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Short and Sweet
June 18, 2008
This article appears in the current edition of Lacrosse Magazine, a members-only benefit of US Lacrosse. Join US Lacrosse today to start your monthly subscription! by Matt Jennings, Special to Lacrosse Magazine Online So let's establish one thing right at the outset: this is not a lacrosse story. Oh, there's lacrosse in the story. But if that were all, well, you'd be finished reading right about now. No, this is a story about a young woman who has fallen in the love with the game -- just in time for her career to be over. She first picked up a lacrosse stick in September 2007, roughly one year before she would graduate from the University of Texas. The Texas women's team was founded as a club in 1993 and competes in the US Lacrosse Women's Division Intercollegiate Associates (WDIA). The athletes play for the fun of it, and an athletic young woman -- who had grown up playing tennis and running cross country and who had rowed crew at UT -- can just pick up the game one early autumn afternoon and be fully accepted. But you're reading about Tiffany Fogarty because just a few years ago, when most of her Longhorn teammates were going to the prom or texting their BFFs, she was walking the oppressively hot streets of Baghdad, M-16 in her hands, collecting human intelligence, in U.S. Army parlance. Actually she was walking the IED-strewn streets from dawn until dusk, talking to "low-level people, high-level people," anyone with a story to tell, and then repairing to Camp Victory on the site of Baghdad International Airport, where she would work another four hours researching and cross-checking the intelligence she had collected before passing it on to reconnaissance units. "When I first joined the lacrosse team, we went around the room saying something 'interesting' about ourselves. When it was my turn, I stood up and said, `I'm 28. I'm married. I've served in the Army for about 10 years, and not too long ago, I was in Iraq,'" Fogarty says with a laugh. "For a second or two everyone just stared. I think they were stunned, but then just like that, everyone was like, `That's so cool.'" The daughter of an Air Force veteran, Fogarty joined the Army in 1998, a year after graduating from James Madison High School in San Diego (the Army recruiter found her working in a toy store), and she says that she jumped at the opportunity. She wanted to go to college, and here was a great way to see the world, examine career options and have her education paid for. And, this being pre-9/11, her parents could think of no better place for their daughter to be. After basic training, Fogarty was assigned to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., where she spent 47 weeks learning Russian in preparation for a job as a military linguist. She has since learned Serbian and Croatian and is fluent in all three Slavic languages. She met her husband, Shawn, while stationed at Fort Hood in Texas, but by this time the world had drastically changed. There was 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and, in 2003, when she and her husband married, the start of hostilities in Iraq. In July 2003, Fogarty was honorably discharged from the Army, but promptly enlisted in the Army Reserves. She attended college full-time, "busting my ass," she says, before learning that Shawn would be sent to Iraq in March 2004 with the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. A few months later, she got called up and was headed for Iraq. In the Reserves, Fogarty had switched specialties from linguistics to interrogation, and in Baghdad she had her choice of assignments: conducting interrogations at a detainee facility or being part of a four-person unit that canvassed the Iraqi capital for intel. "I didn't want to just sit in a room all day. If I was going to be in Iraq, I wanted to see things, see Iraq," she says. When it came time for Fogarty to reenlist in December 2005, she chose to do so on Saddam Hussein's parade ground in the shadow of Baghdad's most famous landmark -- the Victory Arch, mammoth crossed swords held by giant fists modeled after the former Iraqi dictator's.
Her current enlistment ends in December, and this time, Fogarty says she won't be re-upping. (Shawn was honorably discharged and is now a student at the UT engineering school.) "I'm ready to move on in my career," says the marketing major. "And at some point I'd like to have children, and I'm not getting any younger." But she has one immediate goal first. "I hope to graduate with honors," says Fogarty. "If I could do that...that'd be special." | ||||||||
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