How do you pack when you're leaving for Iraq?
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Captain Adam Lulay |
Major Geoff Vallee |
Sgt. Mike Barker |
1st Lt. Sabrina Vasquez |
SALEM, Ore. -- Adam Lulay spent his last night in Oregon with his pregnant wife, Megan, whose original due date of Jan. 22 is now early February.
Even that short delay is too much: Lulay, a captain in the Oregon Army National Guard unit mobilizing for service in Iraq, had hoped he would see the baby.
“I’m having a little girl,” said Lulay (at left). “I’d love to be able to see her and hold her at least one time before I head out the door.”
The soldiers from the Charlie Company, 7th Battalion, and 158th Aviation mobilized last week to deploy to Iraq under the command of Geoffrey G. Vallee.
On Saturday morning, 50 members of the Oregon Guard Unit departed from a Salem airfield in 12 UH-60 Black Hawks. Friends and family gathered at 6:30 a.m. and wait for the fog to lift. Over 80 other members of the unit will take a commercial flight to their destination at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
While in Iraq, this unit will perform airborne medical evacuation and patient transport missions -- or as CW2 Brent Peter’s three-year-old daughter (at right) puts it, “to help people.”
Friends, families and the state of Oregon will miss the company, which performs rescue missions on Mount Hood to Mount Rainier.
The men and women will also miss their state and the people in it -- or in Lulay's case, the people coming into it.
While married soldiers have to overcome the obstacles of leaving spouses or children, single soldiers have the chore of locating a new home for their belongings.
“Being single, I don’t want to have a house with nobody in it, with all my stuff in it,” said Major Vallee (at right), who moved three surfboards, two bikes, a washer and a dryer into another soldier's home.
Sgt. Mike Barber (at left) decided his belongings would go into a storage unit. In his last week at home, Barber took time to ski at Black Butte and made a point to be with his family.
“There’s nothing like hugging somebody or talking to them in person,” said Barber.
1st Lt. Sabrina Vasquez stayed close to home with her mother, father and brother. Vasquez spent the last week eating at all her favorite restaurants and experienced a few last glimpses of the Northwest.
“We got to see Crater Lake covered in snow and just pretty things like that, that are last minute reminders of where we’re from,” said Vasquez (at left) about her last flight over Oregon.
After moving, waiting and spending quality time with loved ones, these soldiers are ready to enter their helicopters and fly away.
“It’s been a long journey just getting to this point. We know it's been coming so we’ve been preparing, but it's sad and it's hard,” said Meaghan Peters, CW2 Brent Peter’s wife. “So we’re here to watch him take off and wave our flags and show our support.”
With the fog finally lifted, Meaghan Peters watched her husband’s Black Hawk fly through the patch of blue, which just appeared in the sky.
Cali Bagby works as a freelance print and photojournalist in Eugene, Ore. Her work has been published in the Washington Post and the Eugene Weekly. Bagby graduated from the School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Oregon.
