been strewn with debris and filled with unplayable lies, but to the soldier far from home it was Amen Corner.

"It was something that made things feel a little more normal in a place that wasn't very normal at all," says Capt. Kate Blaise, who is safely home at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. "It sort of made it seem like a regular Saturday afternoon. To even get away for 30 minutes to hit balls and do something you would do at home made all the difference."

Blaise, White and three other "founding members" of TPC at Mosul were invited by commissioner Tim Finchem to attend last week's The Players Championship. White was on hand for the final round Sunday and the GIs were booked to play the Stadium, Valley and Marsh Landing courses this week after a three-hour lesson at the PGA Golf Academy.

The gesture was particularly special for Blaise, whose husband, Mike, was killed in a helicopter crash just before the unit pulled out in January. She has been home for two months, taking care of funeral arrangements and trying to squeeze in a few rounds of the game that she learned to play in Iraq, where she chronicled her experiences in a diary for Golf for Women magazine.

Blaise says that golf courses at home now seem to have greener grass, grander trees and sweeter-singing birds than they ever did before.

"That whole experience makes you grow up a little more," she says. "I found myself evaluating my life and the way I was living it . . . the things that are really important to me. To not take certain things for granted, like your family or free time or even some things like running water or bathrooms or a regular shower."

When she played the course in Iraq, she says she would imagine being on a course back home. "Back here, you notice more the way the grass smells . . . the rolling hills and the trees," she says. "It's just beautiful. And then you have your buddies and the same buddies you were playing golf with in Iraq, only now in civilian clothes. You appreciate those people so much in Iraq and then when you get home, you realize what great friends they were. To spend time on the golf course with them here, you realize those guys are family."

In Iraq, Blaise managed 238 soldiers in a battalion that provided support to the 1st Batsogne Brigade Combat Team. As the 101st Airborne pushed on, she served as the night battle captain, linking her support unit to 4,500 combat troops. White was in charge of assigning repair jobs for damaged equipment for the entire brigade. He also carried three golf clubs and some balls along with his chemical suit, gas mask, flak vest, ammo and weapon.

When the convoy would stop, White and a few buddies would bang a few balls out into the desert, leaving, as Blaise says, a trail of dimpled white orbs that must have flummoxed the Iraqi nationals.

"Once the major offensive portion of the initial invasion was over, we were in Mosul by then and started to settle back down somewhat," White says. "There was a lull there for a bit and I took a Humvee antenna, walked out about 160 yards and tied a shop rag on top of it. I stuck it into the ground and then in the evenings sometimes, I'd hit 7-irons at it."

When Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kelley took over as battle commander, he asked White about the curious flag sticking out of the ground.

"He was a golfer," White says. "He didn't say much about it at the time but a couple of days later he came back and said, `Hey, it's a pretty big field, you think you could get about three holes over there?' So I said, `Sure, sir, I'll give it a shot.' In three weeks, we managed to scrape together three holes."

Eventually, the three holes became six and to make it a nine-hole round, they would replay the original three-hole loop. That made seven par threes and a couple of par fours, one that went around an earth-covered bunker to form a dogleg left.

Three-wood, wedge was the play.

White marked the tee boxes with rocks from the Tigris River and tried to find flat areas to serve as greens since not a blade of grass could be found.

"The terrain wasn't what you'd think of as desert," he says. "It wasn't sand as we know it. It was more like the surface of the moon, a combination of sand and rocks."

White tried laying down rugs for greens but that didn't work and when he tried to sweep away the pebbles, he only brought up more rocks. So they just made due, moving off as much debris as possible.

"There was all sorts of things . . . old broken Iraqi radios and missile fins and missile casings, scrap metal, little things that looked like specimen bottles. I'm not sure what they were. All kinds of crazy stuff," he says.

During one round, Col. Samuel Holloway -- who often made a junior officer caddy for him, Blaise says -- hit a tee shot to what White says was "perilously close" to the latrine.

"The facilities were not exactly developed to their full potential," White says. Still, they reminded Holloway that the USGA rules were in effect. "We made him play the ball where it lies."

White's foursome teed off every Friday at 6 a.m., getting in nine holes before 7. Soon, word got around. Aviators stopped by and then soldiers from other units. The course got pretty crowded.

Once Kelley wrote to his father, who is a member of a golf club in Tennessee, all sorts of equipment started showing up in the mail. Finchem got involved after a member of his staff saw an article that was written about TPC at Mosul in the Clarksville, Tenn., newspaper. The PGA Tour made up TPC at Mosul caps with the swinging golfer logo and sent them to Iraq along with all sorts of flag sticks, balls and clubs.

"Once everybody picked up on this, holy cow, we had golf clubs falling out of the sky. It was crazy," White says.

At one point, Blaise prevailed on White to teach her the game. He showed her the setup and grip and soon she was addicted. White would often see Blaise heading straight from her job, which lasted all night, to change into clothes and hit balls.

Once, White, Blaise and her husband, Mike, were able to play together. White recalled that Mike Blaise hit four 9-irons, all right at the flag that day.

"When Mike was killed," White says, "it was definitely the worst blow of all."

White got back home on Friday the 13th, where he was greeted by his wife Sheila and sons Chase and Cobe. A six-handicap, White has been taking advantage of his leave by playing four times a week.

His course at Mosul is still being used, although White isn't sure whether all six holes are in play. The new unit that came in was much smaller so they had to pull in the perimeter of the camp. Nevertheless, he says, the new arrivals were pretty excited to see the makeshift course.

He's also proud of what his unit accomplished in Iraq.

"Absolutely. We did a lot of amazingly great things over there and I've seen a lot of positive changes," he says. "For everything that's reported that's so bad that's happened, there are 10 things positive that don't get reported. For instance, our brigade totally revamped the medical system south of Mosul. They have fully functional neo-natal units, sonograms, trained nurses, running water. These kind of facilities they never had and we spent an entire year sending soldiers into dangerous areas to provide health care for kids.

Blaise says she can separate her husband's tragic death from the rest of her experiences, although she is bothered by the anti-war protests that she has witnessed since she's been home.

"Speaking for myself, it's kind of confusing because I'm in the military and I'm fighting so people can have that voice," she says. "I may not agree with that voice but I'm giving them that voice. The one thing that got me when I got back . . . I was watching the news, watching this anti-war demonstration and they were reading off names of soldiers who had fallen in Iraq and they read off my husband's name. That made me very angry because he very strongly believed in what he was doing and they were using his name for a purpose that he would not have approved of."

"I know I wasn't in that country one day before I realized that we needed to be there," she says.

For Blaise and White and the soldiers they played with on the rocky, barren desert, golf made their lives a little more bearable.

"Our little course helped us all forget just for a minute, what a tough place it could be," White says. "It was almost impossible to forget what went on there every day, but a few laughs on the links sure helped."