Lynbrook soldier on 2nd tour of duty in Iraq

Dan Peck was born into a family of leaders. The 26-year-old Lynbrook resident has two older brothers who served in the armed forces, and, while in high school, Peck said, he led various service organizations. So for him it felt only natural to join the Army in 2001 and eventually lead an Army artillery unit in Salah ad Din, a northern province of Iraq.

“I always felt like being a leader,” Peck said in phone interview with the Herald from Iraq. “It was something I always knew I’d enjoy doing.”

An Army captain in his second tour in the Middle East — his first was in Afghanistan about two years ago — Peck said that his main duties as a staff officer in a field artillery battalion for the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team are to set goals for the battalion and strategize missions to accomplish them, a process he calls “targeting.”

Contrary to what people may think, Peck said, the weather in Iraq is pretty cold, and at night the temperature drops into the low 40s. “I can see my breath at night,” he said. Dust storms are a monthly occurrence. “The wind picks up and blows fine dust everywhere,” he said. “The worst one we had, we could see about 50 meters before it was just dust, but that’s not the norm.”

Peck has about six months left in his tour in Iraq, and he said that besides his family and fiancee, he misses the smaller scale — the proximity — of everything in his hometown. When he’s not overseas, he is stationed in Kansas, and between the two, anywhere he wants to go is a major trek. “In Lynbrook, I can get to wherever I want in five or 10 minutes,” Peck said. “In Kansas, it’s at least 30 minutes to get anywhere.”

He added that although the troops are well fed on his base in Iraq — it has a Burger King, a Starbucks and a Subway — he misses home-cooked meals. “They have a pretty good spread for all meals and keep a pretty good variety,” Peck said of the food on base, which includes everything from tacos to fresh fruit. “I miss home-cooked food, though. ... [W]hen it’s mass produced, it loses a little something.”