Cherry Valley

Update: The auction was held as scheduled on Tuesday, Jan. 12. According to Dave Lamouret, nobody showed so NBT Bank bought back the property and presumably will market it for sale. NBT did not respond to a request for information about the auction.

This is the day Dave Lamouret has long dreaded. NBT Bank will auction off farmland that his family has owned for generations.

The financial troubles that ensnared Lamouret and led to the foreclosure of his land are not simple. But the essential and outrageous truth is this: If he hadn't served with the Army National Guard in Afghanistan, he wouldn't be losing his land.

"It's the loss of a legacy," said Lamouret, 52. "I won't have the land to give to my kids."

This story starts in 1983, when Lamouret first enlisted with the National Guard, went to basic training and discovered that he loved the military. He would have made it a full-time career if not for ...

The land.

That's the 360 acres he inherited in Cherry Valley, northeast of Cooperstown. Part of the property had been purchased by his father's family in 1910, while the rest was bought by his maternal forebears decades earlier.

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It's not easy to walk away from roots that deep. So Lamouret committed to a life of dairy farming and part-time military service. Eventually pushed out of full-time farming by economics, he would become a teacher at Cherry Valley-Springfield Central School.

So far, so good. He was economically sound.

Then Sgt. Maj. Lamouret was sent to Afghanistan. He spent much of 2007 and all of 2008 away from home.

He was charged with training members of the fledgling Afghan army, work that wore at his middle-aged body. Eventually, he could barely walk, he said. He returned home for a hip replacement.

Lamouret requested a medical military retirement, which meant the end of his military paycheck. And while he waited for the Army to make its decision, he was hit by an economic storm. His wife had been laid off. The farm was losing money after his time away.

The waves washed over his head. He fell behind on his bills.

"I just couldn't keep up anymore," Lamouret told me, "and I stopped making payments to NBT."

Of his many bills — including child support and the mortgage on his home — paying back the farmland loan usually came last, and he fell further behind as the bank tacked on late fees and penalties. (Lamouret had taken out a loan on the land to pay his first wife's share of the farm when they divorced.)

Here's the good news: Lamouret's bad economic time is over.

The Army granted his early medical retirement and began supplementing his income. His wife is working again. He is able to make his monthly payments.

The flip side, though, is that NBT Bank was unforgiving, Lamouret says. The bank refused to work with him after he fell behind.

"They just had no compassion," Lamouret said. "And now that I have the income to make the payments, they still refuse to help."

The bank foreclosed in November, affecting land that surrounds Lamouret's house, including the wood furnace that warms it. The auction is scheduled for 11 a.m. Tuesday morning.

What does NBT say? The Norwich-based bank declined to discuss Lamouret's situation and sent me this mealy-mouthed statement:

"As a community bank, we take pride in supporting our customers facing economic hardships and work with them to arrive at the best outcomes for all parties involved in any financial matter."

Lamouret laughed at that. How is foreclosure the "best" option for him?

Yes, there are laws designed to protect service members from foreclosure and financial problems. But as Eric Durr, spokesman for the New York National Guard, noted, those laws only apply during active duty.

Financial problems that happen once members of the military return to civilian life are exempted from the law — even if they're related to service-related injuries.

"It's all a big circle that I got sucked into," Lamouret said as he walked over his farm's frozen fields on a recent afternoon. "I'm stuck in the center and can't get to the outside."

Still, Lamouret would be the first to note that he's relatively lucky.

Nearly 7,000 Americans died serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and many more were seriously wounded. And there are certainly examples of veterans who were treated worse upon return — neglected at Walter Reed Medical Center, for example, or denied meaningful work.

But Lamouret's situation is part of the same national disgrace. We ask the men and women of our military to serve and sacrifice, to put their lives at risk and on hold. We thank them for their service.

Then we shrug at their struggles.

cchurchill@timesunion.com • 518-454-5442 • @chris_churchill