As a young student, Rick Stockburger watched the Twin Towers fall on a television in the cafeteria of West Branch High School in North Georgetown, Ohio, just outside of Salem. He’d grown up in rural Ohio playing army and learning to farm, hunt, and fish. He had already thought about serving his country, but now he and several friends decided to earn their way through college by joining the Ohio Army National Guard.
Today the President and CEO of BRITE Energy Innovators in Warren, Stockburger enlisted in October 2003, after graduating from high school. He attended Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, or “The Benning School for Boys,” as it was affectionately referred to then, he recalls. When his unit was called up to assist after Hurricane Katrina, he served in a rear detachment role, ensuring that his unit received the supplies it required.
“Through the Guard, I ended up being deployed a decent amount of time,” Stockburger says. “So I never got to attend college while I was because we kept getting called up to serve overseas or otherwise.” He later earned his undergraduate degree at Kent State University and completed his master’s coursework in economic development from Penn State University.
Next, on the somewhat ominous date of 6/6/06, his unit was informed they would be deployed to Iraq to provide route security. While training for that mission, they were told they would instead be going to Kosovo, where he served for 18 months. As a corporal, he became the youngest and lowest-ranking person to lead squad-level missions on the Serbian border, doing synchronized patrols with the Serbian Army. While there, he won an Army Achievement Medal.
Leaning towards leaving the military when his term ended in October 2009, he turned down a promotion to Sergeant. In 2009, roughly nine months after returning from Kosovo, he accepted a mission to train with Hungarian Special Forces and serve as a combat advisor to the Afghan National Army. After training in Hungary, they moved to Baghlan Province, Northern Afghanistan, where he served through 2010. His unit saw the most combat of any unit in Afghanistan during the time they were deployed. Stockburger won an Army Commendation Medal and Army Combat Infantry Badge.
The unit included 23 Americans and 23 Hungarians, who were supporting an Afghan infantry unit of 250 on an Afghan base that was formerly a major Russian base during the Soviet-Afghan War called Camp Kilagai (pron. “kill a guy.”). They taught them how to run patrols through Kunduz and a couple of other Taliban hot spots. “We had to train the Hungarians to take the lead, so I spent a lot of time trying to speak Hungarian through Kunduz and a couple of other Taliban hot spots.
“We had to train the Hungarians to take the lead, so I spent a lot of time trying to speak Hungarian through an interpreter, which is a really hard language,” Stockburger says. “They had to translate to Dari or Pashtun, depending on how they were addressing, to help them move Afghan soldiers during combat, so I built up a pretty good talent for learning how to communicate succinctly the important words for what we had to get done while under fire.”
While his unit was there, PBS embedded a reporter with the forces they were fighting to film an episode entitled “Behind Taliban Lines,” which aired about three months after he came home.
“To see Afghan soldiers I was communicating with informing the Taliban where we were and seeing us get ambushed from the perspective of the Taliban was pretty jarring,” Stockburger says. “You even see me driving down a road when we take an RPG hit.”
After leaving the Army in 2010, such experiences only deepened his passion for protecting the interpreters who worked with his unit during the day, then returned to their homes nearby, where they lived next to Taliban supporters who threatened them or their families or tried to bribe them. Many of the interpreters who helped U.S. troops never received the protection or U.S. citizenship they had been promised; many lost their lives, or their family members were assaulted or murdered. During the U.S.’ chaotic withdrawal in August 2021, Stockburger and several veterans basically went sleepless for a couple of weeks and tapped into every contact they had in Afghanistan to rescue as many as they could.
“We got 150 interpreters and their families into Kabul International Airport to get on a plane they wouldn’t have been able to board without our coordinating for them,” informs Stockburger, winner of the 2022 Veteran of the Year Award from the Mahoning Valley Veteran Service Commission. “We have a photo of them literally driving past the truck that exploded outside the gates because we had intel about the IED that was planned. Fortunately, our Hungarian Special Forces guys pulled our families into a culvert on the side right before the truck exploded.”