Pvt. 1st Class Michael Navarro is the kind of guy people like to
be around. Now, this likable soldier from Gilroy is making friends
just as easily in a place where friends are few.
Pvt. 1st Class Michael Navarro is the kind of guy people like to be around. Now, this likable soldier from Gilroy is making friends just as easily in a place where friends are few.
“He even sat down to tea with some Iraqis,” said Sgt. 1st Class Felipe Davila, his National Guard recruiter.
“Tea?” Davila asked Navarro on the phone last week.
“Tea,” Navarro replied, laughing.
None of this surprises Navarro’s mother, Carolina Goodwin, who said Navarro called home recently to request a soccer ball. It broke his heart to see some Iraqi children the same age as his 6-year-old sister playing with a deflated soccer ball, she said.
“He has a big heart,” she said.
Those close to Navarro just hope his caring and trusting nature doesn’t get him into trouble in Iraq, where it’s sometimes difficult to tell friend from foe.
“Men shield themselves with women and children. It’s a different world out there,” Davila said. “Like I told Mike, ‘trust your training, don’t always follow your heart. You’re young, you have a big heart. Be careful. Keep your head down.’ ”
An infantryman with the Army’s 11 Bravo Company, Navarro, 20, patrols area villages around Nasiriyah in a Humvee. He also responds to shootings, ambushes and other attacks against coalition forces stationed nearby, which include the Italians, Portuguese, Koreans, English and Netherlands Royal Air Force.
He feels fortunate to be based near Nasiriyah, which is relatively calm, while more than half of his company moved north, where coalition forces have suffered a greater number of casualties. This left his company at a deficit in Nasiriyah, with 117 soldiers doing the work of about 140. As usual, Navarro isn’t complaining.
“He’s a very happy kid,” Goodwin said. “You never see him upset for more than a minute.”
When he got the call to go to Iraq, he was ready to serve. He said he’d go wherever the military needed him and do whatever the military needed him to do, Davila said.
His mother cried for two days because she feared the worst.
“I never expected Michael to be called,” she said. “To me it was part-time – not even part-time. To me, one weekend a month was nothing.”
Navarro underwent three months of training and arrived in Nasiriyah in February. He is staying at Camp Cedar 2, which is made up of a series of tents, including an air-conditioned exercise tent where Navarro spends much of his free time.
He generally works an eight-hour day made longer by the 120-degree temperatures and heat-trapping uniforms.
“They have to wear the bullet-proof vests,” Goodwin said. “Underneath, they’re soaking wet.”
Sometimes, he calls home and tells his mother he can’t talk long because he feels dizzy from the heat and wants to go rest in his tent.
He talks to his family once every eight days. He doesn’t e-mail much because there is a waiting list to use the Internet at the base, his mother said. That doesn’t stop Goodwin from e-mailing regular updates about his sister, Nicole, or brother William, 3. She also sends him packages with his favorite foods, DVDs, socks and candy to give to the Iraqi children. The base has a store where he can purchase almost any necessity. If he doesn’t need something she sends, she tells him to share.
“They work as a team there,” she said. “They are so much into helping each other. When they get their food from us mothers, they share.”
Knowing her son, Goodwin reassures herself that he’ll return home all right.
“Since he was little he has always been so lucky,” she said. “Since he was little, anything he did always came out great.”
