In-depth coverage Hamilton Joes baseball
HAMILTON — What he wants, ultimately, is to be a great player on an even better team.
The individual part is important to Joshua Manley. But he couldn’t do without the team thing. It’s in his makeup.
As the new general manager of the Hamilton Joes, the local Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League baseball team, Manley is in his element. In some ways it’s like the United States Army, which consumed nine years of his life and made him a man.
The Army has seven core values. They are loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage.
When you’re a young man who can’t seem to avoid trouble or find the good in life, maybe you just scoff at those words. Manley, a young man who couldn’t seem to avoid trouble or find the good in life, went the other way.
“That’s something I memorized in basic training as a 17-year-old when I started realizing this is what I’ve got to do to make myself a life, be a productive member of society and be a successful man,” he said. “I’ve tried to live by that ever since.”
Manley, 31, has come a very long way to get here. He’s seen things that others couldn’t handle. If the blood-soaked dust of Iraq and the crack of the bat at Foundation Field don’t seem to belong together, just know that they do. At least for one man.
On the wrong path
How do you put this gently? Manley wasn’t a poster child for good behavior.
He was a good athlete back in the day. Not great, but pretty good. Some colleges looked at him for soccer, then they saw his grades. They looked away.
Manley played some baseball, too. He graduated from Franklin High School in 1998, but didn’t play the sport there. The reason? As a freshman, he got arrested by an assistant coach who was also a cop.
“In the spring, I got in more trouble, just like usual,” Manley said. “My junior year, I missed 30-some days of school where I just didn’t go.”
He needed something. He could see himself on the path to jail, or maybe worse. Maybe the military was the answer.
Manley enlisted in the Army during his junior year at Franklin and went to basic training in the summer. When he returned to school for his senior year, his grades improved. His general outlook improved. Uncle Sam was transforming his life.
“I took a liking to it very quickly,” Manley said. “You learn to count on yourself to make the right decisions and put in the effort to get where you need to be. Then your teamwork skills take over.
“I had no time management skills,” he continued. “I had no responsibility. I had no respect for anyone. I had no self-respect. And when I came in, I learned very quickly that I had to have those tools just to be able to survive in the Army world.”
Becoming a medic
So began a six-year stint in the Army. Manley trained to be a medic, one of those people that “takes care of guys that get shot and blown to pieces.”
He didn’t see any combat during that time, but he prepared himself for that day. He worked hard and played a little baseball.
Manley left the Army in May 2003. He had matured enough to have college on his mind. Yet leaving the military environment wasn’t necessarily a good thing for Manley. As he said, “I kind of fell out a little bit. I kind of took two steps backward.”
Once again, he needed something. Or someone.
During a trip to Nashville, Tenn., in the winter of 2004-05, he met a young woman named Lucy Haubner at a conference.
Haubner, a former softball standout at Ross High School (Class of ’99), and Manley quickly discovered they had mutual friends.
In March 2006, they were married on a beach in Hawaii.
Manley was back in the Army by that time, having re-enlisted in January. He missed it, and the couple thought it was a good situation for them.
Manley’s new military path was that of a flight medic. He talked his way into that opportunity right away, even though he’d never flown in a Blackhawk helicopter before.
And he knew this: If he was going to be a flight medic, he was going to Iraq. No question.
In July 2006, he officially became part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His life was about to change forever.
‘I hit something’
Manley was sent to Tal Afar in northern Iraq, not far from Turkey and Iran. His original deployment was set for 12 months. It would become 15.
Training was over. This was real. A medic’s job is to deal with war’s destruction. Injuries that are hard to view and harder to forget.
And that was just part of it. Manley was still a soldier. He still had to fight. Often he would get dropped in a hot zone and have to get through the fire to reach the wounded.
“You’re in danger anytime you’re in a helicopter because of the rocket-propelled grenades and bullets being fired at you,” Manley said. “You can get hit by a little tiny bullet in the air just like you can on the ground. I think it was my second week in theater when we lost a pilot who got shot in the face as he was hovering 250 feet up.”
Manley wasn’t always in the thick of it. But there were plenty of times when he was. It didn’t matter what the situation was. You could never take safety for granted.
“I went and rescued a pilot on the Fourth of July. I’m not a big fan of the Fourth of July as a result,” Manley said. “Landing in the middle of a city surrounded by nothing but 250, 300 Iraqis that are no more than 10 yards away from you. You never knew what was going to happen. The worst was at night. They hide in caves. I’m not going in caves.”
In January 2007, he went on a mission to rescue a dying American soldier. His crew was taking fire. The helicopter came in hard.
“We hit the ground so hard, probably about two G’s,” Manley recalled. “It was like, ‘Get ready to jump out and then we’re taking off because of the fire coming in.’ And when we hit and I was getting ready to jump out, it threw me. I hit something. I don’t know what it was. I got thrown out, and I didn’t have my monkey harness on.
“I had so much adrenaline running through me that I got up and ran to where I was supposed to go,” he continued. “We had to fly back into Mosul and take the guy there. As soon as I got him dropped off, whenever they took him off my hands, all my energy just left. I fell on the ground.”
Manley had a broken back. There was pain, but he could walk. He could work. So after a short break, that’s what he did.
“It would’ve taken three months to get a brand-new medic trained,” Manley said. “Flight medics are one of the rarest jobs in the United States Army. That’s why I wanted to do it in the first place.
“I didn’t want to screw my buddies over,” he added. “If I left, somebody else had to work, and that’s more that their life is in danger. I wasn’t missing a leg or anything. So what I did was I lightened my load and trucked on.”
For about nine months, he put up with the pain. Eventually, after he left Iraq and returned to Hawaii, Manley had to wear a large brace. It didn’t really help, so in May, 2008, he had a six-hour surgery at Tripler Army Medical Center.
His time in combat was over, but really it wasn’t. And isn’t. He closes his eyes and it’s back.
The faces of war
How do you forget? Manley won’t pretend that he can. He’s dealing with it. Some can’t.
“This is hard for people to understand,” Manley said. “I’ve got a friend that killed himself, a roommate, because of dealing with this stuff. Every time we went out, it was the worst moment of somebody else’s life. They’re fighting, hanging on to life, missing a limb. You do lose the fear after a while. I’m a little rough around the edges, but I see things differently now.”
The question is asked: What’s the worst thing you ever saw as a soldier? He hesitates because maybe he’s not sure he wants to talk about it. But the answer is easy.
“Children,” Manley said. “Whenever stuff happened to kids is the only time I really felt any emotion. I couldn’t tell you how many people I watched die or had to have their blood all over me. But I know the exact number of kids.”
The number is 19, all with a story. There is one that’s stuck in his brain, an 11-year-old boy. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Middle Eastern kid caught in the blast of an improvised explosive device (IED) in a marketplace.
“The force of it had thrown him into a building and basically split the back of his skull open,” Manley said. “He had shrapnel all over him. I worked for about 30 minutes to stabilize him before I even took him to the helicopter. And the whole time he was trying to talk to me.
“He started crashing in the helicopter as soon as we took off, literally, and he lost his pulse,” he continued. “I went to work on him for 30 minutes of solid CPR. I didn’t have a drop of sweat left in me when I was done. About 30 seconds before we landed at the (combat hospital), his pulse came back on its own. I handed him off to the medics, and they lost him. That was probably the worst.”
Manley takes a deep breath. Too much doesn’t make sense.
“I have literally been in a position where the guys we were fighting, 15 minutes after the fighting was over, I was taking care of them,” he said. “I don’t know the words to really describe it, just the feeling of, ‘Jesus Christ, why are you fighting us?’
“I literally had a guy in a helicopter try to stab me in the neck,” Manley added. “All I could do was take the knife from him, restrain him, put the IV back in his arm, keep him alive.
“After a while, you do kind of ask what you’re doing there,” he continued. “You’re around so much destruction and death. We build a school and they blow it up. You go out one day and see something that’s really great being built, and the next day you’re there picking bodies up.”
Sometimes it did make sense. Manley witnessed the reaction in Mosul on Dec. 30, 2006, when Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging.
“There were people firing guns in the air,” Manley said. “They weren’t trying to attack us. They were celebrating that he was gone, and the bullets were hitting the windshields of our helicopters. They were just raining down.”
Turning to baseball
The 2008 surgery left Manley in a state of uncertainty. He was told that if he stayed in the Army, his duties would likely be at a desk. His back was filled with metal.
Manley decided to join the Army’s Warrior Transition Unit.
“It’s probably the best thing that ever happened to me as far as where I am today,” he said.
The WTU is a program the Army set up for wounded veterans. Essentially you go through rehab and start mapping out your future. You can get an unpaid civilian job.
One day somebody mentioned the Hawaii Winter Baseball League, where Class AA and A guys played in the offseason.
Manley had never heard of it, but it sounded interesting. So he picked up the phone and put in a direct call to league president Hervy Kurisu.
“He said, ‘Boy, you got some nerve, don’t you?’ ” Manley said. “But it turned out that he loved soldiers, he loved what my personal history was, and he gave me an opportunity to learn from the ground up.”
Lucy Manley’s take on the situation was that her husband was a perfect choice to bring military and baseball people together.
“On certain parts of the island, there’s tension between the military and local population in Hawaii,” she said. “Josh was like a liaison between the two. The league looked at it like, ‘Let’s get some of the military coming to us because they’re coming from all over the country, especially from cities where baseball is huge. Maybe we can increase our attendance.’ And once he started working there, they realized what a hard worker he is and how valuable he is.”
Manley did a little bit of everything with the league. Baseball was back in his blood.
The league offered him a full-time job when he left the Army for good in February, 2009. But the league folded in early ’09 when its contract with Major League Baseball expired.
Manley pondered his next move. He actually tried out for a semipro team and made it, then immediately quit. He knew his body couldn’t take it.
He planned to attend the MLB winter meetings. His networking had resulted in some job offers, so he wanted to go and see what he could secure. First, though, the Manleys decided to spend some time in Ohio. In May, as Josh prepared to return to the mainland, his phone rang.
“I was like two hours from getting on the plane,” Manley said. “I didn’t know this guy from Adam. Somebody he knew knew my father-in-law, and they got to talking about me. He said he needed somebody who knows how to run a baseball organization.”
The caller was Mike Brennan, general manager of the Hamilton Joes. They set up a meeting that included coach Darrel Grissom. Just like that, the Joes had an assistant general manager.
Grissom liked what he heard from Manley. He was a self-starter, a guy who didn’t care much about obstacles.
“I think the way he looks at it, whatever is going on, it can’t be that bad because he’s seen worse,” Grissom said. “You’re going to be a little tougher-skinned when you’ve seen the stuff that he’s seen.”
Manley helped Brennan that first season with the Joes. Last year, he turned to coaching with Grissom.
This year, Brennan decided to step aside. Manley, who is a couple semesters away from a history degree at Miami University, became the new GM.
“He doesn’t let anybody stand in his way, and that’s what I love about him,” said Tyler Bradshaw, the Joes’ director of media and broadcasting. “He will throw ideas out there, and you will sit and think, ‘I don’t see any way this can realistically happen.’ And sure enough, a couple months later, you sit back and say, ‘Well, I was wrong,’ because Josh made it happen.”
A man and his team
Manley loves mentoring young men. He knows a few things about good choices and bad choices and their consequences.
“I know there’s guys out there that have a story where they got in trouble and screwed up their life,” Manley said. “I know they’re a dime a dozen. I know I’m nobody special. But I do like to think I’ve had some success with this. I have worked with some guys that came from the same story that I did, and they just needed somebody helping them out. I think I can do that better than anybody I know.”
He’s a decorated war veteran. Manley can’t remember the exact number, but he thinks his time in mission was around 510 hours. He lost friends, but maintained the will to go on.
That doesn’t mean every day is easy. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, in varying degrees, is pretty much a given with veterans.
“It’s something he’ll have forever,” Lucy Manley said. “I know there’s some things he’s never talked to me about, and he probably never will. I’m OK with it. It’s not going to affect our relationship.”
Joshua Manley will admit this: He misses the military. If he’s not thrown from a helicopter on a fateful day in Iraq, he’s probably still in the Army.
But he was, and he’s not. The Hamilton Joes are his team now, and the team is always the thing. Together, they’re moving ahead.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2194 or rcassano@coxohio.com.
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