A husband lost

WINDOW ROCK, April 3, 2008

It was 6 a.m. in Grafenwoehr, Germany. It was too early for a social call so when a knock on the door came, Jacqueline Todacheene assumed the obvious: Her neighbors probably locked themselves out of their house again.

Instead, out in the morning dark stood two men, a chaplain and a soldier. They were most likely looking for someone else. They had the wrong door.

She greeted them. Then the chaplain addressed her directly, "Mrs. Todacheene ..."

"That's when I knew they had the right door," Todacheene said.

She immediately turned away from her visitors.

"I was hoping maybe he was just hurt. Whatever it was, I didn't want to hear it."

That was the first time her world fell apart. When that lingering fear, which Todacheene had pushed to the back of her mind with fierce denial, came true.

The day before, on April 6, 2004, Todacheene's husband, Sgt. Lee Todacheene, 29, had been killed in action in Balad, Iraq.

They said he died in a hostile attack, a mortar blast during combat. One of the two - the chaplain or the soldier - told her that he died instantly, if that was any consolation.

It wasn't.

 

"I kept thinking about our boys," she said last Thursday during a visit to Window Rock.

She spoke in short sentences between bouts of delicate weeping. "I didn't want to hear it."

She asked repeatedly if they were sure it was Lee Todacheene. The same Todacheene who grew up in Lukachukai, Ariz.

Lee, who used music and an unmatched wit to woo his future wife in the halls of Navajo Preparatory School in Farmington. Who married his high school sweetheart on June 9, 1995, just five months before the birth of their second child.

Shaken, Jacqueline walked around the house, picking up random items. She tried to find a reasonable excuse, something to help her deny the news. It couldn't have been possible, she thought. Just the day before ...

The day before, she recalled, Lee unexpectedly logged into the Internet chat program the couple used to communicate daily via video connection.

He logged in earlier than they had scheduled and left a message saying that he had some unexpected free time and waited to see if she would log in. He said he might not have free time to talk later, as they had planned.

Accepting the truth

When Lee died, it was about 9 p.m. in Iraq. In Germany, where Jacqueline was waiting for him to log in to his chat account, it was about 7 p.m. Back home on the Navajo Nation, it was about 11 a.m.

That next day, pacing around her house, Jacqueline still had trouble accepting the news. It was difficult to bear, even when the couple's oldest son, 9-year-old Cody Lane, came out of his room to find out what was going on.

It took months for the family to accept the truth, to truly accept it.

To realize that Jacqueline's dream of running into Lee some day, when he would explain that he was hurt so badly and was so ashamed of his scars and injuries that he faked his death, was only that, a dream.

The news that day ended Jacqueline's lifelong romance with the man she had originally tried to set up with a friend.

He wasn't interested in the friend. Instead, Lee began buzzing around Jacqueline. He would wait for her every morning in the dorm lobby so they could walk to the cafeteria together for breakfast.

He borrowed her cassette tape of the album "Chicago 19," which featured the song "You're Not Alone."

"He used that as an excuse," Jacqueline said. "I kept asking for it and he'd say 'I already gave it back to you.'"

He returned the cassette months later when they were dating.

Although she played coy for a while, Jacqueline's friends liked Lee immediately.

They said he was respectful. They said he was intense, a serious look always on his face. But that was, apparently, just his normal expression.

"I always asked him what was wrong," Jacqueline said. "He'd say, 'Nothing.' He always looked so serious, like something was wrong. It's just the way he was."

Lee enlisted in the Navy after graduating from Navajo Prep in 1992. When his stint was over, he signed up for the National Guard.

Military life suited him and in 1997 he enlisted in the Army, moving his family to Fort Benning, Ga.

He was a combat medic. She was a soldier's wife who stood by her husband.

She stood by him during his three-month tour in Kuwait in 1999 and when he moved the family into an old two-story brick house with wooden floors in Colorado Springs a year later.

A soldier's spouse has one obvious worry in the back of her mind but during those years, at least for Jacqueline, it seemed an unlikely notion that the country would soon be at war.

Still, as a combat medic, Lee was always prepared. In every house they occupied, he kept a packed bag in the closet nearest the front door in case his unit was called out.

In 2003, just as the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Todacheenes moved to Germany. It was a move that she hoped would stave off the call, which came that September.

"I still kept thinking that maybe the war would end before he would have to leave," she said.

Lee left for Iraq in February, just before Valentine's Day.

"I kept denying that any of this was going to happen," she said.

Friendly fire

The second time Jacqueline Todacheene's world fell apart came in a phone call in November 2005. A casualty officer said her husband, Lee, was a casualty of friendly fire. The mortar that killed him was one of their own.

This news made her loss worse. Much worse.

"I cried. I told them that they can't do this to us again," she said. "I was dealing with it when they said it was hostile action. But now I was angry. They killed my husband. It was an accident and we didn't even get an apology. I still don't have answers."

A report filed by military investigators states that a noncommissioned officer in Todacheene's unit reported its location using incorrect coordinates. The officer reported that the unit was 1,000 yards away from where the battalion had targeted its mortars. The unit was actually 100 yards away.

The report states that the mistake was entirely human error. The tracking system was working and capable of giving the accurate coordinates. The officer also had other tools at his disposal to accurately give his unit's location. The rounds were fired correctly.

Todacheene wants more answers. Perhaps the name of the officer who misreported her husband's location and what became of him following that disastrous day.

How could such a mistake even be made? Why, of all the people in his unit, did Lee seem to be the only one who did not run for cover when the mistake was finally reported over the airwaves in desperate yells?

In an August 2005 e-mail message, David Hubner, commander of Todacheene's battalion, said the officer who misreported "was crushed personally and professionally by the event ... he will never be the same."

That was almost three years ago.

Carrying on

Jacqueline has since moved back to Cove, Ariz., with her sons, Cody, now 13, and Dylan Lee, 12.

With the help of family and friends, she was able to build the house that she and Lee had always talked about building.

She is nearing the completion of her second associate's degree, this one in health information technology at San Juan College. She already has a medical administrative assistant degree from the school.

Her interest in the medical field "has everything to do with my husband," she said.

The war that killed her husband is now one of the biggest political issues in the country. For Todacheene, a soldier's widow, the issue was always black and white.

"I was always against the war. First because, that was my husband going out there," she said. "Now, it's because no one is going to win. We can't turn back. If we leave (Iraq) now people are going to lose. If we stay people are going to lose."