The hardest goodbyes

CASEY RESSLER

Frontiersman Valley Life editor

In the coming weeks, there will be many tearful goodbyes from parents, as their children get ready to head hundreds - or thousands - of miles away to college.

For those parents, there is a comfort in knowing that their children are coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas break. They'll probably come home for a few months the following summer. At the very worst, those students are just a phone call away from their parents.

There is little comfort for hundreds of other tearful goodbyes that have been taking place, however. Those parents aren't looking forward to seeing their children during a semester break. Their children are heading to Iraq, in harm's way, and they don't know when they'll next get the opportunity to hug their son or daughter.

Wendy Caverly knows that feeling well. The Valley resident just said goodbye to her son, Tyler Jorgensen, as he deployed with the 172nd Stryker Brigade on Sunday.

"As the date got closer, every little report I heard on the news about Iraq has taken my breath away," Caverly said. "I know they aren't after our soldiers in a combat way, but there is still a lot of danger over there. It makes me very nervous."

Last Friday, the family gathered for one last hurrah. Caverly said watching her son say goodbye to his 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Alexia, was particularly tough.

"It was hard on everyone, but saying goodbye to his daughter was really emotional for me," Jorgensen said.

Jorgensen, a 2000 Palmer High School graduate, is in the Army, and has been stationed at Fort Wainwright. Originally, he didn't think he'd be headed to the Middle East.

"He said, 'I'm glad up here in Alaska, because we'll never go over to Iraq. They'll keep us here in case of things like North Korea,'" Caverly said. "But then he got his orders."

The Stryker Brigade Combat Team deployed Sunday, and it was a record-setting day for the military.

The weekend deployment was the largest Alaska deployment since Vietnam, with approximately 3,800 soldiers leaving the state for Iraq. The brigade was created in Alaska two years ago. For the last 18 months, training has included hand-to-hand combat, weapons and medical training, protecting convoys, urban warfare and border patrols.

"You are an impressive sight," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., commanding general of U.S. Army Alaska, told the brigade before it deployed Sunday. "You are fit, strong, confident, worthy of your families' and nation's pride, worthy of your commanders' confidence and worthy of your enemies' fears."

The unit the 172nd is replacing has made headlines during its deployment for discovering weapons caches and detaining insurgents. That doesn't exactly subside the fears of the parents of the deployed soldiers.

"Tyler is not in the infantry, he's in communications, but it still makes you very nervous as a parent," Caverly said.

Parents aren't the only people concerned during deployments. Young wives and husbands also have a hard time saying goodbye to their spouses, with no return date.

Valley resident Sarah Burdan was reunited with her husband, David, in March, after he was shipped out to the Middle East for more than a year. In March, she said the days often felt like weeks, which felt like years.

"I never thought of myself as a 'soldier's wife,' because it wasn't like he was a full-time soldier. He is in the reserves," she said. "I never understood the agony the wives went through, until I went through it myself. There were a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of tears.

"It's been a real journey for both of us, David and me," she said. "I've taken it one day at a time, and my relationship with God has really deepened. He has seen us through this."