GILBERT, AZ — When Major Sven Olson woke up on Sept. 11, 2001, to his father’s urgent phone call and the horrifying images playing out on television, he knew immediately his life was about to change.
Olson had already spent 13 years in the Army National Guard, balancing a civilian career as an education technology consultant for Apple with what he thought would remain a “traditional guardsman” role — one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer, and the occasional call-up for floods, forest fires and hurricanes.
“9/11 is pivotal for me because it was the turning point from traditional guardsman,” Olson said. “9/11 happened, and I was on active duty for most of the rest of my career.”
The attacks would pull him out of the disaster-response missions he’d signed up for and into the long, grinding deployments of the post-9/11 wars. It also cost him his marriage, a loss he bluntly calls a casualty of war.
Olson first joined the Guard in Oregon, drawn to the idea of serving in emergencies without giving up a civilian life. He deployed overseas before 9/11, but for humanitarian missions — hurricane relief in Jamaica and other natural disasters.
“I didn’t want to do it as a full-time job,” he said. “I liked the idea of having a civilian career but being called up on active duty for floods and forest fires.”
That changed in 2003, when orders came down for Iraq. By then, he was an engineer officer with the Arizona Army National Guard.
“Literally, the big dance. This is what we’ve trained for,” Olson said. He loved his unit — a close-knit headquarters element assigned to the 18th Airborne Corps.
They deployed through Kuwait and into Iraq, landing at what would become Joint Base Balad, a sprawling installation north of Baghdad that troops came to know as “Mortaritaville” because of daily incoming fire.
“We landed, we dumped our stuff in a tent, and within an hour I had volunteered and was out on a mission,” Olson said. “Within hours of dropping my stuff, I was already out on the banks of the Tigris River. It was an unbelievable experience.”
Olson’s Iraq service eventually stretched into two 18‑month deployments, back to back, with less than 30 days at home in between. He returned once as an individual augmentee, then almost immediately deployed again when his Arizona unit was activated.
“Three days after getting home, my unit got activated,” he said. “My wife said, ‘No, you can’t go back. I won’t be here when you get back.’ And she wasn’t.”
Olson argues that the National Guard bore the brunt of some of the longest wartime deployments, with early tours running 18 months or more as active-duty units cycled in and out on shorter rotations. He points to a roughly 25% divorce rate for Guard members in the first years of the Iraq war as part of that hidden cost.
“I count my family as a casualty of war,” he said.
Despite the constant threat — mortars that hit the base “every day,” and casualties that became part of the routine — Olson says most of his time in Iraq was defined not by combat, but by rebuilding.
“Most of what I did in Iraq was good, mostly the humanitarian stuff,” he said. As an engineer, he helped build clinics and schools and repair civic infrastructure in nearby villages.
He also discovered something unexpected about himself: he was a photographer.
Olson’s parents, who had lived through the Vietnam era and were wary of watching another war unfold on television, gave him a camera before he left and asked him to send photos and stories instead of relying on news coverage.
When missions allowed, he began taking pictures of the children and families in the villages where he worked. Back on base, he would print them, cut them out, and organize them by village. The next time he went out, he handed the photos to the families.
“In Iraq in those days there was no internet, there were no phones, there were no computers in homes,” he said. “There were no pictures that these children would ever have access to, and I, as a visitor to their village, became known as Sora Man — Photo Man.”
He still keeps in touch with some of those families, including a boy he mentored who later became an army translator and then one of the first Iraqis to receive a special immigrant visa to the United States. Today, Olson said, that young man works as a translator for Navy SEALs out of San Diego.
Olson’s service didn’t end with Iraq. He stayed on active duty for Hurricane Katrina response, later served in Germany and eventually worked at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.
At home, his two sons once vowed they would never join the military after watching the toll those long deployments took on their family. Both eventually did.
“Both of my sons said they would never join the military. Both did, and I’m incredibly proud,” he said. One served four years and got out. The other, now a major like his father when he retired, is deploying to Jordan, part of a new generation answering the call in the same region where Olson once served.
Olson sees that as part of the broader, generational impact of 9/11 — on his own family, on military families across the country and on people living in the war zones where he deployed.
He recalls Iraqis lining up to vote in their new democracy, even after a bombing in one line killed and wounded civilians.
“They cleared the bodies and filled the line back up,” he said. “That’s how important freedom was to them.”
He also remembers learning that, under Saddam Hussein, bananas were banned simply because the dictator hated them. After the invasion, bananas returned to markets and homes.
“The fruit of freedom was the banana,” Olson said. “To me, I’m like, okay, that is crazy. How many bananas have I taken for granted?”
As the nation marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Olson worries that younger Americans may barely remember 9/11, if at all — or may not have learned about it in school.
He grounds his reflections in the mantra of the Travis Manion Foundation, named for a Marine killed in Iraq: “If not me, then who?”
“This is a day that people showed up in the moment of crisis,” he said. “People went into the building. A lot of people ran away, but a lot of people ran into the building. I want to be one of those. I want my son to be one of those that runs in, not away.”
For Olson, remembering 9/11 means more than replaying the images of the towers or listing the battles that followed. It means honoring both the visible and invisible sacrifices — the years of deployments, the families that broke apart, and the lives quietly changed in places like Balad and the villages along the Tigris River.
“We have to remember,” he said. “We have to carry this legacy on, so they understand the sacrifice — not just in years of our lives, but actual service in uniform, taking an oath that means something more than just words on paper.”
Sven Olson is taking part in the Phoenix 9/11 Heroes Run at Mountain America Stadium on September 19th. You can visit the Travis Manion Foundation website for registration information.
