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Berlin cop serves town and country

(Oct. 20, 2016) Cpl. Merle Bragg was less than 24 hours away from another lengthy deployment with the U.S. Army National Guard. It would have been a familiar story for the 50-year-old veteran, before the state granted a hardship approval memorandum to keep him on duty with the Berlin Police Department.
A native of northern Maine, Bragg said the service “kicked [him] around” between different units until he ended up in Maryland 26 years ago. He has been a member of the Berlin Police force for two decades.
For Bragg, entry into the service had been a foregone conclusion since middle school.
“I joined the delayed entry program with the Army between my junior and senior year of high school. I told my dad when I was 12, I wanted to be a soldier,” he said. “I was a farmer [and] didn’t want to be a farmer. I wanted to do something else.
“In the small towns, you always have the patriotic, loyalty-type duty thing going on, and that was instilled with me,” Bragg continued. “I’ve have members of my family – uncles and grandfathers – that were involved in it. I just decided that was going to be my career path.”
After graduating from high school, Bragg served four years active duty, including Army Airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia and a tour with the 11th Armored Cavalry.
He also served with the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, and then left active service to attend college. Always a soldier, Bragg joined the National Guard in Georgia immediately after his active-duty discharge.
From there, he was transferred to the Maryland Army National Guard, where he remains to this day.
At last count, Bragg said he’s been “well up into the higher teens” in the number of countries in which he has been stationed. He has not had any say in where he goes, he said.
“Uncle Sam is usually pretty good at coordinating my travel itinerary. It’s never been a question – it’s part of the uniform,” he said. “They say this is where you’re going to go and when you’re going to go, and this is how long you’re going to be there. And you stand up, give them a salute, ‘Yes sir,’ and off you go.”
He toured Iraq during the “early part of the war,” and was part of the military police unit from Salisbury that responded to the Pentagon immediately following the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
“We went to the Pentagon for the initial securing of the scene,” he said. “We were the first unit to go down to Guantanamo to open that facility down there. And when we went into Iraq, we maintained the high-value detainee facility. Part of that was because we had been the first ones to do the Guantanamo mission – we knew we could handle the high-value individuals.”
What will stick with Bragg the most about the events of the 9/11 terrorist attack was how quickly the country rallied.
“From what I observed, initially after 9/11, was the camaraderie where everyone pulled together,” he said. “There was a huge outpouring of patriotism, of loyalty, of ‘U.S.A.’ – all of that. When I went back, three years later, the sense of security had obviously been tightened. People were obviously paying a lot more attention to what was going on.
“I wouldn’t say it made for a bad work environment, but it’s something that everybody should pay attention to, even your everyday life” Bragg added. “Pay attention to what’s going on around you – don’t become an automatic victim. And that goes right in line with the police department. We try to tell the folks constantly – if it doesn’t look right, if it doesn’t smell right, it probably isn’t right. At least have somebody understand and come by and check it out. The military is no different.”
Most recently, in 2012, the Salisbury outfit was deployed to Afghanistan, where Bragg said he was “borrowed” from his current unit to serve as the operations sergeant major.
“That was an interesting tour,” he said. “The Guard is being asked to do a lot that active-duty units used to do, and for the most part it’s showing that we can definitely do that job.”
“I’ve spent more time deployed with the military at the end of my career than I ever did at the beginning of my career,” Bragg continued. “Ever since 9/11, the Berlin Police Department has done really well in supporting our military. We have one other officer here in the department who is still actively engaged with the Maryland Guard, and for a small agency, sometimes that makes for some interesting logistical issues.
“The town was really good back in ’04,” he said. “After I came back from Iraq, I went up and I worked in D.C. for a number of years. The town maintained my job and I came back, obviously out of loyalty to the department.”
All of those experiences have helped Bragg be much more aware of his surroundings in his job with the Berlin Police Department.
“It’s something that almost becomes second nature, because you know you’re in an environment where you never know what’s going to happen, and when you come back you become more lax, but you begin to notice a lot of things that you really didn’t pay attention to before,” he said.
Bragg was due to leave last Friday morning, after finishing a police shift on Thursday that ended at midnight. He was ordered to go to Camp Fredderd in Reisterstown for records review with the 29th Infantry. He would have reported at 6:30 a.m. that morning.
At about 3 p.m. last Thursday, he learned the trip – at least his part in it – had been canceled. He would have been deployed in the Middle East, where he said he’s been in and out “a couple dozen times.”
Most orders in the military are written for 400 days, so it was likely that Bragg would have been gone for up to a year.
Asked about how he thought people’s perceptions of current military activity differed from reality, Bragg said, “People just need to remember that the culture is completely different [overseas].”
“It’s not something that isn’t understandable, it’s just that we, here, have had it so good for so long,” he said. “If I want to walk down to the local grocery store and get an apple, I can walk down to the store and get an apple. You don’t always have that same capability over there. It’s dependent upon where they live, how they’re going to get there, what’s available to them, what type of travel means, mode and security are they going to have to do today to get there.
“Sometimes when you sit and compare life here in the United States to somewhere out in the middle of a freakin’ desert somewhere, there’s just no way to make people understand just how good they really do have it,” he said.
Bragg said he has always been a proponent of mandatory service for all U.S. citizens and that everyone should serve a minimum of two years.
“One, it gives them their bearing, because when you’re 17, 18 years old do you really know what you want to do? Two, it gives you a little bit of discipline, and three, you actually get to see something other than what your little bubble has been during your childhood years,” he said. “‘My momma won’t let me have the newest iPhone.’ In the big scheme of things, that really doesn’t count for anything.
“It’s like, you wake up the next morning, ‘Momma, am I going to have a roof over my head, are the animals going to die today, and am I going to have anything to eat tonight?’ That makes a big difference,” Bragg added. “The power goes out for 10 minutes, and — oh my God — you don’t know how to read a book anymore.”
One thing Bragg won’t be spared because of the cancellation is what he termed the “proverbial honey do-list” that typically greets him upon his return.
“No matter how well you prep before you go, s..t will break,” he said. “Usually [his wife] is really good about being able to take care of the day-to-day stuff, but it’s the oddball stuff. She’s pretty self-sufficient.
“The first time, when we were doing the initial deployment, I got down to Cuba and she called me and said that something happened to one of the rotors on the front brakes on the pickup truck. She was all upset that she ruined the truck. First off, you haven’t ruined it, and please take it to a mechanic because I’m in Cuba.”
What he misses the most when he’s deployed overseas for an extended period, Bragg said, is “good television.”
“Overseas, if you’re lucky enough to get a signal and have the equipment to be able to watch it, the only thing you’ve got is AFM – the Armed Forces Network,” he said. “Usually things are three or four months behind, except for the news, of course. I miss the ability to sit back in a recliner in your own living room and turn on the TV and watch one of the stupid, brain cell-killing sitcoms that’s on.”
When he returned from his first permanent station, in Germany, Bragg remembers sitting and watching the traffic, just “to watch American cars go by.”
“And believe it or not, American commercials,” he said. “It’s just weird things. Jump on a motorcycle, go a couple hundred miles and get off and have an ice cream, then ride back on the back roads. It’s the sense of being free enough to do what you want to do.”
Bragg admitted he was “coming to end of [his] career” after serving his country for more than three decades.
“It’s a young kids’ game,” he said. “But there’s still gotta be a few of us old dinosaurs to stick around to make sure some of the old traditions are still maintained. There’s been quite the change from when I first came in to what it is now. Some of it’s OK, some of it’s not bad, and some of it sucks.
“That’s another idiom of the military: ‘Joe’s got the right to bitch and complain about something,’” Bragg added. “He’s going to do it no matter what you do.”
As for his most recent order, this time to not deploy, Bragg said he would continue to what he has done for more than three decades – serve his country to the best of his abilities, however it sees fit.
“I’m a soldier,” he said. “I do as I’m ordered. If the military has deemed I am needed more to stay and work emergency services at home, then I stay at home.”