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Friday, Jan. 02, 2009

Family’s eldest son deploying with memories of younger brother’s sacrifice in Iraq

Phyllis Nathan hadn’t stopped crying for her second son before the tears started falling for her oldest.

A year and a half after 22-year-old Jason Nathan was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, his 26-year-old brother Joe Jr. deploys next week.

Their mother tried to find a way out for her oldest son, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

“I wouldn’t have felt right not going because everyone else is going over there,” Joe Nathan Jr. said New Year’s Eve as the family gathered at his mother’s house in Macon. “I’m excited to go. I’ve never been.”

The Nathans are second-generation military. The young men’s father spent 22 years in the Army before retiring. Joe Nathan Sr. served two tours in Iraq and was in Mosul when the war began in 2003.

The elder Nathan, who now lives in Indianapolis, said he would have preferred his sons stay in college, but a football injury kept Joe Jr. from playing at Fort Valley State University and led him to enlist in the Air Force. Jason followed in his big brother’s footsteps in 2004 and was named airman of the year at his home base in Lakenheath, England.

“Jason was fearful and he went anyway,” Joe Sr. said. “I could see the worry in Jason’s eyes, but Joe’s hard to read. I support his decision and he has my blessing to go. I understand he’s committed to his contract, and I know as long as he honors his contract, God will bless him for it.”

Joe Jr. spent four years in active military service before joining the reserves in 2007. A trip to Bulgaria to train with that country’s military was his only deployment before he flies to Iraq with the 482nd Maintenance Group at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Fla.

“I signed this contract and I knew I’d have to go over there sometime,” he said.

The airman will be gone for 114 days and miss the birth of his fourth child next month. If it’s a boy, he and his wife, Christina, plan to name him Jason in honor of the baby’s late uncle.

“I really wanted (Joe Jr.) to be here for the baby,” Christina Nathan said. “He’s my coach. He keeps me calm.”

The expectant father appears poised and ready for the trip as his family prepares to say goodbye. He had hoped to slip off without a lot of fanfare, but his parents and siblings plan a big send-off with the Patriot Guard tonight at Cheddar’s.

As his grandmother was busy making yellow bows for the front yard, Phyllis Nathan was putting a new American flag on the pole outside her house. Flying the flag every day is a tradition she started long before her son was killed.

A gold star service flag hangs in one front window of the home in honor of Jason but she plans to get a blue star service flag to fly for Joe Jr.

“I know I don’t talk to you about it much, but I’m still proud of you, Joe,” she told her son before joining him on the couch for a tearful hug.

The mother and son work together at the post office on Rocky Creek Road. Phyllis Nathan beams with pride when her co-workers tell her how much they enjoy working with her oldest of four children.

While Joe Jr. is more independent, she admits Jason was a “mama’s boy” who still tugs at her heart daily.

A larger-than-life portrait of the smiling airman first class hangs crooked in the living room. The picture was taken the day Jason arrived in Iraq. She doesn’t want anyone to rehang it. She finds comfort in straightening it continually. It’s her way of making contact with Jason.

Her 20-year-old daughter finds it hard to talk about her brothers’ service. Teenage brother Nigel keeps Jason’s blanket from Iraq on his bed. Other belongings are piled behind closed doors in the old dining room until Phyllis can bring herself to go through the boxes. Jason’s medals and commendations have replaced the china in her cabinet.

While Joe Jr.’s deployment brings back a flood of memories, there is one she would like to forget — the feeling in her stomach that told her Jason wouldn’t come back from Iraq. She’s fighting those feelings again as Joe Jr. prepares to leave.

Her ex-husband had a similar premonition about Jason, who promised to return for his father’s wedding in 2007. “A little voice kept telling me he wasn’t going to be there. I tried not to listen, but it was God warning me,” Joe Sr. said. “He died 28 days before the wedding.”

But Dad is confident his oldest son will come home.

Phyllis can’t bear to return to work until she knows Joe Jr. has arrived safely in the war-torn country.

While she spent hours walking Macon Mall during Jason’s deployment, this time she plans to spend her spare time spoiling her grandchildren in their father’s absence.

She says she’s asked God to see her through.

“That’s the only thing that carries us through, is our faith,” Joe Sr. said.

Jason’s faith got him through the lonely hours at Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Tikrit, where he spent hours reading his Bible. A comrade retrieved that Bible from the wreckage of the ambushed Humvee in which Jason was riding.

Inside the front cover, Jason wrote: “God first, family second. The Lord is with me through the good and the bad times.”

Beneath the inscription is a row of 33 hash marks — one for each trip outside the wired confines of their base in the old palace. The last entry came June 23, 2007.

For Christina, her brother-in-law’s death brings a strange peace about her husband.

“I know (Joe’s) going to be fine. I feel like Jason is always watching over him,” she said. “He watches over all of us.”