Brooklyn Ink Big Reads

No Justice No Beets

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:01:40 -0400

Sonny and Joe’s hummus — Until a resolution, it’s off the shelves at Gracefully Supermarket in Midtown. Rebecca Ellis / The Brooklyn Ink

The basics of kosher law govern the facility, where no meat products or utensils were seen together with the dairy products, the cheeses stored in a separate area of the warehouse.

But as strictly as Flaum follows the biblical laws, federal officials say Flaum is hardly kosher when it comes to adhering to labor law.

Moshe Grunhut and his kosher food distribution company, Flaum Appetizing Corp., have been at the center of a complex and high profile controversy about employment law involving major union organizers and advocates in two federal cases. In the first most widely publicized case, former kitchen workers, represented by the Industrial Workers of the World, allege that the company violated the National Labor Relations Act for discouraging its employees from organizing a union and firing them after doing so. The Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union, and Brandworkers International, a labor law non-profit, is representing 17 workers after they were fired during a union organizing drive.

After the labor board ordered Flaum on Aug. 6, 2009 to pay at least $230,000 in damages to the workers, Flaum filed a countersuit alleging that the employees in questions were all illegal aliens and could therefore not organize a union, let alone be entitled to back pay or reinstatement.

No Justice No Beets

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:21:00 -0400

No Justice No Beets:

The basics of kosher law govern the facility, where no meat products or utensils were seen together with the dairy products, the cheeses stored in a separate area of the warehouse.

But as strictly as Flaum follows the biblical laws, federal officials say Flaum is hardly kosher when it comes to adhering to labor law.

Soft Porn, Hardening Hearts: A Magazine's Private Story

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:36:25 -0500

This longread was originally published on Jan. 2, 2012 on The Brooklyn Ink

***

By Jonathan Tayler

The speck bothered Danielle Leder. It had to go.

It was nothing more than a small piece of dead skin, or perhaps a stray bit of dust, but against her model’s bright red lips, the mote could not stay. That was all the more apparent on the screen of the expensive high-definition video camera that Leder had acquired for the video shoot. The small brownish spot stood out amidst the sea of red lipstick and pale white skin.

Her crew of four had tried what they could to get the speck off without having to remove or smudge the model’s makeup. Finally, Leder got up, took her model’s hand and led her to the back of the studio, to the lit mirrors and swivel chairs that served as a dressing room.

“Come on,” said the 25-year-old Leder. “I want to get it right.”

So off came the lipstick, and with it, the offending speck. And back went the model—also named Danielle—onto the array of tarp and sheets that functioned as a backdrop. She wore a sleeveless white turtleneck and white underwear with white socks adorned with lace frills. A bobbed black wig covered her platinum blonde hair. Her lips were immaculate, and her skin untouched. The mark gone, she was ready for her closeup once more. She would spend the next three hours covered in blue paint.

This was the first video shoot for the re-launched Jacques Magazine, and Danielle Leder had to get it right. She had to produce content to show that the magazine still existed. She had to create something that didn’t stray from Jacques’ well-established aesthetic. And she would do it without the magazine’s co-founder and her husband, 38-year-old Jonathan Leder, who at that moment was somewhere near Tampa shooting a movie about a stripper running from a serial killer. He was in Florida while his wife was in New York because they were in the process of separating. Over the course of the year, their marriage had disintegrated, just as the magazine’s momentum had slowed to a crawl.

Jonathan departed New York on October 20. He left behind his wife, his two young children, and Jacques, the softcore erotica magazine that he started with Danielle.Jacques, the analog answer to a world of digital porn, the callback to an era of skin magazines long gone, a small circulation print magazine with one advertiser and dreams of being something far bigger.

“It’s my name, it’s my investment,” Danielle said. “But even though they were my ideas, it’s Jonathan’s work. When people see the next issue, they will know it’s my work.”

***

Two years ago, Danielle Leder almost died. While giving birth to her son, Jack, she hemorrhaged three times and spent three days in intensive care. When she eventually went home, it was up to Jonathan to take care of his wife and newborn son.

“As time went on, he really wasn’t working, nothing substantial,” Danielle said. “I kind of just said, let’s make a magazine. I can’t do anything, I’m here on the couch, let’s just start a magazine.”

It was an idea the two had bounced around before. Both had a magazine background—Jonathan as a photographer, Danielle as a former fashion model for the likes of the French version of Vogue. The two actually met on a photo shoot. The timing for their new venture wasn’t ideal with the recession deepening, but the couple didn’t feel as if that were an obstacle.

“After the meltdown, part of the reason we started the magazine was that it was the best time to start something,” Jonathan said. “If you start a magazine when everyone is running for cover, it’s a nice story for people to tell and believe in.”

“We felt the only place we could go is up,” Danielle said.

Despite no experience in design or print journalism, Danielle did the mockup, and after a false start on the name—they wanted to call it Ritz, only to have the Ritz Carlton threaten to sue—they settled on Jacques, the French version of their son’s name.

The size of the operation—just Danielle and Jonathan initially—wasn’t the only thing setting Jacques apart. There was also the content: soft-core nudity. Beyond that, there was also the format. Jonathan shot on film, and the couple styled the magazine on vintage Playboy and the long-departed adult magazines of the 1970s.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of quality magazines out there, period,” Jonathan said. “The plastic wrap stuff is pretty disgusting. The quality of photography is bad. You’ll see some cute girls, for sure, but is it totally Photoshopped? Is it shot with digital cameras and terrible lighting? Today, it’s the lowest common denominator with everything.”

Why start an erotica magazine at a time when porn magazines were rapidly losing money? Both Jonathan and Danielle expressed a desire to showcase an aesthetic they felt was missing from mainstream adult magazines.

“Our girls are much different than what Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler are offering,” Danielle said. “Those girls that they’re showcasing, I could easily hop on my computer and get millions and millions of pictures that are those girls. I would like to think our girls are different. They’re curvy and not airbrushed. I feel like this is filling a gap that does not exist right now.”

The Leders started their magazine in Williamsburg and tried to recruit women in the neighborhood to pose. The inaugural issue was “awful,” in Danielle’s mind, riddled with spelling errors and printing problems. But subsequent releases improved on quality, and the magazine started gaining notice. Major chain bookstores had begun addingJacques to their newsstands. A deal was struck with PowerHouse Books to put together a calendar for a 2011 release.

Then things began to fall apart.

***

It’s October 19, and Jonathan Leder is in upstate New York, but he’s headed down to Florida the next day to continue work on his movie. For most of the year, the Leders had been cycling between Florida and New York, and Jonathan spent most of that time filming and reworking the script.

“The magazine is kind of nice where it is,” he said. “I’d like to see it do a little bit more and if someone wants to help take it to the next level, I’m cool with that, but personally, I have other projects rather than just pumping out a magazine.”

Those other projects left the magazine neglected. Issue no. 7, which was completed at the end of 2010, was delivered months late to subscribers. The calendar deal fell apart. Work on the eighth issue, which was supposed to take place during the movie filming, stalled as well.

At the same time, the Leders’ marriage began to unravel. They fought frequently on their trips to and from Florida and during the filming, and money became an issue as well.

“If we did not have two kids, I would have quietly packed my bags and left,” Danielle said. “I deserve better than this.”

That October night, things came to a head as Danielle and Jonathan got into another fight over his plans to return to Florida to continue work on the movie. The next day, Jonathan packed his bags and told Danielle he was leaving for Florida.

“I told him, if you go, it won’t be good, because I can’t trust you and we obviously have problems we need to work on,” Danielle said. “He just looked at me and got in the car and left.”

Jonathan hasn’t been back to New York since.

***

Jacques seemed like a venture doomed to failure.

The magazine was not profitable. Jonathan claimed they were breaking even, but thatJacques wasn’t bringing much back in terms of money. Advertising was a major issue; American Apparel was the only company to buy space. The website was rarely updated. Distribution was an issue, Jonathan said, and he was unsure if he wanted the magazine in stores like Barnes & Noble or the now-defunct Borders. “The truth is, those places are really mainstream, and they don’t even sell that well to begin with,” Leder said.

Beyond that, Jacques was attempting to recreate an aesthetic that died years ago in an industry that is collapsing in a medium that is declining. Jacques was trying to sell nudity in a day and age when anyone with a functioning internet connection and a working computer can pull up millions of photos of a naked woman in roughly three seconds at no cost to them, and for that privilege, the magazine charged $9 an issue.

Despite all this, Jonathan believed that the magazine could be a bigger success. He just didn’t know if he was the one who could do it. “I think if we had someone working on the magazine full time and really wanted to bust their ass, there’s a huge market for this,” Jonathan said. “The problem is that we’re not magazine publishers. We’ll see what happens when our new editor comes in. He seems really gung ho on taking it to the next level.”

That new editor was a familiar face to the Leders: Noah Wunsch, who had joined the magazine as a writer two years ago and worked his way up to an editor position. He is 22 years old, tall and rail thin, and he believed that there was room in an increasingly digital world for a print magazine with an aesthetic seemingly a generation out of date.

“The magazine is niche, but we don’t have to have a niche clientele,” he said. “This appeals to a broad audience.”

The plans were there in Wunsch’s mind: More advertisers, better distribution, publicity events, a new website, better written content. It would be an attempt to be the early version of Playboy with a more modern spin.

“That’s where we want to be, getting people to say without snickering, ‘I read it for the articles,’” Wunsch said. “It’s not implausible that could happen.”

In October, a couple of days after Wunsch told me about his plans for the magazine, he was no longer editor-at-large for Jacques. The new sole owner, Danielle Leder, had let him go.

***

When Danielle talks about the future of Jacques, her eyes get bright and her voice jumps. This is her magazine, all the way through now. No one will take it from her. Not Jonathan, not Noah, not anyone. Her readers will see that Jacques was not just Jonathan Leder and his film photographs. There are her ideas, expansions and improvements. This is why Danielle and her crew stood in Fast Ashley’s Studios in Williamsburg, everyone clustered into a small space near the front, trying to get the path of blue paint trickling down the model’s arms and back and chest just right.

The first video shoot for the new Jacques started at 10:00 a.m. At 1 p.m., the crew had yet to begin shooting. They were still gathering supplies and setting up the camera acquired specially for the day. Thai food had been ordered and now sat mostly finished on a table toward the back. Everyone had eaten except the model, Danielle, who turned down offers of spring rolls and fried rice.

“When I eat, I get really tired,” she said.

Danielle Leder wouldn’t have it, though.

“Eat for me,” she said. “You can’t be on a shoot and not eat.”

Danielle demurred again.

“It’ll make me happy,” Leder said, and that settled it. The model took a bit of food.

Wearing khaki pants and a plaid shirt, Danielle Leder is, as expected for a former model, tall and thin. She wears round glasses over her green eyes and is frequently on the move. Danielle hopes to have Jacques up and running again by February of 2012, and to do so, she wants to release some short video commercials for the magazine and new website. Today’s video concept is simple: Danielle the model, mostly clothed, will have blue paint poured on her and then writhe around in it. At some point, there will likely be a voiceover. The idea is basic, but the execution is a far cry from the first efforts that the Leders shot for the inaugural issue of Jacques.

“We used to shoot commercials in our apartment,” Danielle said. “We’d put the kids to sleep, push furniture out of the way, get cheap lights and get a model to pose.”

For the next couple of hours, Danielle will give orders, demonstrate multiple poses, fix makeup and hair, change the music playing in the background (going between Michael Jackson and the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing), adjust the camera angle, pour paint on her model, order wardrobe changes (a pair of silver heels in particular), make sure that paint doesn’t get tracked onto the bare floor (something at which she isn’t entirely successful), and about a dozen other things. She will argue a few times with Kyle Walling, a friend from Tampa who is now part of the Jacques staff, about angles and placement and just how much paint to use.

In the past, Jonathan did the shooting for Jacques while Danielle worked behind the scenes, often helping the models with placement and posing, as well as makeup, hair and wardrobe. But she feels that her influence went beyond what she did on set. On Jonathan’s website, filled with photos taken for Jacques and other publications, Danielle clicks through a seemingly endless gallery of women posing half-nude in dark hotel rooms or in the middle of suburban lawns or stretched out in the backseats of retro cars. In every image, Danielle finds a piece of herself.

“That’s my skirt, my garter belt, my bra,” she said, pausing on each photo. “That’s our house, that’s our neighbor’s house. That’s the hotel we liked upstate. I styled this one and did makeup.”

Personal stories abound in the photos. Places they lived and stayed, the strip club at which she worked before modeling, the life she led that became the inspiration for hundreds of images.

“People don’t realize how much of me is in Jonathan Leder,” she said, eyes fixed on the screen, taking in every girl splayed out on a couch or pressed against a window with a vacant look on her face or her underwear bunched around her ankles. And then Danielle returns to the shoot, seating herself in the corner as the second round of paint pouring begins, eyes once again fixed.

***

The porn magazine in the digital age is a dying breed. The soft focus and grainy photos that grace the pages of Jacques have long been replaced in the adult industry by glossy sheets and online photo sets. Even the venerable Playboy has seen its circulation numbers and advertising revenue dwindle.

“That whole genre of magazines has seen its heyday way back in the 1980s,” said Dr. Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and an expert on the magazine industry. “It used to be that the number one category from 1986 to the mid-1990s was sex. We had more new sex magazines started in that category than any other.”

These days, companies like Playboy and Penthouse are struggling to compete with the Internet. After all, when you can get the same product for no money and in no time at all, why pay for the paper product? And yet that is precisely why Husni believes thatJacques can make it in the industry.

“When you have a magazine like Jacques, which takes a step backward, they have a better chance of surviving,” he said. “They go after that artistic appeal, which differentiates them from a magazine like Hustler or Penthouse. It gives them that collector’s feel. Nudity is an art, and as long as they stay within the artistic appeal, they will have a future.”

Yet for other reasons, Jacques’ future is unclear. Legal ownership of the magazine is disputed between Danielle and Jonathan, each of whom claims sole possession. There have been threats of lawsuits, but they have so far remained just that.

“There won’t be a Jacques,” Jonathan said. “She can’t continue without me. She never had anything to do with it. She can’t do it. She’s not capable.”

“He can make all his threats,” Danielle said. “He can sue me. They’re empty. I’m moving on with my magazine. Let him cling onto the old as much as he can. Without the magazine, he’s nothing.”

For now, Jacques still exists. Danielle’s plan is to get a new website up and functioning soon, as well as rent an office somewhere in Manhattan. If that can all come together, there’s a chance that Jacques could become something bigger.

“It is up to me now to move forward with this magazine and prove that we are a magazine that is here and we are going to stay,” Danielle said. “To make profit would be great. Is it my main goal? No. It’s a way for me to be creative.”

In Florida, Jonathan Leder also plots his next move. He’s continuing to work on his movie, and is debating whether to start a new magazine with Wunsch, one that continues what Jacques was and maybe even takes it somewhere new. He’ll head to Los Angeles when the movie is done with and try to make that magazine a reality.

“I’m not holding my breath on it becoming the next Playboy in terms of profit,” he said. “It’s just something I love to do.”

Why keep going with Jacques? The profit may be there, but it will take time to realize it. There are personal incentives, beliefs and ideals, but those won’t undo the adult industry’s move into the digital world or make distribution any cheaper or convince people to take a chance on a niche of a niche. It’s not quite a dream; it’s a reality with no easy answers.

“I’m not going to lie,” Danielle said. “If I cannot have this magazine to focus on, I’d be sitting in the corner crying. So I decided I’m going to take a really awful situation and turn it into a good one, take the magazine back and give my subscribers issues that they need. I just hope that they can still be supportive and bear with me on this transition.

“I’m sure most people don’t care,” she added. “They just want to look at naked people.”

The Life and Death of Army Spec. Kevin O. Hill

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:14:00 -0500

This longread was originally published on Oct. 15, 2009 on The Brooklyn Ink

***

By Terry Baynes

The News

The minute Oslen Hill saw the uniforms at his door, he knew. He had served in the military. No words were necessary. His son, Kevin O. Hill, was dead. He was a 23-year-old soldier from Brooklyn deployed in Afghanistan.

Soon after the officers left, the phone started ringing in Oslen Hill’s home in Raleigh, North Carolina. He picked it up to hear his wife, Mahalia Hill, screaming on the other end. Two officers had also come to her door, in East New York, Brooklyn. Two synchronized knocks five hundred miles apart; the same news.

Hill tried to call his daughters, Chinyere and Shantel, but he couldn’t reach them. They had gone out shopping that Sunday and hadn’t heard the news yet. On the bus ride back, his oldest daughter, Chinyere, called. “The way I answered the phone, my voice, she knew that something was wrong,” he said. “Having to tell her on the phone, and not being able to hold her. And to hear them scream, without being able to hold them. That just made it even worse.”

Hill has worked for the Postal Service for the past 18 years and recently relocated from New York to North Carolina, where he wanted to move his family. After speaking to them on the phone on Sunday, Hill got in his car and drove straight to New York. “Nine hours, driving and crying, driving and crying,” he said. He arrived in Brooklyn early Monday morning, October 5.

Piecing Together the Facts

Kevin died on Sunday, October 4.

He was very close to his mother, Mahalia, and would call her every week to check in on her. The last time they spoke was on the Tuesday before Kevin died. He asked how she was doing, if she was going to the movies anytime soon, and if she was going to start working again. He always asked how his sisters were doing. Just before saying goodbye, he mentioned, “There are people in this unit who got killed,” his mother recounted. It was the only time he told her anything related to the war.

“He never wanted his mom to worry because, of course she was worried. He tried his best not to tell her anything really. Anything concerning war,” his father said. “He never talked about what he was doing, and we never really pushed it because, in our eyes, people who go to combat don’t like talking about combat.”

The Hill family is still trying to piece together what happened to Kevin. According to the Department of Defense, he died at Contingency Outpost Dehanna in Afghanistan when enemy forces attacked his unit. Officials from the Army informed the family that Kevin died while he was out on patrol on a road near the Pakistan border.

Conflicting stories of what happened have shaken their prior assumptions. The family understood Kevin to be working as a prison guard in Afghanistan. They assumed this meant he would be stationary and shielded from most of the action and danger. “Being a guard and being out there searching for IED’s in the middle of nowhere, I can’t understand,” his father said. “But these are the stories they gave.”

Army officials told the family that Kevin was shot in the head, his father said. He added, “I don’t know if that’s to make us feel better. Because that sounds real neat and tidy. No suffering. But then, at the same time, we’re having a closed casket.”

One of Kevin’s friends from his platoon had called the family and said that there were some explosions. “‘So Kevin, he’s not all here.’ That’s what he said,” recounted Chinyere, Kevin’s older sister.

“I don’t know whether he suffered or not, and that’s what kills me. In terms of details, him being shot before or after. I just try not to think about it because it’s too much, too much,” his father said, his voice breaking. On the table in front of him stood a large bouquet of flowers with a card reading: “I’m sorry that I could not bring Kevin home. A piece of me died that day along with him. Know that you and your family are in our thoughts. Love and prayers. Sincerely, 1Lt. Patrick C. Benitez.”

Next to the flowers sits a letter on army letterhead detailing the funeral expenses covered under Kevin’s contract.

About Kevin

Kevin Hill was born on June 14, 1986 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, while his father, Oslen, was stationed at Fort Bragg. The family followed Oslen to Germany for a short time and later moved to Bushwick, where Kevin spent most of his childhood. The Hills didn’t want their children hanging out on the streets. So they spent time at home, playing Nintendo games like Donkey Kong. The children also played with a neighbor, Darryl Hamilton, who became Kevin’s best friend. Darryl later recalled how they would all go to the movies together, like an extended family.

When Kevin was 14, his family was facing financial difficulties, and he and his sister, Shantel, moved in with their aunt, Sophia McCarthy. McCarthy was twenty years older than Kevin’s mother, Mahalia, and the first in her family to move to New York from Jamaica.

“His aunt is so protective of him, she loves him to death,” said Kevin’s father. “She never had any kids. So her sister’s kids are pretty much her kids.” Once, she asked Kevin to go out and buy some milk. He ran into a friend and lost track of time. He returned with the milk half-an-hour later to find police cars outside his aunt’s house. In a panic, she had called 911.

“If you want to have a son, you should have Kevin. He was such a good boy,” McCarthy said. “He never wore his pants hanging low. He went to school every single day. He never drank any bit of alcohol.”

Kevin seldom spoke about himself. “He was always a very quiet kid,” his father said. He was not the sort to push himself in class at John Dewey High School. “He was the kid that would do the minimum,” his father said. If 70 was a passing grade, “he would do 71 or 72.” His older sister, Chinyere was the opposite. So, for Oslen Hill, it was a surprise when Kevin started to work hard to go to college. “Of course we expected her to go to college,” he said of Chinyere. “And we were hoping he would go. But then it turned out he did. That was a pleasant surprise.”

Kevin held jobs at Nathan’s hot dog stand and the Cyclone’s baseball stadium on Coney Island. The summer after high school, he worked at a law firm. He rented his own apartment in Bushwick, but he spent little time there. “He just worked and came home and hung out with us,” his father said. He would take his mother and sisters to the movies or out to eat.

After graduating from John Dewey High School in 2004, Kevin went straight to a four-year degree program at Monroe College in the Bronx. He got a job with the Transportation Security Administration as a security agent at J.F.K. Airport. He would wake before dawn and leave the house by 4 a.m. to get to work. After work, he would travel up to the Bronx for classes. “He always put school first, all year round, to graduate a little early. Summer time, winter time, he had a class no matter what,” said his sister, Chinyere.

Kevin graduated in June of 2008 with a B.A. in criminal justice. The whole extended family, from Canada and Florida, converged on Brooklyn to celebrate. They went to Red Lobster for dinner.

Graduating from college was a proud tradition in the Hill family. “Except for me. I broke it,” said Kevin’s father. When his high school sweetheart, Kevin’s mother, Mahalia, became pregnant with their oldest child, Oslen Hill decided to join the military. He had been working odd jobs at the time and decided that he needed more stability for his kids.

The Decision to Enlist

Kevin did not tell his family when he enlisted in the Army. Before joining, he mentioned the idea. When everyone, including his sisters, discouraged him, he stopped talking about it.

“None of us wanted him to go into the military. Well not in the Army anyway because I was in the Army in the first Gulf War, and I knew what war was like. And so I didn’t want my son experiencing combat like I did,” said Oslen Hill. He told his son about the constant fear, of not knowing where the next bullet, mine, or sniper was hidden.

When Kevin stopped talking about the idea, they assumed that was the end of it. “But, of course, it wasn’t because he still joined. And when everyone found out, it was too late. He was already in,” his father said.

The decision was a mark of Kevin’s independence. “He liked to do things on his own,” said his mother, all the way back to when he was a baby playing with his toys. “He liked support, for us to be there for him, but he liked to do things for himself.”

Sometimes, when Kevin was young, they would go to army exhibitions to watch his father jump out of planes. He was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. “Maybe that’s why Kevin insisted on the Army,” Hill said. “Because he had choices, I mean, any branch. He could have gone to the Navy or the Air Force, the National Guard, but he chose the Army. I can only say that that’s what he wanted to do.”

Sitting on the couch a week after Kevin’s death, Oslen Hill clutched onto his favorite picture of Kevin. It was one of him in college cap and gown. “Kevin was more than a soldier. He actually did something with his life prior to being a soldier. That’s not all he was. I’m proud of him being a soldier, but I’m more proud of him for being a graduate,” he said. “It means more to me.”

Kevin told his mother his ideas of becoming a detective. He also mentioned to his father the idea of opening up a law firm with his best friend Darryl Hamilton: Hill and Hamilton, Partners at Law. Both friends were majoring in criminal justice in college, and Darryl had his sights set on law school. “Kevin was supposed to be a lawyer,” said his Aunt Sophia.

In 2008, Kevin sat down with Lisa Whiteside, Professor of Criminal Justice at Monroe College, to discuss his career options. But his mind was made up: he was going to join the military. “Are you sure this is something you really want to do?” Whiteside recalls asking. He was sure. His father and grandfather had served in the military, and he wanted to do as they had done.

“I wanted to be certain that he knew what the consequences were,” Whiteside said. “I explained to him that there were other things that he could do with a degree in criminal justice. He could have gotten in with any law enforcement agency. There were opportunities short of him going into the military.” Whiteside listed Hill’s options: the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, the NYPD, corrections.

After graduating in the summer of 2008, Kevin told Darryl that he wanted to work for the Secret Service, but he didn’t feel that he had enough work experience. He thought that military service would help his career, Darryl said. Kevin joined the Army on September 16, 2008.

Kevin’s father suspects he encountered military recruiters at Monroe College. The military recruiting process is “ruthless,” he said. Recruiters have to fill certain quotas and particular jobs. “If Kevin had spoken to me, I could have steered him. I could have told him what jobs to take and what jobs not to take… He could have taken just about any job that was offered,” Hill said. “He could have worked in the legal department.”

Although everyone in the family was worried when they learned that Kevin had enlisted, they decided it was best not to frighten him but rather to support him. They held on to the hope that someone with his level of education would be steered towards an office job and away from combat.

Kevin, said his father, was “not a violent person or anything of the sort. I just feared for him because he was not a fighter kind of person. He was a gentle person, and so I didn’t foresee combat for him.”

As Kevin was deciding whether to enlist during the summer of 2008, the debate over U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was fading from the public discourse. By June, conventional wisdom had solidified around the idea that President George W. Bush’s “surge” in Iraq had succeeded. The war effort was “on a firmer foundation” because of America’s increased troop presence there, one military analyst wrote in an AugustWashington Post column.

When Kevin finally made his decision in September, news from the region was mixed. Early in the month, President Bush announced that the United States would pull 8,000 troops out of Iraq in early 2009. At the same time, the president said he would be increasing troop levels in Afghanistan by around 4,500 troops. The announcement drew little attention initially. But over the next few weeks, the increasingly grim news from Afghanistan began to overwhelm the encouraging news from Iraq.

By mid-September, however, the nation was focused on an entirely different worry: the quickly deteriorating economy. On September 15, Lehman Brothers collapsed and Wall Street went into a panic not seen since 1929. Kevin enlisted the next day.

By October 1, General David Petraeus, days away from taking over the United States Central Command, admitted to reporters that insurgents were gaining ground in Afghanistan. A week later, news leaked that intelligence agencies believed the country was heading into a “downward spiral.”

By February 2009, Kevin had finished basic training at Fort Carson, Colorado, and was deployed to Iraq. The family threw him a send-off with barbecue chicken and his favorite, lasagna. They all went to play video arcade games on 42nd Street and saw a movie through 3D glasses.

By April 2009, Kevin was relocated from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The Last Visit

Kevin came home on leave this past August. His Aunt Sophia thought he looked worn down when he arrived. But after three days at home, she said, “He looked so different, rested and peaceful.” He took his mother and sisters out for lunch and to the movies.

He also traveled down to Washington, D.C. with Darryl Hamilton and one of Darryl’s friends. He had never been to the Nation’s Capitol and wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, the Frederick Douglass Museum, and other sites. He was always interested in history and museums; his favorites were the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History.

“He seemed like he was ready to be home,” Darryl said. “He was happy to be home.”

While others thought of him only as a quiet young man, Darryl saw him as a playful person who told a lot of jokes. Yet, in Washington, D.C., he seemed “kind of distant” to Darryl. “Like he had a lot of stuff on his mind, like his mind was racing,” Darryl said. “He told me he had seen a dead body in front of him.”

Darryl and Kevin talked about planning something for the next time he came back. Kevin told Darryl he wanted to buy a car, a Chrysler 300. He said that his tour would be ending soon and that Darryl should come and visit him when he was stationed back in Colorado.

The most recent pictures of Kevin are from his trip to D.C. They are still on his digital camera in the family’s apartment. One picture shows Kevin at the World War II Memorial, standing in front of the New York column. Another shows the three men smiling in front of the White House.

The Army

Kevin Hill died as the president and his advisers are once again debating U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. The debate turns on two crucial points: whether or not to increase troops by as many as 40,000, and where in Afghanistan the brunt of U.S. forces should be based.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, America’s top commander in the country, believes the United States should not hunt down the Taliban in rural parts of the country. Our forces “cannot be strong everywhere,” he wrote in a highly publicized assessment last August. Instead, McChrystal argues, American troops should leave remote parts of the county to focus more on protecting civilians in high-population areas. The “key terrain,” he believes, “is generally where the population lives and works” – far from the small town in rural Dehanna where Kevin Hill was on patrol when he was killed.

Kevin’s father knows that this war is different from the one he fought. “We knew the enemy in the first Gulf War. In this war, there’s no one in uniforms to distinguish who’s who. Everyone’s in robes,” he said. “It’s a totally different war.”

He does not believe that President Obama should send any more troops to Afghanistan. And not because of Kevin. “Until Pakistan steps up their responsibility and stops making the border of Pakistan safe havens,” he said. “It will be absolutely useless.”

Kevin’s body is currently at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. His memorial service will be held at John J. McManus & Sons Funeral Home at 4601 Avenue N in Flatlands, Brooklyn at 7 p.m. on Friday, October 16, 2009. He will be buried on Saturday morning at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens.

Additional reporting by Rob Anderson, Alessia Pirolo, Daniel Roberts and Mara Zepada