Woodsville
For the quartet of young Marines — Nick Thompson, James Brant, Ben Elliott and Allen Young — the parade in Woodsville, held when the United States was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed like the next chapter in lives that were tethered to the local community.
But by May of this year, only one — Thompson — lived in town, a sign that, no matter how much young people love Haverhill’s rural community of 4,700 people, a lack of job opportunities is prompting more of them to enter the military, and fewer to settle down locally.
It’s the kind of dynamic that can wear away at the easy familiarity of lifelong friendships.
“Everybody is always busy with their own life, so it gets a little worse, a little worse, a little worse, you know, especially with kids and family and stuff like that,” Thompson, now 28, said in May. He was sitting on a pigeon-stained picnic bench outside the Butler’s Bus Service garage on Benton Road in Haverhill, his muscular arms bruised from a morning of repairing buses.
In 2006, when Thompson and the others graduated from Woodsville High School, he didn’t have those muscles. He was scrawny, worried about whether he’d be able to keep up with the demands of the notoriously strenuous Marine Corps boot camp.
Elliott, the hothead of the group, was a heavy-set 245 pounds when he decided to enter the service — in fact, he said in 2006 that he joined the Marines partially because he wanted to lose weight.
Brant, tall and skinny, was the quietest and most reserved of the four.
When, in their senior year, Young, Thompson and Elliott planned a secret overnight trip to Canada, where they could purchase alcohol legally and have a wild night out, Brant stayed home. Thompson said the results of the trip showed Brant had the most level head.
“We got a motel room, found strip clubs and lost most of our money and found out it was a terrible idea and came back with hangovers,” he said.
“He’s a good kid,” said Brant’s mother, Mary Ann Brant. She said her son weighed his options when he graduated, rejecting college because he didn’t really see himself as a “college kid.” His father set up an interview for him to drive a truck for Coca Cola, but instead, he listened to Young.
Young was the most athletic, the most outgoing, and a natural-born leader. Ever since childhood, he said in 2006, he had “wanted to be a warrior.”
“Allen was the one that dragged us all to going into the Marines,” Thompson said. “He was the mastermind behind it all.”
When the four boys signed up with the Lebanon-based Marine recruitment office, the recruiter said he’d never before seen four friends from a single school enlist together. That they were from such a small, rural school — Woodsville High had a graduating class of just 75 students at the time — was special, he said.
Thompson said he feels he and his fellow Marines set a trend at Woodsville High, making it more acceptable for the students in his wake to turn to the military rather than college. “It was kind of the turning point for the high school,” he said. “When the four of us pushed for the Marine Corps, they said, ‘Do you really want to do this?’”
Now, he said, he sees more and more graduates choosing that path.
The numbers seem to bear that out. In 2005, the year before they took the plunge into the Marines, just 1.5 percent of the Woodsville High graduating class entered the military, less than the statewide average of 2.5 percent.
Though the statewide average barely budged, Thompson and his friends helped to push that percentage to 8.8 percent in 2006, and the number has continued to be significantly higher than the state average, according to the New Hampshire Department of Education website.
When this year’s class graduates on June 11, 10.3 percent of them will have committed to the military, according to Sue Clark, a guidance counselor at Woodsville High.
She agreed that Thompson’s class of 2006 had an impact, in part because it woke up area recruiters to the fact that Woodsville was worth recruiting from.
“I think it validated the Marine Corps,” she said. “After they went in, the Marines made a very concerted effort to recruit actively.”
But Clark said the high numbers are also because she and the rest of the Woodsville High staff, in contrast to many area schools, provide a welcoming environment to military recruiters.
“We allow them to come in and meet with our students,” she said. “They can set up in the cafeteria and speak to students.”
Clark said she takes that approach because, for many high school graduates, military service represents the best possible path forward — not as a patriotic duty, but as a career.
“We believe that military service is a viable career option for many of our graduates,” she said. “The graduates are looking at the fact that there are very few full-time secure job opportunities in the North Country. They look at the fact that the military offers them job security, and career training.”
Though many young people want the excitement and the experiences that can come with traveling out of state for college, the military or direct entry into the workforce, many assume they’ll be back home in a few years, and that the friends they’ve grown up with will always be a part of their daily lives.
When joining the Marines together, the four friends arranged to enter the same platoon during boot camp in Parris Island, S.C. Even though they were together, they weren’t prepared for the culture shock, Thompson said.
In trying to explain the difference between boot camp and Woodsville, Thompson pointed to the person who had provided most of his discipline for the first 18 years of his life. “My mother,” he said, “wasn’t much of a yeller.”
By contrast, the drill instructors screamed in the faces of the new recruits, triggering a flood of adrenaline that made them want to run away or fight. “We were all staring at each other like, ‘What did we get ourselves into? Let’s go home,’” Thompson said.
The four quickly became regular churchgoers — not because they were particularly spiritual, but because it was the one place they could have a few minutes to talk freely, boosting each others’ spirits. But forces soon tore them apart.
Partway through boot camp, one of the other platoons grew short-handed. “They grabbed a guy off the end,” said Thompson. “It was alphabetical. Allen’s last name was Young. Boom.”
After boot camp, each of the young men was assigned to a different area. Young did very well, and successfully applied to a sniper training program.
Thompson said he underwent seven months of flight school at a Marine Corps training academy in New River, N.C. By coincidence, Elliott was going to school for military security in Lejeune, N.C., about half an hour away.
The two got together on weekends to hang out — they would go to a local pool hall, or spend $10 to attend drag races on a Saturday night, often reminiscing about their high school days, and how much life had changed.
After schooling, Thompson was deployed to Iraq, but he spent only six months there before becoming one of the first heavy airlift soldiers to transition into Afghanistan, where U.S. military operations were beginning to ramp up.
He flew to the site in the desert of Kandahar Province, where the military was building a base from nothing. Thompson, by then a helicopter crew chief, said he went on raids during which U.S. forces collected weapons and drugs into piles on the sand, and set them alight.
Sometimes, they faced resistance.
“I took a bullet in a fuel tank, took one in a tail rotor once,” he said. “I had a couple hard landings.”
There were a handful of reminders that, even though Thompson was halfway across the world, there was still a community back in Woodsville to which he belonged.
Once, in a chow hall in Iraq, he turned to the soldier next to him and realized it was another member of his graduating class, Matt Desrosier, who also had enlisted as a Marine.
“It was kind of weird,” he said. “You’re in Kuwait and you happen to sit down right next to someone you went to school with.”
Another time, he bumped into another former Woodsville High student in Afghanistan.
One day, Thompson said, he was surprised to see Brant — still tall, but now filling out with muscle — at his helicopter. Brant had been assigned to load the helicopter with ordnance.
“I didn’t even know he was there,” he said. “I just bumped into him when he showed up.”
Over four years of active duty, Brant’s mother said, he spent one year in Afghanistan.
From a purely mathematical perspective, the odds of meeting a fellow Woodsville High graduate in a distant foreign country is ridiculously small. But the odds grow dramatically if one considers the economic forces that are turning Haverhill and other small, rural areas into increasingly robust pipelines into the military.
Thompson said one reason the four friends joined the Marines is that it represented opportunity of a kind that didn’t seem possible at home. Thompson said he had decent grades, but was more skilled with his hands — his father taught him to turn a wrench, and he liked working on cars.
In rural areas of the Upper Valley and the Twin States, a stagnant job market means opportunities for graduates like Thompson have narrowed over the past decade, squeezing many young people so hard that they decide to leave the area.
When Thompson came home in 2014, he had only minor difficulties adjusting to civilian life. For a long time, he slept only lightly, some part of him waiting for an alarm signifying incoming mortar shells. He joined the North Haverhill Fire Department, seeking the adrenaline rush that comes with responding to a structure fire.
He did a short stint with Upper Valley Press, but he found factory work depressing. He took a job repairing buses for Blue Mountain School District in Newbury, Vt., and then got a mechanic’s job with Pike Industries, which helped him pay for a two-year degree at White Mountain Community College. Then he went to Butler’s to work on school buses, in part because he lives just up the road from the garage.
Thompson said he’s glad he entered the service.
“For me, it was great,” he said. “You had your ups and your downs, but that’s like anywhere.”
Attempts to talk to Brant directly were unsuccessful. He, too, returned to Haverhill, and was happy for a time working for PT Farm on Benton Road. But a romantic relationship went sour, and his hours at the farm also were cut back, his mother said.
With little to occupy his time and attention, she said, he grew bored and restless in Haverhill and moved to Florida, where he is working a retail job at an Ace Hardware.
He’d enter the Marines again, if he had it to do all over again, she said.
“He wasn’t for college. The other option would have just been staying here and not really making anything of himself,” she said. While he’d hoped for more out of his military experience, she said, “he’s made some great relationships through the Corps.”
Efforts to reach Elliott and Young were unsuccessful. Thompson said he was unsure how they would rate their military experience, but that there’s no doubt there have been some benefits.
Elliott, who lost 84 pounds in the months leading up to and including boot camp, moved to pursue work opportunities in Utah. He worked for a while for a vitamin and nutritional supplement company, and is currently in school to become a nurse, according to Mary Ann Brant. “If you’re young and single, there’s nothing for you in Woodsville,” she said.
Thompson said Young completed sniper training and was shot in the shoulder by an enemy combatant. He remains in the service and is stationed overseas. Messages left with some of his relatives in Haverhill were not returned.
While he is still in touch with the others and considers them to be brothers, Thompson said he’s still sometimes surprised that they’ve wound up living so far away from each other.
“You kind of assume that eventually we’d all get out (of the service ) and be back home, but everybody chooses a different thing, moves here, moves there,” he said.
Clark said she’s never surprised to hear that a graduate has moved away from the area.
“What’s to keep them here?” she asked.
The impact of young people leaving rural New Hampshire can be seen in a population with more seniors, and fewer schoolchildren.
Though Grafton County’s overall population is growing, the median age has jumped, from 37 in 2000 to 41.5 in 2014, according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. With fewer young people to send their children to Woodsville High, this year’s high school student population is 223, down from 318 the year Thompson and the others graduated. The percentage of students that qualify for a free or reduced lunch — a statistic often used to describe an area’s poverty — has increased, from 29.6 percent in 2003 to 34 percent this year.
Brant’s mother said Brant’s younger sister has a master’s degree in mental health counseling but had a hard time finding a local job. She’s now in the process of joining the Vermont National Guard. Mary Ann Brant said she is also out of work and looking for a job.
“I’m looking at minimum wage,” she said. “I could go to McDonald’s. There’s not a lot to do around here.”
In fact, even Thompson, the last of the four Marines to live in Woodsville, is about to leave himself.
“I’m moving to Portsmouth,” he said. “A job opportunity came up, so I’m going to go work at a shipyard, painting.”
He’s sad to leave the community, but even without overtime, he said, he’ll probably make 50 percent more than he makes now.
“The rent down there is way higher, but if you do the math, I’m still way ahead,” he said.
But Thompson’s departure may not spell the end of the group’s presence in Grafton County.
Clark said many move away to make their mark on the world, but some never lose the desire to come back home. When those people find a way to return, she said, it’s often a decision that sticks.
“They’ve seen what the world’s like outside of Woodsville, New Hampshire,” she said. “When they come back, it’s by choice.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.