Word: bradford
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Turning his cruiser into Perry Turner's tractor shop, Chambliss shifts gears and shares his dreams for Bradford, of the town's becoming a draw for the weekend arts-and-crafts crowd, its streets lined with majestic Bradford pear trees. But the $500,000 annual town budget and a 50-year-old water system are holding back development. Bradford's patrol cars have 35-year-old radars, and Chambliss came home from Iraq to find a mere $820 in the department kitty for new purchases. "I'm not going to talk down the war," says the police chief, a staunch...
What can you say about a man who shows you a picture of a human heart lying on the road after a bombing in Baghdad, then turns to his whiny 9-month-old daughter and calms her with a gentle "Hey, Toots"? Bradford's boyish police chief, Josh Chambliss, 30, is sitting in his neat-as-a-pin living room with wife Farrah and baby Chloe, clicking through an electronic album on his computer of photos he took of life in Baghdad: the palace of Saddam Hussein's son Uday and his infamous rape bed. Bloody, blown-up bodies...
Chambliss signed up for the National Guard at age 17 when he was still at Bradford High. He recently re-enlisted for another six years despite narrowly escaping a roadside bomb attack in Iraq just two months before coming home. "I would do it over again if I had to. It's my job," he says. Still, he's more cynical about the mission. "In my first six months, I went from being scared to excited, to 'Hey, this is kind of fun' and feeling sorry for the Iraqis," he says. Then, as attacks on U.S. troops mounted despite American...
Back on the job in Bradford, Chambliss says he notices a change in himself. Driving through town in his police cruiser, he describes the arrest a day earlier of a suspected meth dealer. "I knocked on the front door and got him coming out the back, but I realized I had my hand on my gun and was fixin' to draw down on him," says Chambliss. His deputy stopped him, but his eagerness to pull a gun shook him. It still does...
When he left for the war, Bunn gave an enthusiastic speech to Bradford's sixth-graders about the duty of "citizen soldiers" to help Iraq's "nation building." No one realized how much the mayor had changed until April, when several hundred people gathered downtown to dedicate a patriotic wall, dreamed up by the soldiers' wives and families to honor all the townsfolk who had served in battle from World War I to Afghanistan and Iraq. The list started with 25 names and grew to 400. Bunn, not yet officially released from active duty but out on a pass from...