Desert Hoosier: Bush Living Dream at IU after tour in Iraq
This is a feature story about Kevin Bush, a football player who maintained his dream to play football at Indiana through military tours in Iraq and South Korea. This story was published in April, 2010 during spring practice before his first year of eligibility. It placed first in the Sports News or Feature Coverage category in its circulation division in the 2010 Hoosier State Press Association Better Newspaper Contest.
Kevin Bush isn’t supposed to be on the field for the 11-on-11 scrimmage drill, but he’s halfway out there anyway, standing at the numbers and making sure he low-fives every single defender who goes on or off the field.
The action starts, forcing the Indiana sophomore defensive end to the sideline, but he can’t sit still. He’s pacing back and forth, bellowing instructions and encouragement at the defense.
“Come on Red!”
He stops only for a moment to help a teammate. Junior defensive tackle Tony Carter walks past needing his chin strap snapped up, and since it’s in Bush’s nature to take care of people, that’s what he does. After that he’s back to pacing and yelling until he’s called onto the field so he can finally burn all that energy by running into people.
By this point in spring practice, there are a select few players still bouncing around like Bush. The only thing separating them from three months off is about 20 minutes of practice and a spring game. But he’s been through too much not to enjoy every second of this.
Less than a month away from his 25th birthday, he’s finally where he wanted to be at age 19. Between then and now, he played two months of college football, experienced the working world, joined the Army and fought in a war.
He knows exactly how lucky he is to be playing football.
“The way he approaches practice every day, even the way he approaches the 6 a.m. workouts in the winter, you can really tell that he’s just happy to be here,” quarterback Ben Chappell said. “That’s something I think we all sometimes take for granted.”
Said defensive ends coach George Ricumstrict: “He’s really had to work for pretty much everything he’s got up until this point, so he really appreciates this. At times we think this is life and death, but he understands what life and death really is. I think he understands that this is a privilege.”
One that he once surrendered, then spent the last five years earning back the hard way.
First time around
The first time Bush tried to play college football, it wasn’t the right time or the right place.
When he graduated from Homestead High School in Fort Wayne in 2005, he was a 6-foot-4, 210-pounder trying to figure out a position. He’d played quarterback and then wide receiver and earned all-state honors, but he didn’t have the speed to play wide out at the Division I level. He got some interest from Big Ten schools as a junior, but at the end of his senior year, he was choosing between walk-on offers from MAC teams.
He eventually decided on Toledo, which felt like settling at the time because he desperately wanted to go to Indiana. One of his old high school teammates, Michael Hines, played for the Hoosiers as a punter, and Bush frequently visited him and other friends at IU on weekends during his senior year.
“I can’t tell you why,” his mother Mary Ann said. “That’s just always been his dream to play at IU.”
Toledo still represented a chance to play college football, and by Bush’s account, things went well on that end. The Rockets moved him to tight end, and gave him reason to believe he’d eventually play and perhaps earn a scholarship. But Bush just never felt right there. He left the football team about four games into his first season and left school at the end of the first semester.
“I just wasn’t as happy as I expected to be, I guess,” he said. “I’d visited IU on weekends. I’d come down and be around my friends. I think it was more just socially and just being up there. I didn’t feel like it fit the way it should, I guess.”
His hope was to eventually transfer to Indiana, football or no football, but he needed to do some academic work before he could pull that off, and he wasn’t quite ready to enroll anywhere for the spring semester. While he was waiting to go back to class he got a job at a steel fabrication factory in Fort Wayne owned by a family friend. He appreciated the favor, of course, but it also gave him a wake-up call about life in labor.
“He met some younger men out there were going through some tough times,” his father John said. “I think he thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t what I want to do. I’m not sure what I want to do, but that’s not it.’”
His attempts to get his grades to transfer were unsuccessful as well. He said he took too heavy of a course load in the summer at IPFW, not realizing that the shorter sessions meant everything was intensified.
“I fumbled that up,” he said.
So with his hopes of going to IU fading away, he realized he needed another plan. He thought about another friend of his who had joined the military and decided to explore the option.
Seeking penance
The army fit as a next step in life for a number of reasons. Military life is about teamwork, and Bush is most comfortable when he can weave himself into the fabric of a team. He’s outgoing and social, but somewhat paradoxically doesn’t like to draw attention directly to himself. Even when he makes major life decisions, he keeps them as quiet as possible so no one focuses on him.
“It’s never about Kevin,” Mary Ann said.
And even though he’d only held a gun once in his life, he believed he had the chutzpah to execute the frightening tasks he’d be asked to do. Even with the country at war.
“I remember telling one of my buddies, he was like, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Bush said. “I was like, ‘Who would you rather have over there, you know, fighting for you?’ And he was like, ‘Well, if you look at it that way .’ Because I’ve always been kind of a gung-ho, crazy guy in everything I do.”
Another major part of the army’s lure to Bush, though, was that it could serve as a proper penance.
According to his parents, Bush was always obsessively hard on himself. After losses and even sometimes after wins, he’s be distraught by his failures, believing that he’d disappointed his teammates. That guilt surfaced again when he thought about leaving Toledo, and the military offered an opportunity to strive for absolution.
“I felt like when I left I kind of let people down in a way,” he said. “People expected me to do well there. I expected things of myself. Aside from letting myself down, I felt like I let a lot of people down. My parents drive me all over for camps in the summers and came to support me all the time. I felt like by (joining the military), obviously I made the choice because I had to decide what I was going to do with my life and at that point, I felt like that was the best step. But at a side, as a beneficial thing, it was something that I could look at and say, I’ll do this for something else.”
He signed up before telling his parents. They found out when Mary Ann went into his room one day to put his laundry away and she found Army pamphlets in his room. She claims they were on his bed. Kevin thinks his mom might have done some digging.
Regardless, John and Mary Ann were supportive, but understandably petrified.
“I did say to him, ‘Kevin, do you understand this is not Halo?’” Mary Ann said, referring to the sci-fi combat video game. “These kids, they play Halo and they think ‘Wow it’s cool.’ But he said, ‘Absolutely, I understand.’”
Bush went through basic training, then deployed with the second infantry division to Korea. After a year there, he returned to the U.S. and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division as an infantry solider, training at Fort Campbell, Tenn., for eight months to prepare for another deployment for Iraq.
By the time his unit was called up and he flew to the war-torn country, he actually found himself anxious to go.
“It’s just like practicing for a game,” he said. “We were practicing for a game for so long. We go from winter all the way through until fall. Imagine waiting those eight months to go do what you’re trained to do.”
By the time Bush got there in November of 2007, combat tension had eased to the point that full-blown fire fights had become rare, he said, and the purpose of U.S. soldiers was to maintain security and help Iraqi leaders rebuild their country. Stationed in northern Iraq, most of Bush’s job involved patrolling, either by driving out in the desert or taking tower posts in the towns he and his fellow soldiers worked in.
That isn’t to say Iraq had become tame. In fact, Bush said, if not for a war-altering advance in military technology, he wouldn’t have made it back.
Bush still remembers the song that was playing in his head phones — James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” — when the vehicle he was driving drove over an improvised explosive device.
“It was right after the chorus, and then BOOM,” Bush said. “And then I just remember there was smoke. It took me a second to gather and realize what happened, because you’re just going and then all the sudden everything’s whatever.”
Had it happened when he first arrived, when the military was still using Humvees to transport troops and supplies off the base, he and the rest of his crew would have assuredly been killed. However, in December of 2007, the military introduced mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, MRAPs, designed to shield soldiers from the effects of the roadside bombs that had become the weapon of choice for insurgents. Because he and his crew were riding in one of those, Bush survived the blast unscathed and, aside from one fellow soldier who suffered and eventually recovered from a head contusion, the group was unharmed.
“Those MRAPs are a godsend,” he said.
He and his company had good fortunate for its entire 14-month tour. Every one of the 120-plus members of his company made it home alive. Bush, who rose to the rank of specialist, developed a sterling reputation among his fellow soldiers and was offered the opportunity to become an officer if he would be willing to re-enlist.
“He was always doing the right thing,” said Sgt. John Wisnewski, Bush’s platoon sergeant. “He was always about the guys, taking care of the guys and keeping everybody happy. He’d be a sergeant right now if he would’ve stayed.”
But about halfway through his tour, he determined he didn’t want that. He still wanted to go to IU, and he desperately missed football, so he dedicated himself to giving it one more try. He had his parents send him a camouflaged Indiana baseball hat that he wore to motivate himself whenever he was on his forward operating base and didn’t have to have his helmet on. He spent every available moment on base lifting weights, running or playing basketball. When he was off-base, he would invent exercises for himself using sandbags and anything else he could find.
He rarely if ever mentioned to his fellow soldiers what he was planning — “He tried to stay below the radar and not draw attention to himself,” Wisnewski said — but a return to college football was always on his mind.
“I think part of that is what got me through Iraq was that I knew I was coming back and I was going to get out of the army and I was going to do everything in my power to play football again,” he said. “I think with that goal, if you’re so focused on something, if you put all your energy into that, in a lot of cases, you can accomplish whatever needs to be done to get to that goal.”
‘Way more than that’
Eventually he did. After arriving back in the U.S. in February of 2009, he was admitted to Indiana through the G.I. bill. He started class last fall and showed up at walk-on tryouts weighing in at 252 pounds, 40 pounds more than he weighed at the end of high school and over 50 more than he did when he graduated basic training. The IU coaching staff was impressed with his size and athleticism and offered him a roster spot.
He spent his first fall on scout team. He didn’t have a chance to prove much other than his motor. He was responsible for the collision of the year, a literally bone-crushing blow on a special teams play in practice with fellow defensive end Darius Johnson that chipped Johnson’s shoulder and kept him out for the rest of the season.
“At the time it was unfortunate,” Ricumstrict said. “But that’s how Kevin plays. He’s gonna go all out all the time.”
This spring gives him more of a chance to do that. The Hoosiers added a 3-4 alignment this fall, and he fits perfectly in the drop end position. He usually lines up at the line of scrimmage in a stand-up position, sometimes rushing the quarterback and sometimes dropping back in coverage.
“We originally thought, best case scenario, he’d be a good special teams guy for us,” Ricumstrict said. “And he will be, but he’s turned into way more than that. He’s gonna be a key contributor for our defense.”
For those who have seen what it took for Bush to get to that point, seeing him finally put on an IU uniform will be remarkable. His parents saw almost every one of his high school games. They sobbed in the car when they dropped him off at basic training, held their breath for 14 months while he was in Iraq and finally let it go when he returned. This, they say, is a reward he’s more than earned.
“It still puts tears in my eyes now,” said John, who had to stop to compose himself, then shared the rest of his thought with a quivering voice. “I have a hard time talking about it. He’s a great young man. And he deserves everything he gets. We’re so proud. We will not miss a game. I guarantee you. We will not miss a game.”
And Bush won’t take for granted a day.
“My biggest fear was not being able to get the opportunity to do it all over again,” he said. “So I try to use every day to enjoy it. That’s the one thing I’ll take. You never know when it can all be gone tomorrow, so enjoy it while it’s here.”
Dustin Dopirak 