Mom looking ahead

Valerie Bernard is thinking forward to the day her daughter, Jenny Collins, a combat nurse, comes home.

Collins, 26, is with the U.S. Army 86th Combat Support Hospital, which is a unit of the 101st Airborne from Fort Campbell, Ky., stationed in northern Kuwait.

Bernard received an e-mail from Collins Thursday and she seemed OK, Bernard said.

Bernard said she was doing OK, too. “Some days are better than others.”

The Jay woman said she is interested in the news, but she finds if she watches less, it’s better for her. So she limits it.

She is handling her daughter being in the war the same as she handles widowhood. Her husband, Pete, died a few years ago.

“I say a lot of prayers for Jenny, the troops and the world,” Bernard said. “I have support … I try to keep busy and take a day at a time. I’m trying to be forward thinking.”

Collins’ four-year hitch is up late spring. Bernard is thinking of the time when her daughter comes home, and they look for a job for Jenny as a critical care nurse.

“I’m just trying to think about forward things — about doing some wallpapering and painting,” she said. “I’m trying to be positive.”

— Donna M. Perry
Farmington
All or nothing

Constant worry aside, Holly Chapdelaine is “doing all right”.

The University of Maine at Farmington junior from Massachusetts has found that online chatrooms, like Yahoo’s Marinepride, help her cope with the fact that her big brother, Matt, is currently stationed in the Persian Gulf as a lance corporal in the Marine Corps.

The chatrooms give her a chance to express her fears and worries with other family members who are going through the same thing. They help her realize that she is not alone.

“It’s great to have people around the country to talk and share with,” Chapdelaine said. “We’re all in this together.”

Chapdelaine, who is getting married in August of 2004, the same month her brother is expected to be done serving, has recently begun to understand the strength of the sacrifice her 23-year-old brother is making. She is prouder than ever.

“I feel like I’m just beginning to grasp the magnitude of what people like my brother are doing for this country,” she said. “To believe so strongly in something that they are willing to give everything. That is how they are trained, all or nothing. Wow!”

–Samantha DePoy

Wilton

Shining through

Eric Goodrow called his sister last week.

“I just wanted to make sure I was still shining my boots right,” Goodrow said. He is a police officer in Livermore Falls, Jay and Rumford.

His older sister by 16 months, Elizabeth, 23, taught him to shine his boots. She is a helicopter technician in a medical evacuation unit with the U.S. Army stationed in Fort Hood in Texas.

The family got the news recently that she would be shipping out to Kuwait.

His sister is concerned about what’s going on over there, Goodrow said.

His mother, Joan Goodrow, was upset when she learned her daughter was to be deployed to Iraq, he said. He’s helping her cope with it.

“It really hasn’t sunk in with me yet,” Eric Goodrow said.

— Donna M. Perry

Paris

Reaching back home

Susan Heaward is reaching out to her friends in Maine for support these days.

Her son Scott Heaward is serving with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, Bravo Company, bracing for urban combat somewhere in Iraq.

She doesn’t know where he is. The last letter she got from him, on March 29, the day the war with Iraq started, was dated March 9.

“I haven’t received anything since,” said Heaward, a resident of Palm Bay, Fla.

Heaward is originally from Paris and lived many years in the Oxford Hills area. Her friends in Maine are helping her hold it together, she said.

“It’s tough. You watch the news, and you hate what you’re seeing, but you can’t pull yourself away from it,” Heaward said.

Her son is a 26-year-old airborne ranger who has served six years in the infantry.

“He’s extremely strong and very strong-willed, and he tells me not to worry for him or his guys,” she said. “He tells me we need to make our prayers for those we will be killing.”

Scott Heaward was deployed Feb. 28 from his base in Fort Campbell, Ky., and spent weeks in Kuwait, doing extensive training, before the war began.

His e-mails then were short and brief. Now she figures she probably won’t hear from him at all, as the climactic battle for control of the capital city of Baghdad nears.

“I feel so bad for all the mothers and wives.”

— Gail Geraghty