One semester left, Uncle Sam calls

PONTIAC, Ill. — On the outside, looking in, the stereotypical notion of soldiers’ work goes straight to what is seen in the movies, but there’s so much more to their service that is behind the scenes.

Brad Carroll joined the Illinois Army National Guard after graduating from Pontiac Township High School in 2007 and served in Afghanistan four years later.

“I did basic training the summer after high school. I had two job titles. I was a heavy construction equipment operator and also a combat engineer,” he said.

His National Guard unit was based in Sparta in southern Illinois, where he would train one weekend a month and do a two-week training stint each year, while enrolled at Heartland Community College and then Illinois State University.

Carroll was one semester short of earning a degree in agribusiness and accounting at ISU, but Uncle Sam had other plans in the fall of 2011 with an assignment in Afghanistan.

He was deployed for about a year, including six weeks of training in Texas before being shipped to the war zone.

The Livingston County farmer and future business owner returned to ISU in 2013 to complete his last semester and earn his degree.

Construction Unit

Utilizing his skills honed in basic training, Carroll was part of a construction equipment unit in Afghanistan.

“Bagram Air Base was one of our main launching points in eastern Afghanistan. We were deployed basically as a construction equipment unit. We did a variety of things, building forward operating bases, basically putting up walls, moving dirt,” he said.

“I was a sergeant and spent most of my time doing road repairs. Basically, anytime a road was blown up by an improvised explosive device, our job to repair road. Our job was to refill the hole and pave over it. We had a backhoe, a tandem dump truck and a portable concrete mixer.

“We would fill the hole back in, mix concrete on the side of the road and pour it. The roads were like two-lane highways here. You’d have a hole from an IED covering both lanes that a vehicle would get swallowed up in. It wasn’t just like a pothole.

“We’d get there at dusk and we’d work overnight because it was safer. If you backfill that much dirt at one time without the right compaction, it’s going to sink. The reason why the coalition wanted it capped off with concrete was because if it wasn’t capped off with concrete, it allowed them to dig in loose dirt and put something back in it.

“We spent a lot of time on the roads. We’d drive around and live a little bit like nomads. We’d go from place to place and sleep in some small FOBs. Then they’d say another road needed patching, so we would go out on patrol and they’d take us out there to patch a hole.

“A lot of times they’d put explosives underneath a box culvert or a pipe under the road, and we spent a lot of time trying to somehow patch those back together. That was our job for most of the time.”

As an equipment engineer, Carroll said, it would also involve the unusual.

“One time a C-5 Galaxy transport plane overran the runway on the ice at Bagram. Nobody got hurt. We had to use bulldozers to pull it out of the mud. There was a multitude of interesting things,” he said.

Service, Education

His decision to join the military was two-fold.

“Both my grandfathers served in Korea and that was part of it. There was the history there. I’m a patriotic person, and I also looked at it was a way to pay for college,” Carroll said.

“Having said that, I also enjoyed what I did there. Our job was unique. I made a lot of friends with people from all over the country. I think it’s one of those experiences that is unique.

“What we did was very, very interesting. I got to see a lot of cool things. Looking back, I enjoyed it at the time. Did you think it was fun when you were there? Probably not, but every day was different.”

Farming, Business

Carroll grew up near Graymont in central Illinois and had the opportunity to start farming land on his mother’s side of the family around 2017 and 2018. He now raises corn and soybeans predominantly in the Graymont and Flanagan areas.

At about the time he started farming, with his agribusiness and accounting college background, he also opened Carroll Farm Business Services in Pontiac.

Operating his own tax and accounting business was not in his initial plans after graduating from ISU.

“I don’t think I ever thought of it, to be honest, but I knew I wanted to farm. I was trying to find a career in agriculture that also balanced the seasonality of farming,” he said.

He found that farming and business balance.

“It coincides well timing-wise. We just finished harvest last week, and it’s time where I can switch gears a little bit and come back to the office. We’re fairly busy at the office from mid-November, all the way through April 15. Timing-wise, that’s a good balance with fieldwork,” he said.

“We do about 600 or 700 tax returns. Predominantly all are farmers or landowners of active farms. We try to specialize just in agriculture. We have farms mostly in central Illinois, but also some in southern, western and northern Illinois.

“We’re probably a little different than a lot of other tax and accounting firms. We meet with almost all of our clients. There’s a lot of consulting that goes along with it, especially year-end tax planning.

“We’ll start appointments shortly after harvest, reviewing their tax position, where they’re at and what they might expect to owe, what type of strategies and options are available to either lower or, in some circumstances, increase their taxable income. We also do retirement planning and consulting strategies.

“We’re not the typical kind of firm where you drop your information off and we spit back a tax return. We’re more of a consulting and more in-depth business, trying to lead you in the right direction, trying to understand what we’re putting on the paper and saying, hey, next year, maybe we should try doing something a little differently.”

Family

He and his wife, Ashley, have two children, ages 9 and 6.