Army Staff Sergeant John L. Hartman, Jr.

JENNIFER SCHUELLER: He’d go fishing with my dad all the time. They did that out on Anna Maria Island city pier a lot, they went out on the boat a lot. And we would go out to the Skyway pier, and we would do the all-night—him and I and my husband and stuff—we'd do the all-night fishing thing. We enjoyed that. Yeah, it was fun. It was a lot of fun. He loved the beach.

He worked—worked a lot. When he wasn’t in the service, he did a lot: he worked on roofs, he worked in restaurants, he worked at Publix—there was, you know, all-round—had all kinds of abilities.

TAYLOR JONES: We were always up to something. Out there—let's see—Lakewood Ranch—you can approach it from DeSoto Road or different areas all the way around, but we’d go there fishing, and duck hunting, quail hunting, dove hunting, so he was raised around that. He worked for his grandfather on and off, you know, when he’d come into town. But before he went into the service, he worked for the sign company. Like I said, he worked—I'd wait for him to get out of school. I did the service and installation, I was on one of the teams for my father’s sign company. And I’d save the service work just like my mentor did for me when I got out of school or whatever—they would wait til I got out of school then I would ride with them to learn a service—you know, help them out as the second person on the job. And I did that with little John. So I’d say it was a couple years he hung around here before he probably decided.

Then he went in and came out, and he tried doing roofing for a while up in Washington State. You know, I thought, I told him, I said, “It rains all the time up there and it’s got one of the highest suicide rates in the United States—the rain and miserable weather.”

So he came down here and tried it here for a little while, but re-enlisted and went back in. He’d been around his uncle—my brother—he was in the Navy, and his father was in the Marines, and he retired from the Marines, and the jobs were hard to find around here, so he turned around and decided to enlist. And he would be guaranteed a paycheck, basically. And he got to travel.

JENNIFER SCHUELLER: He enlisted at 17 and then, when he got out after a few years—after about 10 or 12 years, something like that—and he was here and got married, and then re-enlisted. John wanted at least one out of all of the kids to go to college, and both of his kids are doing it. That was John’s big wish.

CHRIS ROBISHAW: John was the most experienced guy on the team, having already fought in Iraq, and that experience can’t be replicated. It’s invaluable to a commander with a relatively—though talented—inexperienced team. So, he was in a lot of ways my sounding board—or, at least, I could gauge his reaction or just outright his feelings—or advice—on what my plans were with the team.

As an example, the night before a mission, I would issue the guys—you know, the mission, what we’re going to do that day—and they’d all kind of gather around, you know, rather informally, around the hooch. And I’d look over at John, always, because again, he was kind of my validation. And I would look over at him, and based on his facial expressions—or if he told me it was a dumb idea, well then, you know, he’d certainly say that. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those—but I totally, absolutely relied on his experience—I keep going to that word, validate—to validate my plan, my intent—that not only was it a smart thing to do in terms of appropriate for what our mission was, but if it was a smart thing in terms of our self-preservation, due to the insanely kinetic nature of our tour there in East Baghdad.

So, that’s what I relied on: his wisdom, based on his experience, and his very brutal, honest assessment of some wazoo ideas I came up with. I mean, it could just be something as simple as a nod, or a slight smirk, but if he put his hands on his hips, and he looked down at the floor and shook his head ever so slightly, I knew I wasn’t going in the right direction, so I would re-approach the problem, or I’d be like, “John, so what do you think?”

BALSAM ALJOBORY: I came to America, and I joined the Army, and I’m a Sergeant First Class in the U.S. Army because of John. Like, even though that I was the civilian linguist in the team, I never felt—like with John or with the rest of the team—that I’m, like, not part of the team. And during the time, like 2007, it was a really rough and difficult time, but John always had that smile and always there’s a joke, no matter how difficult the situation is. He always made you smile, so, I can’t really even count—it's like a daily thing—and, I mean, that’s the reason, like, John is the reason, the immediate reason behind people like me that they came to the United States and they joined the Army right away, because Johnny is a great representative of the U.S. Army overseas. He was very commanding to the mission, helpful, honest, and professional. All this combination, like, in Johnny, really made me look like—it's the biggest dream in my life is to be a servicemember of the U.S. Army. And it happens.

JOSH DENTON: He had grit. Yeah, he knew his stuff, he was reliable. He had a great sense of humor: we were in a pretty bad situation, and he found ways to make us laugh and make light of it.

BIN JOHNSON: And just like, he was like a natural instructor. He wasn’t a flashy guy, like he wasn’t--John was more of like, “Let’s get this really done, I don’t care if I get credit for it, I’m going to teach people how to do it right.” And he always did that, he just was kind of like a natural—he was like the perfect NCO. He just did things. And he didn’t care, and he was never, like, above doing, like, the dirty work, but he was also—he was really smart, and he had this laugh—I'm sure everyone’s told you about the laugh.

He had this awesome mustache, and this laugh where just like—I don’t know, he just, he did have a cool presence about him, and it was really—it was really fun to have him around, he just—and then, those kind of guys, he was also very brave under fire.

JOSH DENTON: He was always up in the turret, and either I was driving, and I was a horrible driver, and Jeff would be TC, which, I guess—truck commander, the person riding shotgun, giving directions, where to go—or it'd be reversed, where Jeff would be driving, I would be the TC, and John would be in the turret. So, I got to know him and his stories essentially through that. And he was an outstanding guy, and a real soldier.

ALEJANDRO CERVANTES: He was never afraid to put himself out there. Like, I have one of his last letters that he wrote, and he just talked about—you know, the only thing he wished for is for the rest of us to be safe. So, I mean, that just goes into his character, and that’s just how he was: like I said, any time we went out, he was the one in the gun, always watching our backs.

CHRIS ROBISHAW: As a professional soldier, he was always worried about us. And, so many examples of that—the one that sticks out is, on our team we would rotate positions in the gun trucks. Every other mission we would rotate, in order to share the risk of being exposed as the top gunner. So, in our gun trucks, in the Humvees, the top gunner was relatively exposed—there was a small cupola of armored stuff on three sides—but, at the end of the day, not nearly the protection that the other two guys in the truck, the driver and the shotgun, would have. Well, that was the team rule, you’ve got to rotate, you’ve got to share the risk. And the guys were cool about it: In fact, gunning is arguably as fun, if not more fun, than driving, so there was no issue, but John was a real stick in the mud, he wouldn’t rotate off the gun.

I don’t remember ever—and he did a lot of missions—I can’t think of a time I didn’t see John on the gun, meaning standing up in the truck, you know, exposed out the top of the roof. He preferred the 240 machine gun over the 50 cal. Anyway, that’s how I’ll always remember him, in the turret, in the truck, because he cared too much about everybody else to give it up. And even—I mean there’s a few times where we commandeered a couple of hotel rooms, because we were doing a late-night mission with our Iraqi unit, and we all rotated up to the hotel rooms so that we could take showers—definitely to sleep—and rotate, and, John-O's favorite word—or at least, in my mind, I remember it is, “I got this,” “I got this,” “I got this,” to the point where he never came off the gun the whole night—he let everyone else sleep.

Now that’s—I mean, that’s not heroic, that’s not different than what a lot of guys do at any given time, but that really exemplifies John: “I got it, don’t you worry about it,” “I got it, don’t worry about me, I have it,” “You rest, I’ll take it.”

CHRIS ROBISHAW: We’d taken indirect fire—so, that means somebody was lobbing something at us: in this case, I believe it was rockets—at our base. And one of those particular rockets went through the building adjacent to us—luckily, it was vacant—but by the rocket going literally through it—you know, the exterior walls, the interior walls, and then back out the exterior wall—the round, the munition, landed just a few feet from our building.

So, we had some EOD guys come out, render it safe, take it away, whatever. But, the next morning, I thought it was important that we do kind of a crater analysis, and John knew how to do that, so we were trying to determine where the rocket came from and luckily it left, you know, pretty good holes in the building next to us, so you kind of reverse-engineer, you know, line those holes up, determine the type of rocket it was, then you can kind of figure out where in the city it was launched from—what we call the point of origin. It’s actually known as the POO.

So, John knew this, he’d done it several times in the past, so I asked him to kind of lead the team’s detail on how to figure out where the point of origin was for this rocket. And he wasn’t too thrilled about it—John pretty much was a warrior’s warrior: we all hate paperwork, but I think paperwork physically made John sick. (laughs) So he gave me one of those sarcastic smirks, or I don’t remember what his comment was, something like “Oh, yeah, I’ll get all over that,” you know, with an eye roll, or something like that.

So, he and a couple guys went into the structure, trying to figure it out, and I asked—the product that he owed me was something called a storyboard, or analysis, just a single sheet—PowerPoint, preferably—on digits or printed out about, you know, where did it come from, where were the suspicions, what were the evidence, what can we do next time, you compare just like any type of report or analysis—including photographs, because we’d have to send this up to our higher headquarters, and they could collaborate it all together and figure it out. But anyway, John, not thrilled about it, disappeared for a couple hours and he came back and—I don’t know what I was doing—but he said “Hey, that report’s on your desk,” and the desk was just a pile of boxes—quite spartan conditions. So, I was like, “Great John-O, thank you bro,” and he went off.

And then I remember I went to go check it out, and on my pile of boxes there was an 8.5" by 11" regular standard sheet of paper, and all it was was—almost like it was drawn by a third-grader—it was a couple of stick-figure diagrams of an explosion, and stick figures running around going crazy with their hair on fire. And (laughs) that was John’s very experienced and professional product to help us figure out where the rocket came from. So, I knew right there and then, rely on his expertise, and respect his disdain for paperwork.

JENNIFER SCHUELLER: He told me that he had a pallet of shoes shipped over to Iraq when he was stationed there the second time, and the kids would come up and they would steal one shoe and run away, so they would have to chase the kid down and bring them back so that they could have a pair of shoes. And they would have to chase them down an alley, to keep them from being hurt while they were trying to put shoes on the kids, because their feet were getting cut up by all the rubble and stuff that was all around.

JOSH DENTON: This was probably a week or two before he was killed. So, our unit was responsible for advising an Iraqi infantry battalion, and they were in the northeast portion of Baghdad. And, it was right up to Sadr City—this was a slum, and that’s where a lot of supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr were, and they were the ones that were actively attacking us, they had the backing of the Iranians, neither here nor there. But we were going down the road—which name I can’t remember—but Sadr City was on one side of us, and a roadside bomb went off.

I don’t remember if we were the lead truck or not, but I remember seeing it go off in front of us—we kept going, there wasn’t any real damage to us, and then we pulled over when we could into what I can best describe as a scrap yard, or a—just, trash everywhere, that’s just how people lived: there were slums. And while we were there, just inspecting the trucks, making sure everything was fine, we received small arms fire. It wasn’t quite sniper fire, because it didn’t hit anyone, but it ricocheted off of one of the blast shields—not our truck, but a neighboring truck—and actually hit a little girl.

And then—so obviously the mother’s wailing, with our medic and chief who got out. I was driving this day, and our TC, who would have been Jeff, got out to help, see what we could do. And then I start hearing these concussions go off, and they were getting closer. And we had intercoms in the truck, and I said to John, like, “John, that’s so strange, the roadside bomb blasts are getting closer.” And he kind of laughed, and said, “No, they’re walking mortars in on us.” And that’s when we left as quickly as we could, but it just goes to show how much of a seasoned soldier he was—he'd stay calm, he knew exactly what it was, as opposed to me, I’m like “Well, that’s strange, why are there blasts getting closer?” And, yeah, that was probably my last memory that I have of a conversation of anything relevant with him.

ALEJANDRO CERVANTES: We were in a big firefight, and I had a 50—I was in the 50 cal, and he was in the 240. I just remember him laughing at the end of it, because I was shooting right next to him in the 50 cal. He was like, he kept hearing me, “I knew what it was, but you kept scaring me, like, I knew what it was, but you kept scaring me.” And it was just—that's the way John’s humor was: It was the worst time of our life, but somehow he found a way to make the best of it, so we could laugh it off.

BIN JOHNSON: We were on this beach, and he was like, I don’t know—these kids were like playing this game, and I just always remember John, he seemed so like happy and peaceful. And he went over and kind of talked—do you know that game? It’s not horseshoes, but where you—basically there’s like three plastic things on a stand, and you’re trying to throw it and have it wrap around the plastic thing. The kids were playing it, and they were doing terrible, and John walked up to this group of strangers and goes, “Hey, you’re not doing the wrist flick right,” and I’m like, sitting there, like (laughs) because I’m like, “John, you don’t know these people.” And he just went, and he played with them for like an hour.

TAYLOR JONES: There’s Big Sky—his best friend Rich wrote to little John all the time, and at the end of the letter he would always say, “There’s a cold one in the fridge for you.” And he would take the label off of the Big Sky beer, and put that on the envelope for him. And when little John passed away, he wrote Big Sky Brewing Company, in Missoula, Montana, and showed them a copy of the letter, and they did a tribute to him: a poster in memory of Staff Sergeant John Hartman, and they passed that all around the bars and the stores and stuff like that, that was a tribute to little John.

JENNIFER SCHUELLER: He played with his children. He visited his grandparents and his family a lot. Lots of barbecues at home in our backyard. Just, he played hard with the kids and we’d get on the trampoline and play with them, and—just a normal guy. It was just—he worked hard, played hard. He had a lot of fun. He was a fun person to hang out with.

You always had fun when you hung out with him. When we were growing up we weren’t the best of friends, but when we all became adults, my brother—my two brothers and I—we were thick as thieves: couldn’t separate us. We looked out for each other. He made a bet with my children one time that—and he knew he would lose the bet—and they bet him that if he lost the best that they would be able to dye his hair pink. And he knew he would lose that bet—and it was just so much fun watching the kids dye his hair pink. Because he knew he would go back and get it cut off before he went overseas. That one was fun: that was a fun day.

He used to break into my house—he wouldn’t tell me when he was coming home on leave or something, and we had this thing where he would break into my house. He told me, “Locks only keep honest people out.” And he’d break into my house, and I’d have to figure out how he broke into the house, and I’d have to fix it so he couldn’t do it the next time, but he always found a way to break into my house. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, hearing this godawful snoring in my living room, and I’d walk out there and he’d be asleep on the couch.

TAYLOR JONES: We never really did anything dull. We got into a lot of mischief. I just—everything we did was fun. We were close, I mean, we were seven years apart from each other, and so we grew up together. His mom and her three kids, and being the oldest, he lived at our house quite a bit—we lived in—we grew up in—I was born here in Bradenton, and we grew up in West Bradenton, off of 59th and 8th Avenue Drive West.