Wives drop in on ‘Bosslift’

DONA ANA, N.M. – Three North Idaho women found an unexpected way of visiting their husbands – who are in a dusty corner of Fort Bliss here preparing for a year’s duty in Iraq – when they hitched a ride on Operation Bosslift.

A national group that arranged for employers of Idaho National Guard and Reserve members to fly down to Fort Bliss on Monday picked up a little bit of intrigue with their C-130 transports.

“I told them I was his boss,” Kim Broesch of Coeur d’Alene said of her husband and stay-at-home dad, Jerry.

Kim Broesch was at first denied a spot on Bosslift when she revealed she was visiting a spouse, but organizers relented. The company she works for, North Idaho Dialysis, has a worker who has been deployed to active duty, making Broesch’s trip legit.

She was just asked to be quiet about who she was visiting. Even with the official sanction, Broesch was worried she’d get kicked off the plane and remained almost completely mum in a small group of seven people waiting in the dark and cold for a C-130 military transport plane to drop out of the darkness above Coeur d’Alene before dawn Monday.

Down in Lewiston, Cheryl Parham, a truck driver, clambered aboard the big, noisy, prop-driven cargo plane when it arrived after sunup. The company she works for, Eagle Transfer, is small. The boss, Millie McGarry, had surgery 10 days ago and couldn’t make the trip. Parham got the seat on Bosslift, instead.

Her husband, Ken, another Eagle driver, just happened to be deployed here. Wink, wink.

“I guess you have to go even though you know he’d rather see me than you,” Eagle Transfer co-owner Gayle McGarry told her.

And then there is Jenna Weatherly. The medical office student at Lewis-Clark State College showed up at the Lewiston airport Monday morning on assignment to snap a photo of school president Dean Thomas boarding the C-130 for the LCSC student newspaper.

Turns out there was a vacancy, and before Weatherly could say “There’s noplace like Bliss. There’s noplace like Bliss” and click the heels of her running shoes, she was bundled onto the plane with no change of clothing, somebody else popping for the $75 fare and the school president herselfpromising to run interference if anybody gave Weatherly trouble for missed classes.

Weatherly’s husband, Nick, himself an LCSC student, is among the Idaho Guard soldiers here.

By late afternoon, the three women had landed in El Paso, Texas, where the heat beat down like a hammer. Soon they were holding hands with surprised husbands, who had been rounded up by equally surprised senior officers.

Spc. Nick Weatherly, in fact, was shaken awake by his platoon leader, Sgt. Mike Betty. “I was told he had to be at the sergeant major’s office by 4 o’clock. He thought he was in trouble and had some kind of a detail – like picking up garbage,” Betty said.

Instead, Weatherby, still cradling his M4 rifle, found himself grinning at the most unexpected sight of his wife, Jenna, in a sprawling group of bosses and journalists. Jenna was still packing her camera bag.

In a crowd of soldiers running drills and civilians walking and gawking, Nick and Jenna, Kim and Jerry, Cheryl and Ken held hands and walked in a private world of smiles.

Kim Boesch said she and Jerry haven’t seen each other for “89 days. Not that I’m counting.”

In his absence, their youngest child has had surgery and can hear for the first time. Jerry leaves long messages on the telephone so the child will know his voice. Then there was the pack of wild dogs – believed to be coyote mixes – that denned near the house and threatened the kids. The cops came and sprayed tear gas all around, Kim Boesch said. If Jerry were home, he could shoot them, she said.

“For me, when he goes over there (to Iraq), I want to know he’s going to be safe,” Kim Broesch said. She spoke as various officers led nearly 100 Idaho and eastern Oregon civilians on a tour of the Dona Ana FOB – or forward operating base – as gunfire and smoke grenades went off to illustrate various training exercises.

“People always ask me how I’d doing, and I always say fine,” Kim Broesch said. “I have to be fine, because I don’t have the option of breaking down and crying. I have to take care of things. When he comes home I can be a sobbing mass, but that’s a year and half away.”