TAZEWELL, Va. — He was a little bleary-eyed on Friday morning, Independence Day 2008, but Staff Sgt. Michael Rose was exceedingly articulate on the meaning of freedom to him after completing his second tour in the Middle East, first in Afghanistan and most recently, in Iraq.

“Until you’ve experienced living in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq, you don’t know the freedom you have here,” Rose, 49, said, seated at his kitchen table holding hands with his wife Christy. Rose has the name “Christina” tattooed on his left forearm and his wife has the name “Michael” tattooed on her right forearm.

“We have the right to do what we want to do, live where we want to live and vote for candidates and political party we want to have,” he said. During his first tour, he served in the remote mountains of Afghanistan where his base was located at an elevation of 6,000 feet, but he patrolled routinely in mountains that were 10,000 to 12,000 feet high.

“You would look outside the wire sometimes at the primitive homes and people wearing robes and sandals and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see Jesus Christ walking among the people carrying some loaves and fishes, ready to feed the multitudes,” Rose said.

“I’ve always been patriotic,” Rose, a 1977 graduate of Tazewell High School said. “To me, being a soldier is very important. Unless you’ve been out of the United States and have seen how people live in some of these third-world countries, you can’t appreciate what we have here,” he said.

“When I think of Independence Day, I think of all the good people over the last 400 or 500 years who did not say no when they were asked to stand up and fight to preserve our freedom,” Rose said. “When you think about it, it is really unbelievable. I don’t see how anybody who enjoys this way of life could say anything against the soldiers who fight to protect this nation.”

Rose speaks with unwavering commitment to his country and the military despite periods of extreme frustration during his deployments — most notably during his 2005-’06 deployment to Afghanistan. “That was as bad as a deployment could be,” Rose said. “Christy called me on Feb. 15, 2005 to tell me our youngest daughter, Michaela, had been diagnosed with leukemia. As bad as that was itself, my commanding officer told me I couldn’t go home to be with my family.”

Rose had been serving with the 29th Infantry Division of the Virginia Army National Guard since 1998 and was deployed to Afghanistan as part of the 3rd of the 116th Infantry Battalion. Michaela, who is now 5 years old, was only 2 when she was diagnosed.

“After I talked with Michael, we flew straight to Memphis, Tenn., and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” Christy Rose said. “When Michaela’s doctor found out that Michael’s commanding officer wasn’t going to let him come home, he got on the telephone and called his commanding officer right away. He said: ‘This child needs her father. This family needs him with them.’

“What was horrible about the government was that Michael was crying and upset when he found out he couldn’t come home,” Christy Rose said. “He got serious and said: ‘You’ve got to fix this.’ When you push me too hard, I will do what I have to do. I got him home in less than a week.”

Although more than three years and two deployments have passed since that family crisis, the Roses seem almost to be frozen in the moment. After Michaela’s tear-filled, emotional reunion with her father and a few days of treatments, Michael and Christy Rose went for a walk down the world-famous Beale Street in Memphis, known as the birthplace of blues music. But it wasn’t the blues that now supplies the soundtrack for the Rose family’s lives — it was the king: Elvis Presley.

“When I got back home from Afghanistan, I drove Christy’s old van to Memphis and after a couple of weeks, the brakes went out in it,” Michael Rose said. “We took the van to a repair place on Beale Street not far from St. Jude’s. After we dropped it off, we took off walking down Beale Street. When we came to a five-way intersection, we looked across the street and saw Sun Studios. We looked at each other and knew that was the place where Elvis recorded his first hits.”

Michael enjoyed Elvis Presley’s music but had never been a big Elvis fan. Christy was a bigger fan, but that moment changed things for both of them.

“The guys at the garage gave us a special price on the brake replacement job because we had a child at St. Jude’s, and everybody in Memphis was nice and supportive of us,” Christy Rose said. “Graceland allows the families of children who are being treated at Graceland to visit the home and even go to see the garage with all the cars in it.” Since they returned home, they keep their Sirius Radio station tuned to the all-Elvis station, “24-7,” Christy Rose said with pride.

The Roses stayed in Memphis through the week, and made the 12-hour drive back to Tazewell each weekend to spend time with their older daughter, Leslie, who is now 13. “She was so strong, but she cried every time we had to leave to go back to Memphis,” Christy Rose said. “She loved staying with my mom, but it was just hard on her every time we went back to stay with Michaela. The three of us had been together so much during Michael’s first deployment and we really needed each other.”

During the darkest hours, the Roses said they felt alone, but when Michaela started responding to her chemotherapy treatments and her leukemia went into remission, the family started regaining a degree of normalcy. It wasn’t long before Michael Rose was called to return for an additional tour — this time with the 2nd of the 183rd Cavalry.

“They put units together from various National Guard units throughout Virginia,” Rose said. “My former squad leader was now a captain, and he was putting the new unit together. He saw my name on the list of available soldiers and put me in with him.”

During his most recent deployment that ended in May, Rose was part of a team that was responsible for keeping a 50-mile sector of the Main Supply Route to the green zone in Baghdad free of insurgents and explosives. He was proud to report that during his deployment, they didn’t lose any convoys to attack and more importantly, they didn’t lose any soldiers.

“We also picked up unexploded ordinance that was littering the desert,” Rose said. “Some of it had been out there in the desert since the first Desert Storm war. There was all kinds of ordinances — ours and theirs.” He said the unit would spend as long as 16 hours in a day to properly disarm a suspected explosive device and dispose of all the artillery rounds, live grenades and mines safely.

Back at home, Michaela was on the mend. Her mother took a photograph of he holding her Hero Doll, that she called her “Daddy Doll,” that features Rose’s photographic image on it. On Independence Day, she was wearing a shirt that carried the message: “Got Freedom? Thank my daddy.” Michael Rose returned to his “real world job,” last week at the CNX warehouse in Claypool Hill, Va., but he appears to love every moment he can get with his family.

Rose joined the U.S. Marine Corps soon after graduating from THS, and after 9 years in the Marines, came back home to serve as a Town of Tazewell police officer. A chance encounter with Tazewell Attorney Steve Arey prompted him to join the National Guard, and he is thankful that he did.

“We’re not fighting the Iraqi or Afghani people over there,” Rose said. “We’re fighting religious militants who feel we are the evil of the world. They feel we need to be eliminated. This isn’t something you can just walk away from.”

“I didn’t watch the news the whole time he was deployed,” Christy Rose said. “All they ever showed was the bad. Michael would tell me about the children his unit helped or the bombs they cleared away and the TV news programs only reported on bad things taking place.”

“We loved to see children in the towns we visited,” Michael Rose said. “If the children came out, that usually meant it was safe. If there weren’t any children, you knew you had to watch out. You’re about to get hit. The American heart is so big. People here in the United States were sending packages from home all the time to show their support for the troops and soldiers would turn around and give everything they were being sent to the Iraqi people and the children. They had so little.”

Rose shared the story of how a captain who was a physician’s assistant in the real world, saved the life of a young Bedouin girl who had been severely burned. “Americans aren’t seeing the good we are doing there — the hospitals we’re building and the health care we’re providing to the people,” he said. “People don’t see that.”

Michaela will be heading to kindergarten this year and Leslie is a rising eighth grade student at Tazewell Middle School. The entire family had a lot to be thankful for on Independence Day 2008, and they said it poetically with their smiles.

– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com