First Lieutenant Corey Fefferman is serving with the National Guard in Iraq. Her practice of playing with the Iraqi children who come to visit detained parents is what she calls her “counter-insurrection.” (In the midst of a divorce, she was advised to use her husband’s name.)
Photo courtesy Ava Reinfeld, Kevin Fefferman, and Corey Fefferman
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May 28, 2009
Ava Reinfeld hasn’t slept well since her niece, Corey Fefferman, left for Iraq last summer.
First Lieutenant Fefferman serves in the New Jersey National Guard. A member of the Bravo 112 Fires Battery, part of the 50th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, she has been stationed in Baghdad since last August.
She will be coming home in June.
Reinfeld can’t wait. “I’ll be very relieved. I’m looking forward to her laugh, her sense of humor, her essence. She wants to have a barbecue. I told her — whatever she wants.”
Fefferman’s mother died when she was just five, and she and her aunt share a particularly close relationship; in fact, when Fefferman returns, she’ll call Reinfeld’s West Orange apartment home.
Fefferman’s father, Harry Fefferman, also lives in West Orange, and he, also, can’t wait to see his daughter. “I worry every day. If I see a black Ford, I worry,” he said, referring to the kind of car usually used by the military to deliver news of a soldier’s death to family members. “Once there was a black Ford parked on my street. I was worried they were looking for me and I kept going. Luckily, Corey was fine.”
Corey Fefferman is not the first in her family to serve in the military. Her brother, Kevin, served in Iraq in 2006-07 (“NJ native reflects on life as a soldier,” NJ Jewish News, Jan. 11, 2007). Now 27, he works at the Pentagon and is looking forward to getting married at the end of August. Both of their parents served in the military as well.
Corey was unable to respond to questions for this article, but her aunt spoke with a reporter over lunch at the Blue Moon Diner in South Orange, and her father spoke to NJJN by telephone.
Reinfeld eagerly shared photos of her niece — one showing her pointing a rifle at a mural of Saddam Hussein sitting on a throne.
And she took obvious pleasure in sharing stories about Fefferman’s kindness to the children of detainees at a Theater Internment Facility in Baghdad.
“She would go and play with them,” said Reinfeld. “Her male coworkers would say to her, ‘Why are you doing this? They are the enemy.’ And she would say, ‘This is my counter-insurrection.’”
Sometimes, Reinfeld said, Fefferman would instant message her and fret that she was doing the wrong thing. “I would say to her in a message, ‘No, what you’re doing is right. It’s good. And maybe someday, they’ll remember the American soldier that was good to them.’”
Reinfeld said that Fefferman also loved to give the children things to play with, and her aunt offered support in her own way.
“I would go to Amazing Savings weekly,” said Reinfeld, referring to the store in East Hanover, “to get them hair bows, Hannah Montana stuff, candy…. I would send big packages to Corey.”
And Reinfeld mounted her own “counter-insurrection” through the packages. “I made sure every food item I sent was marked ‘OU kosher.’ They wouldn’t know what it was anyway, but it was sort of like making a statement. To bust their chops — the Iraqis and all the people who don’t like us because we’re Jews.”
Reinfeld, a counselor at the Jewish Vocational Service of MetroWest, said Fefferman’s treatment of the children showed how she had internalized the Jewish ideal of repairing the world “one individual at a time.” Reinfeld said that Fefferman’s mother would be proud to see her daughter embrace that ideal, something she probably picked up at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange, where she celebrated becoming bat mitzva.
During her tour of duty, Fefferman also served as liaison for a Bulgarian division of soldiers and as a VIP escort officer, working with senior officers in the Department of Defense and other dignitaries visiting the Theater Internment Facility.
Reinfeld said she felt “comfortable” that her niece would be safe.
“They had rigorous training. It included, I think, mace or pepper spray, and physical fighting, and gas masks…. I think she was very well trained to do the job they were going to do, so I felt comfortable.”
She described how Fefferman’s personality has helped her.
“She met a lot of people, she’s very outgoing. She talks to the wind, the door, the doorknob — just like her mother would have done. I was pretty confident she would be safe, but in the back of your mind, you don’t know.”
That nagging concern was always there. “I would say I worried the whole time,” said Reinfeld.
To help stave off the worry, Reinfeld said, she turned to healthy doses of superstition and tradition. She refused to update her passport. “I just said, God forbid I’ll need it, I won’t be able to find it anyway. And I’m a little superstitious — if I didn’t have it, I might not need it.”
She upgraded her level of kashrut, something she began when Kevin went to Iraq — something her own grandfather did when her mother went to serve in Algiers.
“When my mother left, my grandfather said we’ll make the house kosher. It’s our pact with God,” she said.
She also sends text messages to her niece every day.
Fefferman also e-mailed or phoned her father nearly every day. “It was almost like she was down the street. She’d get on the phone and say, ‘Hi, Daddy,’” he said.
His worst moment came on May 11 with news of an American shooting and killing five fellow soldiers at a clinic at Camp Liberty, the army base in Baghdad. He knew Corey was there having dental work done that day. But she called soon after to let him know she was okay — after Kevin had already called to reassure him, he said.
In a phone conversation, he said she told him she had been “down the hall” when it happened and heard everything. She called the incident “sobering” and said, “I’ll be home soon.”
When she does get home, the first thing they’ll do, after a joyful greeting, is go to Yankee Stadium. “We used to go to the old Yankee Stadium for ball games all the time,” said Harry Fefferman. “She wants to go to the new stadium.” And their other big plan? Ribs at the Landmark Diner in Livingston, he said.
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