Home Front: Joel Ponshock

“My father installed window glass, basically any type of glass. Even to this day, he still does that part-time, but mostly auto glass and that sort of thing, windshields and windows,” Joel recalled.

“My mom was kind of a jack-of-all-trades. She went to school to be a seamstress, but then she did kind of a lot of odd jobs. She was a stay-at-home mother until I went to grade school, and then she did a bunch of different odd jobs before she got a state inspector job at a potato plant down in Rapids.

“I’ve got two older brothers, Andy and Perry. Perry’s about two years older than me, and Andy’s about four years older than me.”

Ponshock comes from a long line of service members, and at 18, he joined the Marines.

“In our family, five of my uncles on my mom’s side had been in the military, whether it was the Army or the Marine Corps. And my grandpa on my dad’s side was in the Army and one or two of my uncles on my dad’s side as well.

Ponshock said that “the mental part is probably the most difficult”

“When I was in high school, I worked all summer. I mean, I was out in the heat, in the bugs, getting covered in hay dust up in the mow, you know, doing all that sort of thing,” he said. “I was no stranger to hard physical labor, but the PT (physical training) is different, when you’re running and doing push-ups and all that stuff. That’s a lot different than just hard physical labor, but that part of it, it was difficult. They make it difficult, but the part that I wasn’t used to was the lack of sleep, the instant obedience to orders; I mean, that’s really where the training comes in, and it’s the mental part of it that’s probably the most difficult.
“The biggest adjustment was just not being home. I grew up, a lot of family close by, spent a lot of time with family on the weekends and seeing them all the time. To be gone was a huge change. Not having the ability to go and get a home-cooked meal somewhere or spend time doing the things that I wanted to do. You’re away somewhere else where you don’t have the freedom and the luxury to go out and do whatever you want.”

Ponshock’s first deployment was as a bulk fuel specialist.

“The first two months I sat at Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. We just did fueling operations, so it was 12 on, 12 off. We had 12-hour shifts, and we just did fueling stuff, and then for basically two months, then in between there, I got shipped out to Al-Qaim, which is a FOB, or Forward Operations Base, out on the western side of Iraq, which is I think around an hour or two east of the Syrian border.

“I think we might have had like a 50,000-gallon capacity where every week or so, they’d send out a convoy. We’d offload the fuel truck, fuel all the vehicles up so they could get back to where they came from. And then, you know, we would then disperse that fuel out to anybody else who needed it in the area, whether it was people on base or different little patrols came in or what have you.

“Then, the final two months of that deployment, I basically was just kind of a gofer, like I would work the fuel farm, but if then they had convoys going out, I would ride along on the fuel truck—we usually had an Army driver at that point—and then we would take fuel out to all these small little bases, depending on where they needed it. We’d haul it out there and then drop it off and then come back.

“Then, the second deployment, we were put into a provisional rifle company. They took all kinds of different people: we had armorers, we had mechanics, we had equipment operators, we had like five of us bulk fuel specialists, we had all kinds of different people from different MOSs that they basically jammed into one provisional rifle company. And then we were the QRF (quick reaction force) for Camp Al-Taqaddum in Iraq. So, basically, we were in charge of patrolling the base.”

Ponshock said that military service matures you.

“I was 18, and when I got out, I was 22, so you grow a lot over those four years. There’s a big difference between a 22-year-old who had just gotten out of the Marine Corps and a 22-year-old who had just graduated college, and I think any two people together who fit those categories, you can see that pretty easily,” he said.

“I didn’t go to any school before I went in the Marine Corps, but after I got out, I had the benefit of having the GI Bill (which provided school assistance). I got out in July 2006 — off active duty — and I started school, basically that fall semester. So, I only had about a month and a half off before I started college.”

Ponshock served four years on active duty and nine in the reserves while attending college.