thedrifter
12-25-06, 08:22 AM
Deployments dim Christmas lights
December 25,2006
ANNE CLARK
DAILY NEWS CORRESPONDENT
daily news staff
It was a promising beginning: a Marine in dress blues on one knee, asking his girlfriend to marry him. It was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve 2004, and as she said yes, the sharp colored lights of the Las Vegas strip winked at them from the valley below. From this vantage point, the city looks silent, tranquil even; but move in closer and you’ll be swept up in its hot, loud pulse.
The Marine and his girlfriend married there a few weeks later, in the Little Chapel of Stained Glass.
Like the distant view of the city, their Christmas this year looks normal from outside a wintry night’s window. They’ll have the tree and the party and the family gathered close. Inside, though, is the pain of a pending deployment and the stress of making holiday memories to cling to in the tough gray time to come. He will leave for Iraq in a few months.
Cpl. Marshall Terrin, 20, and his wife Chelsea are together this Christmas; other military families will spend this holiday without someone to hang the tree topper or carry the kids, one under each arm, to the room where presents wait. They’ll miss the mom who holds the video camera as the wrapping paper is torn off, or the dad who hoists the turkey out of the oven. Most of all, military families are keenly aware that in a season most associated with togetherness, when one is away at war, Christmas is something to be endured.
A new, temporary normal
Cpl. Shane Suzuki, 25, watched his wife leave for Iraq in June. A video taken on that day shows Army Spc. Amanda Solitario sitting on the floor of her barracks room, wearing an olive T-shirt and shorts, draping necklaces around her toddler, a sunny blonde girl they named Annabelle. On the video, the child is wobbling with the excitement of dressing up, but Solitario’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and she moves with the weight of goodbye against her chest.
Annabelle will be 2 in March, old enough to be aware of Christmas and the season’s magic.
“I want her know this isn’t normal, that next year Mommy will be home,” Suzuki said. “There will be three of us, and it’ll be good.”
He met his wife in 2004, at the military’s school for combat correspondents at Fort Meade, Md. To get her attention, he wrote a sample news story in class about how he’d asked her out and how she’d said yes. Solitario then accepted for real, and they married a few months later.
She met his family for the first time in Christmas 2004, when they traveled to Washington state. To welcome her into the family, they gave her an ornament of a man and woman fishing, with the words “she’s a keeper” on the bottom. That Christmas is the only one they’ve had together.
Last year, Suzuki was serving in Ramadi and managed to call home and hear the voices of his wife and baby girl. Other than the officers and staff NCOs serving them dinner, Suzuki said there wasn’t much observance of Christmas over there.
“We were too busy to take time to stop and think about the holidays,” Suzuki said. “The elections had just (happened) and there was follow-on work.”
A month later, Solitario found out that her Army reserve unit, the 210th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, would be activated and it would be her turn to go.
“‘I love you and miss you,’” she told Suzuki. “‘But when I come back, you’ll be the same.’”
Annabelle, however, has already outgrown the lopsided baby stage and is now a little girl who runs and jumps and has long hair her father pulls back with ribbons and bows.
Solitario will be home in March for two weeks of leave.
“She’s just going to want to hold Annabelle the whole time,” Suzuki said.
She is due home for good next summer. Until then, Suzuki and his daughter have to get through the holidays. They’ve already mailed her care package with gifts inside, including a clay star ornament that Annabelle painted yellow.
Santa makes it better
Even though Christmas can be challenging for a military family — carrying on as normal even though things aren’t — its rituals can sometimes be comforting. Like the notion that there is a wise old man who can see everyone and everything.
Maria Gholson, 7, may not have her daddy home, but that’s the No. 1 thing she wants for Christmas. She told Santa so at the mall a few weeks ago. Santa got misty-eyed and told the child that he’d pray for all the troops to come home safely.
“I told her that Santa would (find Daddy) and send him her love, since Santa could see him,” said Maria’s mother, Camilla Gholson. “Santa can deliver the message like he can deliver toys.”
Maria and her brother Patrick, 6, know the jolly man works miracles, because he has every Christmas, stringing snowflake lights on their house and slipping down their chimney, even when there’s a fire in it.
Typically, the family goes to Christmas Eve Mass, then the kids change into their pajamas, set out cookies and try to go to sleep. Camilla can count on several minutes of doors opening, excited chatter and little heads peeking around the corner.
Last year’s holiday was different because Maj. Steve Gholson, who left for Iraq in September with Regimental Combat Team 7, was home on leave from Kuwait. The couple surprised their children, who came home from school one day early in December to see their dad sitting in the family room.
Camilla worries that they’ll expect him this year too, and that miracle that won’t come to pass. But preparing their father’s care package may have readied the children for being without him. In the box: a book that Patrick wrote and illustrated, called “Me and My Daddy,” complete with bubble figures, a man and his child playing baseball and tooling around the work shed.
There will be other changes this Christmas, normal with the passing of time: Maria, now a big girl, will wear a new faux fur coat to church, and the siblings will stay up for the first time to watch a movie, probably “Little Drummer Boy,” on Christmas Eve. There will no longer be a kiddie gate around the tree to keep rambunctious kids and the family dog out of the presents. This year, Camilla will film the Christmas morning melee for her husband to watch later.
To keep from being lonely, she will have his parents and hers over; friends will also stop by for a turkey and blueberry pie feast.
Between the cooking and camaraderie, Camilla will be daydreaming of that time in January when Steve comes home from Anbar province.
“I can get help and get a break,” said Camilla, who teaches first- and second-graders at Johnson Primary School aboard Camp Lejeune. “There will be somebody else to pick up work when I get tired.”
The reprieve will be short-lived, though: Steve deployed from California’s Twentynine Palms, where he will be stationed for another two years — a country away from the family who loves him.
Home is where the heart is
This time of year, Melissa Tooman and her family would normally head west to her parents’ home in Hickory. But her husband, 1st Sgt. Jason Tooman, is in Iraq with 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, his second deployment in as many years. She feels closer to him by staying put.
“I wanted to stay here, let the kids have Christmas here,” said Melissa. “We have our routine. And I’m scared some of my wives will need me.”
She means the other wives in the unit. Melissa is a Key Volunteer, part of a support and message network for military spouses that’s crucial when a unit is deployed. And this deployment has been especially rough. There have been at least 30 injuries in her husband’s company alone, she said.
“You hope no one gets hurt,” Melissa said. “When it does, you’re crying right there with them.”
Several Marines from her husband’s unit are home early — at the Wounded Warriors Barracks aboard Lejeune. Over Thanksgiving, Melissa took dinner to the Marines’ parents who stayed several weeks in a local hotel.
Between her work for the unit, her job as a teacher assistant at Parkwood Elementary School and mothering her sons, Jordan, 12, and Owen, 8, Melissa has kept busy during this deployment.
So it might have been easy to skip over some Christmas traditions, like putting up the tree. But her sons wanted one this year. They’ve been struggling with the absence of their father, an affectionate man who is handy around the house.
“He’s a typical Marine,” Melissa said. “He can fix a car, wire up a stereo. He can do anything, and he would do it for anyone.” She met Jason in Myrtle Beach during bikers’ week in 1989, and he took her for a ride.
“I always knew what kind of person I wanted to marry and what I wanted him to look like,” she said. “Right when I met him, I knew.”
A few days ago, she and the boys drove Jason’s truck to a friend’s house.
“Owen lost it,” Melissa said. “He said, ‘It smells like dad in here.’”
Her oldest son said there’s nothing to look forward to this holiday season.
To try and create excitement, Melissa decided that they should open all their gifts on Christmas morning, instead of previewing some the night before.
Though they will observe the holiday in important ways — her parents will come to town, the boys will appear in their church’s Christmas play — the family will celebrate it for real in April, when Jason is home again.
Melissa will probably leave the tree up, and there will be gifts in Christmas wrap to put under it. If Jason’s wish comes true, the key to a new riding lawn mower will be among them.
“The night before he arrives, it feels like it’s Christmas Eve,” Melissa said. “I’ve been holding my breath this whole deployment.”
The long road ahead
Some military families are clinging to Christmas together, knowing that a combat deployment is soon upon them. The Terrins, the couple who became engaged in Las Vegas, are back in Nevada with his family this holiday. He’ll leave with 5th Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, in March, but that doesn’t mean Christmas will be somber. Last year, Chelsea remembers that his mother had five trees in the house, including a live, four-foot-tall tree in their bedroom. They slept with the Christmas lights plugged in, comforted by their soft white glow.
This year, as he’s been doing since childhood, Marshall will accompany his grandmother to the Nutcracker ballet. This year, he’ll proudly escort her in his dress blues.
The two were high school sweethearts, and he told her about his military career path before telling anyone else. His Christmas Eve proposal, overlooking the Vegas strip, came after he finished boot camp. She was 17 years old when they married.
“I didn’t fully understand what a deployment was and how often they’d be gone,” Chelsea said. “I had faith it would work out. It was a leap of faith.”
They were apart for the first year of their marriage, when he was in Okinawa on an unaccompanied tour. Facing another deployment, his mother will try to make this Christmas the best one ever.
“We’ll give him presents he won’t be able to use,” Chelsea said, “but I’ll try to keep a good face on it. I’m grateful to have him this year.”
By March, he’ll be part of a civil affairs group, meeting with local Iraqis and helping make reparations to those who have lost property or suffered housing damage because of the war. He’ll hand out soccer balls and candy to children, and try to win over their parents. He’s excited to go and make a difference, his wife said. Meanwhile, her mind skips ahead to this time next year, when she’ll be with her own parents and younger sisters in New Hampshire, missing him.
“It’ll be sad next year, the first Christmas he won’t be here,” Chelsea said. “It’s our holiday.”
December 25,2006
ANNE CLARK
DAILY NEWS CORRESPONDENT
daily news staff
It was a promising beginning: a Marine in dress blues on one knee, asking his girlfriend to marry him. It was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve 2004, and as she said yes, the sharp colored lights of the Las Vegas strip winked at them from the valley below. From this vantage point, the city looks silent, tranquil even; but move in closer and you’ll be swept up in its hot, loud pulse.
The Marine and his girlfriend married there a few weeks later, in the Little Chapel of Stained Glass.
Like the distant view of the city, their Christmas this year looks normal from outside a wintry night’s window. They’ll have the tree and the party and the family gathered close. Inside, though, is the pain of a pending deployment and the stress of making holiday memories to cling to in the tough gray time to come. He will leave for Iraq in a few months.
Cpl. Marshall Terrin, 20, and his wife Chelsea are together this Christmas; other military families will spend this holiday without someone to hang the tree topper or carry the kids, one under each arm, to the room where presents wait. They’ll miss the mom who holds the video camera as the wrapping paper is torn off, or the dad who hoists the turkey out of the oven. Most of all, military families are keenly aware that in a season most associated with togetherness, when one is away at war, Christmas is something to be endured.
A new, temporary normal
Cpl. Shane Suzuki, 25, watched his wife leave for Iraq in June. A video taken on that day shows Army Spc. Amanda Solitario sitting on the floor of her barracks room, wearing an olive T-shirt and shorts, draping necklaces around her toddler, a sunny blonde girl they named Annabelle. On the video, the child is wobbling with the excitement of dressing up, but Solitario’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and she moves with the weight of goodbye against her chest.
Annabelle will be 2 in March, old enough to be aware of Christmas and the season’s magic.
“I want her know this isn’t normal, that next year Mommy will be home,” Suzuki said. “There will be three of us, and it’ll be good.”
He met his wife in 2004, at the military’s school for combat correspondents at Fort Meade, Md. To get her attention, he wrote a sample news story in class about how he’d asked her out and how she’d said yes. Solitario then accepted for real, and they married a few months later.
She met his family for the first time in Christmas 2004, when they traveled to Washington state. To welcome her into the family, they gave her an ornament of a man and woman fishing, with the words “she’s a keeper” on the bottom. That Christmas is the only one they’ve had together.
Last year, Suzuki was serving in Ramadi and managed to call home and hear the voices of his wife and baby girl. Other than the officers and staff NCOs serving them dinner, Suzuki said there wasn’t much observance of Christmas over there.
“We were too busy to take time to stop and think about the holidays,” Suzuki said. “The elections had just (happened) and there was follow-on work.”
A month later, Solitario found out that her Army reserve unit, the 210th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, would be activated and it would be her turn to go.
“‘I love you and miss you,’” she told Suzuki. “‘But when I come back, you’ll be the same.’”
Annabelle, however, has already outgrown the lopsided baby stage and is now a little girl who runs and jumps and has long hair her father pulls back with ribbons and bows.
Solitario will be home in March for two weeks of leave.
“She’s just going to want to hold Annabelle the whole time,” Suzuki said.
She is due home for good next summer. Until then, Suzuki and his daughter have to get through the holidays. They’ve already mailed her care package with gifts inside, including a clay star ornament that Annabelle painted yellow.
Santa makes it better
Even though Christmas can be challenging for a military family — carrying on as normal even though things aren’t — its rituals can sometimes be comforting. Like the notion that there is a wise old man who can see everyone and everything.
Maria Gholson, 7, may not have her daddy home, but that’s the No. 1 thing she wants for Christmas. She told Santa so at the mall a few weeks ago. Santa got misty-eyed and told the child that he’d pray for all the troops to come home safely.
“I told her that Santa would (find Daddy) and send him her love, since Santa could see him,” said Maria’s mother, Camilla Gholson. “Santa can deliver the message like he can deliver toys.”
Maria and her brother Patrick, 6, know the jolly man works miracles, because he has every Christmas, stringing snowflake lights on their house and slipping down their chimney, even when there’s a fire in it.
Typically, the family goes to Christmas Eve Mass, then the kids change into their pajamas, set out cookies and try to go to sleep. Camilla can count on several minutes of doors opening, excited chatter and little heads peeking around the corner.
Last year’s holiday was different because Maj. Steve Gholson, who left for Iraq in September with Regimental Combat Team 7, was home on leave from Kuwait. The couple surprised their children, who came home from school one day early in December to see their dad sitting in the family room.
Camilla worries that they’ll expect him this year too, and that miracle that won’t come to pass. But preparing their father’s care package may have readied the children for being without him. In the box: a book that Patrick wrote and illustrated, called “Me and My Daddy,” complete with bubble figures, a man and his child playing baseball and tooling around the work shed.
There will be other changes this Christmas, normal with the passing of time: Maria, now a big girl, will wear a new faux fur coat to church, and the siblings will stay up for the first time to watch a movie, probably “Little Drummer Boy,” on Christmas Eve. There will no longer be a kiddie gate around the tree to keep rambunctious kids and the family dog out of the presents. This year, Camilla will film the Christmas morning melee for her husband to watch later.
To keep from being lonely, she will have his parents and hers over; friends will also stop by for a turkey and blueberry pie feast.
Between the cooking and camaraderie, Camilla will be daydreaming of that time in January when Steve comes home from Anbar province.
“I can get help and get a break,” said Camilla, who teaches first- and second-graders at Johnson Primary School aboard Camp Lejeune. “There will be somebody else to pick up work when I get tired.”
The reprieve will be short-lived, though: Steve deployed from California’s Twentynine Palms, where he will be stationed for another two years — a country away from the family who loves him.
Home is where the heart is
This time of year, Melissa Tooman and her family would normally head west to her parents’ home in Hickory. But her husband, 1st Sgt. Jason Tooman, is in Iraq with 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, his second deployment in as many years. She feels closer to him by staying put.
“I wanted to stay here, let the kids have Christmas here,” said Melissa. “We have our routine. And I’m scared some of my wives will need me.”
She means the other wives in the unit. Melissa is a Key Volunteer, part of a support and message network for military spouses that’s crucial when a unit is deployed. And this deployment has been especially rough. There have been at least 30 injuries in her husband’s company alone, she said.
“You hope no one gets hurt,” Melissa said. “When it does, you’re crying right there with them.”
Several Marines from her husband’s unit are home early — at the Wounded Warriors Barracks aboard Lejeune. Over Thanksgiving, Melissa took dinner to the Marines’ parents who stayed several weeks in a local hotel.
Between her work for the unit, her job as a teacher assistant at Parkwood Elementary School and mothering her sons, Jordan, 12, and Owen, 8, Melissa has kept busy during this deployment.
So it might have been easy to skip over some Christmas traditions, like putting up the tree. But her sons wanted one this year. They’ve been struggling with the absence of their father, an affectionate man who is handy around the house.
“He’s a typical Marine,” Melissa said. “He can fix a car, wire up a stereo. He can do anything, and he would do it for anyone.” She met Jason in Myrtle Beach during bikers’ week in 1989, and he took her for a ride.
“I always knew what kind of person I wanted to marry and what I wanted him to look like,” she said. “Right when I met him, I knew.”
A few days ago, she and the boys drove Jason’s truck to a friend’s house.
“Owen lost it,” Melissa said. “He said, ‘It smells like dad in here.’”
Her oldest son said there’s nothing to look forward to this holiday season.
To try and create excitement, Melissa decided that they should open all their gifts on Christmas morning, instead of previewing some the night before.
Though they will observe the holiday in important ways — her parents will come to town, the boys will appear in their church’s Christmas play — the family will celebrate it for real in April, when Jason is home again.
Melissa will probably leave the tree up, and there will be gifts in Christmas wrap to put under it. If Jason’s wish comes true, the key to a new riding lawn mower will be among them.
“The night before he arrives, it feels like it’s Christmas Eve,” Melissa said. “I’ve been holding my breath this whole deployment.”
The long road ahead
Some military families are clinging to Christmas together, knowing that a combat deployment is soon upon them. The Terrins, the couple who became engaged in Las Vegas, are back in Nevada with his family this holiday. He’ll leave with 5th Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, in March, but that doesn’t mean Christmas will be somber. Last year, Chelsea remembers that his mother had five trees in the house, including a live, four-foot-tall tree in their bedroom. They slept with the Christmas lights plugged in, comforted by their soft white glow.
This year, as he’s been doing since childhood, Marshall will accompany his grandmother to the Nutcracker ballet. This year, he’ll proudly escort her in his dress blues.
The two were high school sweethearts, and he told her about his military career path before telling anyone else. His Christmas Eve proposal, overlooking the Vegas strip, came after he finished boot camp. She was 17 years old when they married.
“I didn’t fully understand what a deployment was and how often they’d be gone,” Chelsea said. “I had faith it would work out. It was a leap of faith.”
They were apart for the first year of their marriage, when he was in Okinawa on an unaccompanied tour. Facing another deployment, his mother will try to make this Christmas the best one ever.
“We’ll give him presents he won’t be able to use,” Chelsea said, “but I’ll try to keep a good face on it. I’m grateful to have him this year.”
By March, he’ll be part of a civil affairs group, meeting with local Iraqis and helping make reparations to those who have lost property or suffered housing damage because of the war. He’ll hand out soccer balls and candy to children, and try to win over their parents. He’s excited to go and make a difference, his wife said. Meanwhile, her mind skips ahead to this time next year, when she’ll be with her own parents and younger sisters in New Hampshire, missing him.
“It’ll be sad next year, the first Christmas he won’t be here,” Chelsea said. “It’s our holiday.”