Friday, March 21, 2008

Father, daughter reunite at camp Taji

Army Capt. Carrie Hoppes, left, stands with her parents, Ret. Lt. Col. Jeff Witherel and his wife Linda at their Lake Ridge home on Friday, March 7. Witherel and Hoppes served together in Iraq.

Jeff Witherel and Carrie Witherel-Hoppes never dreamed they’d spend Christmas together in Iraq.

That’s exactly what the father and daughter did last year while stationed together at Camp Taji.

Jeff, 60, has been a part of the military community for 37 years. He retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel after 23 years on active duty and has spent the last 14 years as contractor with Project Manager Land Warrior. He currently serves as the program’s operations chief on Fort Belvoir.

“Land Warrior is an integrated modular system that is built for the dismounted Soldier,” Jeff explained during an interview at the Lake Ridge home he shares with his wife, Linda. “It incorporates radio, computer and (global positioning system) connected to a display.”

Carrie, 26, is an Army captain and physical therapist assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and lives with her husband, Bradley, in Laurel, Md. She served in Iraq from May to February.

“It was busy,” she said with a laugh. “We saw everybody. We saw the folks who stocked supplies in the Post Exchange. We saw the Ugandan gate guards who provided security for our facility. We saw the aviation units. We opened up our services for everybody.”

While her husband and daughter were in Iraq, Linda kept busy with both her job and volunteer work. The family communicated daily via e-mail and cell phone.

“I kept myself busy with care packages,” she added.

Although some of his colleagues were being sent to Iraq, Jeff never thought he would make the trip.

“They really needed me back here because we had dealings with the Pentagon, dealings with Congress, all those kinds of things I work with. So, they really didn’t need me over there,” he said.

That changed last fall when Jeff’s boss asked for volunteers to go overseas from December to January. He quickly volunteered, but decided to keep his plans secret from Carrie.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Jeff said. “I was just going to walk into her clinic.”

Jeff said one of Carrie’s least favorite songs is “Shout.” He planned on getting a recording of the tune and blasting it out on a boom box as he entered her treatment facility.

“I went to lunch one day and the colonel said ‘are you excited about your dad coming over in a couple of months,’” Carrie said as she picked up the story. “I said, ‘my dad’s coming over in a couple of months?’ The colonel said, ‘maybe I wasn’t supposed to say anything.’”
The duo was about four miles apart on post and ate dinner together every night while Jeff was there.

“To be so far from home and to have my Dad there was a really special treat,” said Carrie. Bradley serves as a pilot with the Pennsylvania National Guard. His unit returned from an 18-month deployment shortly before Carrie was sent overseas.

“We had about five and one-half months together before this assignment came up for me,” she said. “So, in our first two and one-half years of marriage, we’ve been gone for most of it. My first anniversary I celebrated with my parents. The second anniversary he celebrated with my parents, so we’re shooting to be together this year.”

While in Iraq, Carrie said she saw numerous Soldiers with lower back, shoulder and ankle pain.

“There were lots of injuries that, if we weren’t there, they would have been evacuated out,” she said. “My position was to keep Soldiers in the fight, to provide services up front.”

Carrie estimated she and her fellow physical therapists prevented between 80 and 100 evacuations.

Some of the Soldiers she took care of nicknamed her the “pretzel lady” due to the positions she put their bodies in during physical therapy sessions.

She was even proposed to by an Iraqi Solider whose back she treated.

“He said his back felt so much better that I could be his second wife,” she said.

Both Carrie and Jeff praised Chaplain (Capt.) Patrick Moore, who held a Christmas Eve candlelight service at the camp. The Soldiers also enjoyed
a barbecue, flag football and live Christmas trees.

“The warehouse we used for medical supplies, the girls who worked there decorated it,” said Carrie. “We had real Christmas trees that were donated by a group in the United States. They were real pine. They smelled like pine; they looked like Christmas trees. It was real nice.”
“He was very energetic,” said Jeff of Moore. “He transformed an abandoned Iraqi building on post into a coffee shop. He got the espresso machine. Everybody started sending him the coffee and syrup.”

Jeff was at Taji for about a month before he traveled to Tikrit and then home; but the brief visit gave them a bit of renown in the camp.
“People would come up to me in the PX and say ‘are you the girl whose Dad is here?’” Carrie said. “I’d say, ‘yeah, that’s me.’”