From hell of Haiti into
the arms of her son

News reunites mom with Brooklyn Marine

By LESLIE CASIMIR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Amid the turmoil and bloodshed of Haiti, Marine Cpl. Harry Milbin had a tearful reunion yesterday with the mother he hasn't seen since leaving the country 11 years ago.
Milbin was among the 400 Marines sent to rescue Haiti from chaos and was guarding Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport yesterday when a woman flashing a picture of him talked her way into the airport.

And when she saw her camouflage-clad son standing on the runway, she couldn't speak, couldn't move and tears just poured from her eyes.

"Don't cry, don't cry," said Milbin in Creole, touching her face and her hair. "I'm here, nothing is going to happen to you."

"I can't believe you are here," said his beaming mother, Josette Dinis.

Dozens of Marines in full combat gear - and big smiles on their faces - stopped to watch the two hugging and kissing.

The last time Dinis, 54, saw her son was when she took him to the same airport in 1993 and said goodbye to him. She sent him to live with his father in Flatbush, Brooklyn, because she couldn't afford to raise him.

For the past several years, Milbin, 28, has supported her, sending $100 a month for expenses and $500 a year for rent.

"I don't know what state I would be in if it wasn't for him," said an ecstatic Dinis.

The two have been kept apart by finances and bureaucracy. Dinis couldn't get to America, not even for his wedding. And she's missed the birth of her three grandchildren.

Milbin couldn't afford the trip to Haiti.

"I never had enough money to try to come here," said Milbin, who is scheduled to be deployed to Iraq in September. "But I had been saving and was planning to come before September."

Milbin's mother, an unemployed ice cream and soda vendor, had been cowering in her cement block house in the impoverished Carrefour district for the last few days as bullets whizzed through the streets. "I couldn't sleep at night, you didn't know if a bullet was going to fly through the window," she said.

Like a good son , Milbin called his mother when he got to Haiti, but she was afraid to leave the house for the dangerous trip to the airport.

So the Daily News contacted Dinis and arranged to take her to him.

When she ventured outside, she found her gravel street strewn with burned-out cars.

At the airport, Milbin showed his mother the trappings of a Marine: his bulletproof vest, his rifle.

"I'll pray for you," she told him.

She remembers her boy - "Claudy" to her - always had military ambitions.

"Since he was a little boy playing with toy guns in the yard, he would tell me he wanted to join the U.S. Army," said Dinis. "And I couldn't discourage him. If he loves it, I can't tell him no."

Originally March 3, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-148398c.html


Sempers,

Roger