After a 22-Year Career, an Exchange Hero Will Retire in a Room Named in His Honor

Many Exchange retirement ceremonies have taken place in the Brian Sonntag Room, an auditorium on the first floor of Dallas headquarters.

On Aug. 31, Sonntag’s own retirement ceremony will happen in the room named in his honor.

From March 2004 to March 2005, Sonntag was deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was assigned to a tactical field Exchange (TFE) in Basra, Iraq, about an hour north of the Kuwait border, and spent his first month or so driving around Kuwait to camps picking up merchandise for the TFE.

On June 28, 2004, the TFE closed. Sonntag was leaving Basra for Kuwait when an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated by the convoy he was riding in. He suffered injuries to his knee, upper leg, arms, neck and eyes.

“I spent the night and a good part of the next day in a British field hospital,” says Sonntag, now chief regional business officer for Central Region. “Then somebody from the Army escorted us back down to Kuwait, where I spent a couple days recovering.”

He was back to work in less than a week, serving those who serve by July 3 at the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait.

In 2006, then-Exchange Commander Air Force Maj. Gen. Bill Essex awarded Sonntag the Defense of Freedom Medal, the civilian equivalent of the Purple Heart. In 2009, Human Resources renamed several rooms at HQ in honor of Exchange associates who were injured during deployments and received the medal. What had been the Dallas Room became the Brian Sonntag Room.

“Sometimes I get emails asking what a class is about and I have to reply, ‘I’m not teaching that class. It’s just in a room named after me’,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘That’s really cool—how did you get a room?’ I give them the short version of what happened. I don’t talk about it much, but when I hear people talking about safety, I always mention what happened to me and to wear appropriate PPE for the task at hand. To retire out of there is an honor. It’s a huge honor to have a room named after me.”

But the deployment, the injuries and the room are just parts of a 22-year that’s coming to an end this week.

The early years

Sonntag served in the Army from 1991 to 2001, joining shortly after graduating high school. His first assignment was with the 7^th Medical Command in Vilseck, Germany, serving Soldiers and family members in the Vilseck and Grafenwoehr community. For seven months beginning in 1997, he was deployed to Bosnia with the 2^nd Infantry Division. He also served in the 1^st Infantry, 3^rd Infantry, 24^th Infantry and 1^st Cavalry divisions before his honorable discharge at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos) in 2001.

He returned to Vilseck to be close to his daughter and began looking for work.

“I dropped my resume off at the civilian personnel office in Vilseck, Germany, and they said, ‘While you’re waiting for us to call you for a job, why don’t you go down the hall to AAFES HR and apply for a job that provides SOFA status so you can stay in Germany,” Sonntag says. “You needed SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement] status in Germany to stay in the country. So I went down and applied for a job at the Exchange and was hired within a couple of weeks. I still joke about how I’m still waiting for that call from the civilian personnel office.”

Sonntag started as a Hardlines associate at the Vilseck Exchange, which may seem like a big change from being a medic. But he says the two have more in common than you might think.

“It was like night and day, from being a medic in the Army, starting IVs and taking care of patients, to joining the Exchange,” he says. “But the similarity is that you’re still taking care of people. I was always told that I had a good bedside manner as a medic. It’s a different task, but you’re still taking care of customers, you’re still taking care of the people you work with, and when you get into management, you’re taking care of your team. There’s no blood and guts on the retail side, though.”

One September day shortly after Sonntag started, he went to the Vilseck food court for lunch and overheard a couple of Soldiers talking about how they couldn’t believe that someone would fly jet planes into a building. He wondered what they were talking about. After eating his lunch, he went back to work.

“There was nobody on the sales floor,” he says. “All the associates were gone. I thought, ‘Man, am I the only one working?’ So I went to the back office area and saw everyone in the break room. I thought to myself, ‘So this is how y’all treat the new guy?’ But then I looked at the TV and saw what they were watching on the news. So one of my first memories at the Exchange was working during 9/11.”

Within months, Sonntag moved into management. He’d heard other associates talking about a housing allowance, so he asked his manager, Charlotte Ramsey, when it kicked in.

“She said, ‘Oh, no, you have to be in management and on a transportation agreement’,” he says. “I asked, ‘How do you do that?’ and she told me what I needed to do. I was a hard worker, and I proved myself to be a good associate, I assume this is why she selected me for the Retail Management Academy. After graduating the six-month course, in January 2002, I became the Grafenwoehr furniture store manager.”

The rewards of deployment

After about a year in the Grafenwoehr position, Sonntag volunteered to deploy as part of an inventory team for Kuwait. He enjoyed the deployment, so after it was over, he volunteered to deploy again for 12 months.

“There are so many rewards,” he says. “There’s the personal reward for going down there and taking care of the Soldiers. There were financial rewards for being in Kuwait because we were offered overtime and bonuses. Going into Iraq, there were larger bonuses for being in a more dangerous environment.”

There was another, more personal reward for Sonntag: His brother, who was serving in the Army, was in Kuwait at the same time and he got to spend some time with him before he went to Iraq. That was after Sonntag was injured in 2004, a fact that he had kept quiet from his family.

“I didn’t tell my family because I didn’t want them to worry,” Sonntag says. “My brother was the only one I told about the incident. I said, ‘Make sure you’re wearing all your protective gear. I don’t want to tell you this to scare you, but this happened to me.’ A couple of days later, he went to his assignment in Iraq. It wasn’t until my brother returned 12 months later that I told my family.

As he was leaving Kuwait, Sonntag learned that he’d been assigned to the Katterbach Exchange in Germany, where he was main store manager. In 2006, he received his first stateside assignment, at the Altus AFB Exchange in southwest Oklahoma. From there, he became operations manager and then sales & merchandise manager at Fort Sill (Altus is part of the Fort Sill Exchange).

In 2015, while he was still at Fort Sill, he deployed again, this time to Afghanistan.

Thanksgiving in Afghanistan

Sonntag says it took about 10 years after his first deployment experience to psych himself for another one. But when he was in Afghanistan, so was a familiar face.

“My brother was deployed to Bagram Air Base with the 101^st Airborne as Gen. [James] McConville’s communications NCO.” “I was excited to learn I would also be assigned to Bagram and get to spend the first six months of my deployment with him.”

He and his brother were even able to share a Thanksgiving meal in Afghanistan in 2015.

“He was in his own compound and we were in our little Exchange village,” Sonntag says. “I’d worry about my brother when I saw his Blackhawk helicopter leave for a mission, but knew when he returned he would call and say, ‘Hey, let’s get together for dinner.’ We spent time together whenever we had an opportunity which made the deployment much more tolerable. It was kind of surreal to think about being in the most dangerous country in the world, eating Thanksgiving dinner with my little brother.”

After about six months, Sonntag’s brother went home, and Sonntag was assigned to Kandahar, where he was store manager. Six months later, he was back at Fort Sill. Shortly after he returned, he was sent to Okinawa to be an Exchange retail business manager.

Across the Pacific—and back

“Okinawa was an enjoyable experience. Not only was it a beautiful Island with amazing food and friendly people, but it also provided an opportunity to serve Marines and Navy personnel.

Sonntag had been in Okinawa about 2½ years when Marla Smith Randolph, then a regional vice president in the Pacific Region, called and said that there was a GM position open and asked if he was interested.  “I jumped on the opportunity.”

He became GM at the Korea Southern Exchange, which also supported all four service branches. He didn’t know how to speak Korean, which was occasionally a challenge, but he says he got a lot of support from the team.

Sonntag spent close to 5 years in PAC,  2½ years in Okinawa and two in South Korea.”

“Everywhere I’ve been stationed, there were really good people,” he says. “The best decision I ever made was to join the Exchange and make it my career.”

While Sonntag was overseas, Randolph was senior vice president for Central Region (she is currently SVP for Europe/Southwest Asia/Africa). She brought Sonntag back to the States, where his job provides him with a fresh look at the Exchange.

“I had the opportunity to work with all the Exchange directorates,” he says. When you’re in the field, you’re where the rubber meets the road, taking care of customers and making sure the merchandise is coming in. To be on this side of the fence, you get to see the inner workings of the Exchange.”

Family Serving Family

Along with having a younger brother in the Army, an older brother in the Marines, and serving himself, Sonntag is also a military son; his father served in Vietnam—and, in a way, did some work for the Exchange.

“There had been Sonntags that worked at the Exchange before me,” he says. “So I was often asked if my dad worked for the Exchange. I’d say, ‘Well, in a roundabout way. When my dad was drafted, as soon as he landed in Vietnam, they asked for volunteers. The first couple of months he was in Vietnam, he drove Exchange merchandise from forward operating base to forward operating base.’”

Sonntag has, almost literally, been around the world during his Exchange and Army careers. It was a journey he didn’t expect.

“Growing up in Southern California, I went to Mexico on fishing trips but never traveled much further away than that. Had it not been for the Army and the Exchange, I wouldn’t have seen so much of the world,” he says, “In the Army, I was stationed Germany for the majority of my time in service. I deployed to Bosnia in ’97, so I did see the Balkans, but never saw Pac until I joined the Exchange. While stationed in Okinawa, I had an opportunity to go to Darwin, Australia, to oversee a Marine TFE inventory. We landed in the Philippines and then in northern Australia. It was an amazing experience.

Sonntag says that after retirement, he plans to move to Kentucky to be closer to his family. “I’m just going to spend some quality time with my parents and my grandma and family that I have there,” he says. “And I’ll travel a lot. I’ll come back to Altus often because I have family here, too.

“It’s been an honor throughout my career to take care of Soldiers and Airmen,” he says. “Giving them that home away from home in an overseas environment. It’s a privilege to take care of the people who fight for our freedom.”

If you would like to wish Brian Sonntag well on his retirement journey, please comment on this story.