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Saturday, February 21, 2004
Waiting: The hard part
By MARK I. JOHNSON | News-Journal Staff Writer
NEW SMYRNA BEACH — For most of the past year, Carole Meier has endured many sleepless nights waiting for her 21-year-old daughter Adrianne Meier, stationed with the U.S. Army in Iraq, to return to the states.
“She is tired and homesick,” Carole Meier said.
Meanwhile, on an Army base in Texas, Jeremy Tedeschi is waiting as well. Within days, the 18-year-old U.S. Army signalman expects to be climbing aboard a transport plane heading east to the Persian Gulf.
“He is looking forward to it, but I am scared to death,” Tedeschi’s grandmother, Sandy, said.
Meier said her daughter enlisted in the military after graduating from high school in June 2001. While she never tried to dissuade her, the elder Meier — the product of a military family herself — said she now wishes the two had talked more about Adrianne’s choice.
“She didn’t need to do it for college,” she said. “I already had that taken care of. I think she was interested in doing something positive.”
But within months of enlisting, the military police specialist was deployed to Kuwait in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
After returning to Fort Riley, Kan., in November 2002, Adrianne spent a few months stateside before being re-deployed to Iraq in April 2003.
“She has spent two-and-a-half years in the service and she has been (in the Gulf) for more than a year and a half of it,” Meier said.
Throughout much of her deployment, Meier said her daughter has maintained an upbeat attitude despite blistering heat, the loss of friends to enemy fire, having to sleep with flea collars around her ankles because of bugs, and numerous other hardships.
It wasn’t until a recent letter, sent just weeks before she was slated to rotate back to the United States, that frustration really surfaced.
“For the past two days, I’ve been sitting in a guard tower. Boring. The shifts are 12 hours long and you are not suppose to write, read, or do anything except watch your position,” Adrianne wrote in a Jan. 12 letter to her mother. “They’ve got to be crazy if they think anyone in their right mind can sit in a guard tower for 12 hours doing nothing. ... I think I’ll be one of the most patient people in the world after getting out of the Army (in) two years, five months and 24 days. I’m not counting or anything.”
Meier believes her daughter has grown up. But if she had it to do over, as a mother, she is not sure she could stay silent about her daughter’s choice of employment.
“As time has progressed, I have felt worse and worse that my beautiful 21-year-old daughter has had to endure those conditions,” Meier said. “But she is really proud of being in the military, even with all her frustrations.”
While the Meiers anxiously await Adrianne’s return to the states in March, Jeremy Tedeschi says not knowing when his unit will be shipping out from Fort Hood, Texas, leaves his future somewhat up in the air. But this is the career he has chosen.
“I got in to go. It is the nation’s time of need and this is something I have always wanted to do, so I figured it was the best time to go,” the New Smyrna Beach resident said recently by telephone. “When I was 7, I saw the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (in Washington, D.C.). Since then, I wanted to join the Army.”
It is a decision his grandmother is proud of, even if it means she cries a lot thinking about her grandson being in harm’s way.
“The military was something he did on his own,” Sandy Tedeschi said. “But going in the Army is one thing. Going to war is another.”
Her daughter, Margaret — Jeremy’s mother — feels much the same way.
“I hope things do not get worse,” Margaret Tedeschi said. “I am proud of him, but I wish it were not in these times. But you can’t choose when you go into the Army what you are going to do or where you are going to go. And if he did not go to Iraq, the people there could not come home.”
The teenager said being in the service has been one of the hardest things he has ever done — both physically and mentally — and it has left its mark.
“The military has helped me grow up,” he said. “I am a lot more disciplined and mature. I went from being a kid one day and two months later, after basic training, I was a man.”
Jeremy believes he is ready to face whatever challenges may arise in Iraq.
“This is something that the job requires,” he said. “I am ready to go.”
Did You Know?
There are about 200,000 United States military personnel serving in Middle East theater of war.
In the Army, there are 79,682 officers, 11,918 of whom are women. The service has 418,585 enlisted personnel, 63,305 of whom are female.
In all branches of the service, there are about 213,252 women in uniform.
SOURCE: Department of Defense