Time in Army results in new aspirations to farm

LANARK, Ill. — Kyle Martz knew as an eighth-grade student that he was going to join the Army and serve his country.

“On my mom’s side of the family, three of them were in the military, so I always had a calling to serve,” said Martz, who farms with his wife, Ariel, and his parents, Gregg and Jane Martz.

After high school, he went to college for two years and played baseball where he was the team’s catcher.

“Baseball was the initial goal,” he said.

Martz’s Army career started in 2005 and he went to South Carolina for his basic training, then to Georgia for advanced training and was stationed at Fort Hood in Texas as a member of the 1st Cavalry Division.

The serviceman was deployed twice to a camp near Baghdad, Iraq.

“For the first deployment, I was part of a prison guard detail at a holding facility,” Martz said. “Some of the people we got in were informants for us, but some of them that came in were bad guys.”

The soldiers rotated between three shifts at the prison.

“I hated the night shift,” Martz said. “It would be 100 degrees at night, but there was no humidity.”

However, the soldiers had air conditioners in their rooms.

“I got lucky. I was in two-man rooms for both deployments, but some people lived in a 40-man bay, so they didn’t have much privacy,” Martz said.

“We would get sandstorms that would leave a quarter-inch of sand on everything, so you had to find somewhere to be inside.”

During his second deployment, Martz did special electronic device repairs.

“I would fix night vision goggles and we put encrypted files on the GPS hard drives of all the vehicles in the unit,” he said. “That was so our system was the only one that knew our location.”

When Martz returned home to northern Illinois on leave, he realized that a bad day on the farm was still better than a good day in Iraq.

“When I went to the Army, I didn’t have any aspirations to farm, but after being in the Army for a little bit, I knew I wanted to have a family,” he said. “I wasn’t going to put a family through the Army lifestyle, so I got out.”

Martz’s original ETS date was May 2009, but he did not complete his expiration term of service until 2010.

“I was on stop-loss for a year, which means the unit cannot lose any numbers,” he said. “But President Obama canceled that.”

For the next year, Martz worked at his family farm before studying at the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute.

“My dad has ridden motorcycles my entire life and I was always interested in them, and when I was in the Army, I bought two motorcycles,” he said. “I loved riding them, so I figured if I was going to have a motorcycle, I wanted to be able to work on it.”

Martz met his wife while at MMI and they moved to the Lanark area where they have been farming ever since and now they are the parents of Logan, Letti, Levi and Luke.

“We farm 1,200 acres and this year it is all corn,” he said. “In the past we’ve grown beans and we will grow them again.”

During the spring, Martz is responsible for planting the crops, while his dad does the chisel plowing.

“I run the grain dryer and the trucks in the fall,” he said. “Dad is the combine operator and hauls the dry corn in the summer.”

Since the farm does not include livestock, that gives Martz the opportunity to attend his kids’ sporting events.

“I value that quite a bit,” he said. “I coach baseball in the summer league and my oldest son is a catcher.”

Martz has PTSD from his time he spent in the Army, as well as tinnitus and asthma.

“But it is nothing that makes farming very difficult,” he said. “I wear a mask and ear protection.”

For anybody going into the military, Martz’s advice is to keep all paperwork.

“You can’t prove anything unless it is written down,” he said. “It will get you out of a pickle when somebody says something otherwise than what is written down.”

Serving in the military was not hard, Martz said.

“They tell you what to do, where to be and how to dress,” he said. “If you can follow directions, it’s pretty straightforward — you can either do the stuff they ask you to do, or you can’t.”

Martz is glad he served in the U.S. Army.

“I was a lot more responsible after I was in the military,” he said. “It gave me purpose and direction, so it was good for me.”