The Choices We Make

This Heartbreak and Hope column started out as a straight-up veterans spotlight story on U.S. Army and Iraq war vet Tom Falletta. After my interview with Falletta, it evolved. More on that later.

55-year-old Thomas Joseph Falletta was born and raised in New Jersey, the son of an Italian immigrant father from Sicily and a mother who was born in the States, but was “100% Italian,” he says. He’s the youngest of three siblings - an older sister and a brother who died in a car accident in 2010.

No one in Falletta’s immediate family had previously served in the military, but at the early age of 10, he felt a calling to serve. “It was innate to me, I guess,” he says. When pressed further on a possible source of his desire to enter the army, he cites the father of a girlfriend he dated in high school. “Her dad was a detective in the police and a Vietnam vet” who was a helicopter pilot shot down twice while serving in the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Air Division. “Coming out of high school, I told my mom I want to go into the Army and fly helicopters,” he says. “She flipped out.”

Instead of enlisting, Falletta attended Trenton State College, now known as The College of New Jersey, and graduated in 1991 with a major in political science and a minor in law and justice. Falletta says he was glued to the television coverage of the Gulf War at the time, reigniting his sense of service to his country. So, at age 22, he applied to the U.S. Secret Service and advanced all the way to the oral boards, a rare accomplishment for someone his age. The special agent who interviewed him told him he was a bit too young for the Service, and his spot was given to a 27-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran. “The agent told me to go get some experience and keep trying, so I enlisted in the army reserves with a bachelor’s degree,” he says, much to his mother’s displeasure. “I could have gone in as an officer with my degree but wanted to be a worker bee. It was the quickest way to get experience.”

After completing his basic training and advanced training as an intelligence analyst, he was hired as an investigator in the New Jersey Attorney General’s office while also serving in the reserves. “The state was really supportive of my parallel careers,” he says. He ultimately changed jobs with the state and became a State Trooper in 1995.

Among other army reserve assignments at the time, he was deployed to North Macedonia on the border of Kosovo in 1997, gathering intelligence on the brewing conflict in the region, earning hazardous duty pay. When he returned home, he put himself in inactive ready reserve, a bit disgruntled he says, by the treatment he received from active-duty soldiers. “As a reservist, they treated you like a reservist,” he says. “I felt kind of like a second-class soldier.”

After a little more than a year, however, he missed army life and re-enlisted as a sergeant in early 2000, teaching noncommissioned officer training and warrior leader courses at Ft. Dix in New Jersey. “It was a schoolhouse environment,” he says. “I told my wife I won’t get deployed again.”

His world changed, of course, on September 11, 2001. As with much of the world, he was transfixed by the images unfolding on the news. “I’m watching this and I packed a bag and said, ‘I gotta go in.’ I started packing a bag when the first tower was hit and I was done packing by the time the second tower was hit.”

At that time, he was assigned to a special unit as a State Trooper overseeing construction projects on the New Jersey Turnpike. Short-staffed that morning, his boss directed him to shut down the northbound lane of the New Jersey turnpike and direct all traffic to the nearby Garden State Parkway. He also shut down the Goethals Bridge access and assisted with shutting down the Holland Tunnel access to lower Manhattan from New Jersey to allow for emergency vehicles to come and go. As a 9/11 first responder, he escorted families of the deceased to the makeshift morgue in New York’s Javits Center, and in his spare time, shuttled to Ground Zero to help firefighters and rescue workers on “the pile,” as the massive debris mound was called. “I just grabbed a respirator and other gear and worked on the pile every night that I was able to,” he says. “Those firemen on that pile were unbelievable.”

For the next several years, while still in the reserves, Falletta spent his army time training soldiers until the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. In August of 2004, Falletta was deployed to Iraq and embedded in the Iraqi army to train its soldiers to fight insurgents. 

“That’s normally the job of Green Berets,” Falletta says. But with those special forces deployed to high-value target missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the training role fell on Falletta and his instructor colleagues in the 98th Reserve Division out of Rochester, New York. 

Falletta actually looked forward to deployment in an active combat zone, he says. “You go through years and years of training and it’s kind of crazy, but you want to see if it’s going to work. It’s the real deal. It’s showtime.”

While embedded and on patrol with his Iraqi counterparts for 13 months, Falletta was involved in firefights and mortar and IED attacks, and he lost many of the Iraqi men he trained and grew to respect.

“It was a very hot area,” he says. “We had a little Kia bus filled with 40 Iraqi soldiers that was going down to southern Iraq. They got stopped along the Iranian border and all 40 of them were executed on the side of the road.”

Like many veterans, Falletta is reluctant to dwell on the details of the violence he saw and withstood in Iraq, preferring to sum up his experience simply, “There was a lot of death.”

U.S. Army Lieutenant General David Petraeus, Commanding General of the Multinational Coalition Forces in Iraq, awarded Falletta the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his service. In the citation, Petraeus notes: “Sergeant First Class Falletta trained and mentored 130 Iraqi Military Police and 250 members of the Base Defense battalion,” and “arrested and detained more than 200 criminals, insurgents and miscreants in support of the Province and Base.” The citation also notes Falletta’s “superb leadership, excellent intelligence training, ability to work in an austere location, with no external support, ability to multi-task beyond his experience and unwillingness to let the mission fail...” He was also awarded the Legion of Merit upon retirement.

And, like many war veterans, Falletta’s combat experience took a deep personal toll on him, leading to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 2007, nearly two years after returning home from Iraq. “It took me a while to go to the VA. It’s a really weird feeling being diagnosed with that because I’m invincible, nothing affects me, right? I was back as a trooper again, with my gun on my dresser and an Iraqi flag next to my nightstand. It was a pretty tough adjustment,” he says.

Falletta says he’s doing better these days, thanks to continued therapy and his two-year-old service dog Truman, provided to him by Puppies Behind Bars, a New York-based nonprofit that provides service dogs to veterans and first responders. While he says the tactile closeness to Truman is soothing, he says the biggest benefit to him is in caring for his canine companion. “I love him, and I’m concerned about him,” he says. “He takes my mind off everything else because I’m not thinking about anything but him.”

Nonetheless, he says he remains “hyper-alert” at all times, always checking the door in restaurants and intentionally sitting with his back to a wall. Falletta and his family split their time between their homes in New Jersey and Marco Island, but he says he tends not to come during the season due to the crowds.

Unlike interviews I’ve done with other veterans for this paper, I found myself reflecting on some of the things I have in common with Tom Falletta, as well as the unique nature of the war he fought and the brave men and women who fought it.

We’re roughly the same age, less than two years apart, with a good portion of our lives spent in the New York metro area. We both worked in the shadows of the World Trade Center in our formative years, feeling a personal loss at their destruction. We were both raised Catholic and are doing our best to manage through painful estrangements with loved ones in our lives. He shares a birthday (November 21) with my twin adult sons, my older brother and his own service dog, Truman.

But the obvious thing that sets us apart is that he stepped up. I didn’t. 

He wasn’t drafted into service. He willingly chose to serve, putting his life at risk alongside every other person who did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The choice I made was to stay in the relatively safe, warm cocoon of my workday life raising kids, climbing the corporate ladder, taking vacations. Sure, I paid attention to the wars, prayed for their end and the safe return of our fellow citizens fighting them, and mourned the loss of so many lives.

But like most Americans, I was removed from it all, and that chasm only widened the longer the wars went on.

Looking back, I know I wouldn’t have – couldn’t have – made the choice Tom Falletta did. And it truly breaks my heart knowing he’s bearing the scars of that choice to this day.

By the end of our Zoom interview, all of this had kind of sunk in. I thanked him for his time, for sharing his story, and most importantly for his service and sacrifice, which can often sound and feel like sort of a cliché these days, something we’re supposed to say to veterans, not something we feel about them. I sincerely feel a lot of gratitude for Tom Falletta, and I hope in turn that he feels everyone’s gratitude for him. He deserves it.