Sweethearts separated by war wait, hope
Last week while the rest of us were zipping around town picking up last-minute gifts or mailing holiday cards, 23-year-old Rhiannon Haverkamp and her family were locked in 27 hours of agony.
Haverkamp, a receptionist at Rockwood Clinic in the Sacred Heart Doctor’s Building in Spokane, checked her e-mail at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. There she found her first news of the explosion at Mosul.
Her husband, Chad Haverkamp, serves there as a U.S. Army sergeant and team leader. He’s a member of Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion 24th Infantry Division from Fort Lewis.
The e-mail said everyone in his unit had been accounted for, but there were injuries and the Army couldn’t release any names yet.
Then the minutes and hours slowly began to tick by.
Colleagues started voicing their concern: “How are you doing?” they asked, and “What are you doing here? You should be at home.”
So Rhiannon left her work and drove to the office of her stepmother, a Spokane life coach named Deanna Davis. There in the Tapio Center, they prayed together, and Davis called the family pastor, the Rev. Virgil Thompson at Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Thompson quickly sent out an e-mail to congregation members, asking for their prayers.
As the day drug on, Haverkamp distracted herself by spending time with a girlfriend. They exchanged Christmas gifts and shopped for an ornament at NorthTown Mall. The girlfriend spent the night, and that evening the two young women stayed awake, telling tales of the days when Chad and Rhiannon met.
They were both 17 and seniors at Mead High School. “He is a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American, very handsome man,” she says proudly.
After high school, they both attended community college in Spokane, and soon after they were engaged, Chad joined the Army. They were married in 2001. Together they loved to water-ski, wakeboard, and ride their horses, an Arab named Sheik and a quarter-horse named Shawnee.
For her birthday, right before he left for Iraq, Chad surprised her with red roses, balloons and a horseshoe-shaped diamond ring.
All Tuesday night and into the early morning hours, Rhiannon stayed awake, checking her e-mail and CNN for updates and telling stories. Finally at 4 a.m. she dozed briefly.
Wednesday morning dawned bleak. There was still no word.
“It’s a horrible, horrible thing, waiting,” Davis said.
Finally at 11 a.m. Wednesday, 27 hours after the first news arrived, Haverkamp received a telephone call from her father-in-law. He’d heard an announcement on CNN: All family members of the dead and wounded had been notified. Families who had not received a call had been spared.
“It was a huge relief,” she said. “It was something I knew in my heart, but until you actually hear it, you don’t believe it. I, of course, started to cry, and it was the best Christmas gift I could have had.”
This holiday week too many American families feared for their loved ones serving in Iraq. This year’s Christmas wishes for peace on earth were shattered by explosions and bloodshed. While many military families struggled simply to stay strong and supportive of their loved ones, other Americans wondered: How did we get to this place, and when will it end?
For Rhiannon Haverkamp, the year 2005 looms ahead as another year of war. Her husband left for Iraq in October expecting to serve there a year to 18 months. Though he was originally scheduled to leave the military this January, last summer the Army pushed that date back to January 2006.
Now Chad Haverkamp tells his young wife he’s determined not to leave Iraq until his entire company can come home.
“I’m scared a lot,” she says, “but I am so incredibly proud of him for what he’s doing and so incredibly grateful for what he and the rest of the military are doing for us and for the sacrifices they’ve made.”
Last Monday morning, the day before the explosion, Rhiannon received a telephone call from her husband. He told her he can see the needs of the Iraqi people reflected in their eyes.
He encountered a little Iraqi girl on the streets of Mosul recently, and he offered her a Rice Krispie treat. The girl didn’t know what it was, but the blue foil wrapper intrigued her. While her mother yelled at her to come in off the street, the girl paused to take the treat from his hand. Then she scampered away as the mother looked into the young American’s eyes and smiled. “It was pretty amazing,” he told his wife later.
Already Rhiannon Haverkamp has learned techniques for surviving the terror of this war. She’s found prayer allows her to turn her worries over to God so that she can get through her days. She’s started a journal where she writes messages for her husband to read when he returns.
In e-mails and phone calls they dream of the days to come when they can buy a house and ride horses again together, when Chad can return home to work in his stepdad’s landscaping business and finish school.
Says Rhiannon, “When we talk about those things, it’s not if he comes home, but when he comes home.”