Suburban airman returns to hero’s welcome in Buffalo Grove

Friends and family who knew Ben Rosengarden as the teenager who sported a mohawk hairstyle and wore an earring would not have predicted he would end up serving in the military.

But on Thursday they gathered in his native Buffalo Grove with suburban leaders to give Rosengarden a hero’s welcome home from his tour of duty in Afghanistan.

“I look at him now, and I can’t believe the transformation,” family friend Sally Nowak said. “He has changed completely. He was kind of a wild child.”

Underneath all of that, however, “was this sweet, loving kid,” she said.

Rosengarden returned to the U.S. last month after a completing a six-month deployment — “181 long days,” he says — with the 934th Air Reserve security forces serving in the Herat Province of Afghanistan.

The 24-year-old Wheeling High School graduate had been in Minneapolis for 14 days before flying into O’Hare International Airport on Thursday afternoon. There he was met by an escort from the Patriot Guard, who accompanied him to Buffalo Grove, where local police and firefighters took over and escorted him to the Village Bar & Grill for his welcome home reception.

“It was kind of awe inspiring,” Rosengarden said of the welcome. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

The event was attended by Congressman Robert Dold, State Rep. Carol Sente, village trustees and former Village President Elliott Hartstein.

Rosengarden said he had very little contact with the Afghan people during his tour, mainly because of the language barrier. However, he did have frequent contact with the national army and gained a positive impression.

“In my opinion, it’s going good,” he said. “I can’t speak from an official Air Force point of view. But in my opinion, I think they’re starting to want to take control back.”

Now that he is back, Rosengarden intends to spend time with wife, Anna, 23, and their dog in their Mount Prospect home. He also plans to finish college, having so far completed 53 credits toward a degree.

Anna said the time apart from her husband was tough, but it helped that they were able to communicate via Skype and Air Force phones.

“It was scary, but I know him, and he is a strong guy,” she said. “I wanted to be naive about the whole thing because the less I knew, the less worried I was. I just wanted to know he was alive and good, and that’s all I cared about.”

Perhaps the man who might least have expected Ben to join the service would have been his dad, Scott, who died in his late 40s in 2007.

Scott was the director of several of the Buffalo Grove Park District’s children’s theater productions, as well as a production of “Evita” that also featured son Ben.

“He’s probably rolling over in his grave that I’m in the military,” Rosengarden said. “He always said ... the movie that scared him the most was ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ because I was his firstborn son. He supported the military; he just didn’t want me in it. But he would probably be really proud of me.”

Rosengarden enlisted three years ago and said he welcomed his deployment.

“I didn’t join to sit around stateside. I wanted to go do something, go help, serve, all the ideals someone has,” he said.

As a senior airman, which he described as “the workhorse of the Air Force,” his duties included vehicle stops and combat patrols. Though he wasn’t involved in direct combat, Rosengarden did experience some close calls in Afghanistan.

“We had a rocket go off about 25 feet from our tent one night,” he said. “It didn’t explode completely, but we were all sleeping. My first reaction was, ‘Really? I have to get up now? I got another hour before work. Let me sleep.’”

“Luckily we had no one fall in our group,” he added.