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thedrifter
03-12-07, 08:41 AM
9th ESB counting the hours until time to come home

By Megan McCloskey, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Tuesday, March 13, 2007

His replacement was almost there.

“I’ll carry his stuff from the [plane] to this office personally,” Support Company commander Capt. Dev Spradlin joked Monday morning, the day the new guy was flying in.

“I’ll tell him, ‘This is your chair, sit here. This is your computer.’”

For Spradlin and the rest of 9th Engineer Support Battalion, the countdown for home is on in earnest now that their replacements have arrived at Camp Taqaddum, Iraq.

The Marines and sailors from Okinawa have about two weeks left before completing their seven-month Iraq deployment, and a few spoke by phone this week to Stars and Stripes about their anticipation of going home.

“I try not to think about it too much. The more you think about it, the longer the days take to go by,” Staff Sgt. Joshua Ladd said. “But that’s extremely hard because we have our walking countdown: the chaplain.”

Lt. Alan Snyder, 9th ESB’s chaplain, has been keeping track of the time left pretty much since day one at Taqaddum, using the bigger dates — Thanksgiving, Christmas — as milestones. And there were a couple of personal time markers, too.

Like when there were 30 days left until he got kicked out his office next to the commanding officer so the incoming battalion’s commander could have a desk — something he happily announced, said Lt. Col. Mark Menotti, the 9th ESB’s commanding officer. With 8th Engineer Support Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., already at Taqaddum, there are almost twice as many Marines in the same amount of space.

“We’ve been going through that dance of sharing the same desk and the same computers,” said Maj. Patrick Hittle, the battalion’s executive officer.

“No one is allowed to lean back or get comfortable,” Ladd joked about working with extra Marines in his already cramped, hallway-like office.

The pace is still hectic for 9th ESB as they help the new battalion learn the ropes.

“There can be no operational pause in the support that we’re providing to all the units we normally support,” Hittle said.

Menotti said he’s always reminding the Marines to stay focused.

“I know it’s human to think about the reunion, but I need their mind/body in the game when they are doing turnover missions — especially when going outside the wire,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They cannot be distracted.”

Ladd said they’ve been told to maintain a professional attitude.

“Everyone is extremely happy and relieved — and trying to keep it under wraps,” he laughed. “Walking around the camp saying ‘neener, neener, neener’ is not professional.”

They’re trying to be particularly sensitive to their replacements. Still, they can’t help but think — at least a little — about what they’ll do when they get home.

Spradlin has an infant daughter he’s never seen.

“I can’t wait. I cannot wait,” he said. “I waited nine months for her to come out and seven more months to see her.”

Hittle, too, is looking forward to family time. “I’ll ignore the phone for a while, I think,” he said. “No e-mail and no phone.”

Ladd said they’ve been told to maintain a professional attitude.

“Everyone is extremely happy and relieved — and trying to keep it under wraps,” he laughed. “Walking around the camp saying ‘neener, neener, neener’ is not professional.”

They’re trying to be particularly sensitive to their replacements. Still, they can’t help but think — at least a little — about what they’ll do when they get home.

Spradlin has an infant daughter he’s never seen.

“I can’t wait. I cannot wait,” he said. “I waited nine months for her to come out and seven more months to see her.”

Hittle, too, is looking forward to family time.

“I’ll ignore the phone for a while, I think,” he said. “No e-mail and no phone.”

Instead, he said, he’ll help out with his sons’ Scout activities and fullfil a Valentine’s Day card promise to his 9- and 7-year-olds that he would take them on a bike ride.

“I want to go surfing, too,” Hittle said. “There’s a lot of time to think out there with no one bugging you.”

Lance Cpl. Adam Krol, who already is looking for ways to get back to Iraq, said he isn’t all that thrilled to get back on Okinawa, but he is “looking forward to going out on the town and hitting up the steakhouses.”

Ladd wants a re-do on a pre-deployment trip to Okuma he and his wife were on before a typhoon interrupted it. And, he said, he needs to satisfy a major craving for Taco Bell.

thedrifter
03-12-07, 08:47 AM
Anticipation kicks into high gear for families on Okinawa


By Megan McCloskey, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Tuesday, March 13, 2007

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — Christmas was two -and-half months ago, but at the Spradlin house the tree is still up.

The holiday, the presents and 7-month-old Alexandra are waiting for Capt. Dev Spradlin to get back from Iraq.

“That way he can still be there for her first Christmas,” his wife Sarah Spradlin said about the couple’s first child, who was born after the captain deployed. “We’ll have Christmas in March.”

The Marines of 9th Engineer Support Battalion are almost back from their seven-month deployment to Camp Taqaddum, Iraq, and their spouses and families are getting ready for them to be home again.

When the month began last week it marked the beginning of the final countdown.

“It’s March! It’s March!” Amy Hittle, wife of the battalion’s executive officer, Maj. Patrick Hittle, said she thought when the calendar finally left February behind.

“The anticipation has hit,” Spradlin said.

Sky Ladd, who is married to Staff Sgt. Joshua Ladd, said she tries not to think about the homecoming because she gets so excited. She said she has a shoebox full of notes of “things I want to remember to tell him.”

Ladd kicked off the month with “the official house clean,” she said. “I’ve let that slide for the past seven months.”

The upcoming reunion will bring adjustments to routines, so room can be made again for the returning family member.

“Mommy has forgotten how to cook,” Hittle said to her two boys. “That will be the challenge.”

Dinner has been eaten out or has been meals such as scrambled eggs or oatmeal.

“I’ll have to cook a real meal, serve it on a plate … at the dining room table,” she said, nodding to the table, which these days is more homework station than eating place with stacks of papers, a blue truck and a green stuffed frog. “We’ve kind of had our own life these last seven months.”

She rearranged the furniture and did “a little shopping while he was gone,” she said, pointing out a hutch, a painting and couple of small cabinets.

The Hittle dog, too, will have to adjust. Daisy, a black lab, will be kicked back to the floor from the bed.

Megan Duesterhaus, who is a personal trainer and a group fitness instructor, said since her husband, 1st Lt. Greg Duesterhaus, left her days have started at 5 a.m. and sometimes don’t end until 9 p.m.

“I opened certain time frames up because I didn’t have some one waiting for me at home,” she said. “It did just occur to me that I may need to scale back now.”

Duesterhaus said the deployment taught her independence and self-reliance.

“But I could have learned the same lessons in two months and not seven,” she said.

Spradlin, who drove herself to the hospital to give birth and then home afterwards, has saved 54 pages of e-mails from her husband on a Word document that she plans on showing her daughter someday.

The Marine captain said she is counting the days until she can introduce the two.

Miming handing the baby to him, she laughed: “It’s going to be like, ‘Hi, honey, here’s your daughter.’”