Soldier of Good Fortune Arrives in Time for Child’s Birth

As leader of a six-man Persian Gulf reconnaissance team, Cpl. Ben Jones helped lead Iraqi POWs from abandoned bunkers, scouted the enemy’s position from allied observation points on the border and got caught in the cross-fire between the two warring sides.

But for sheer drama and adventure, the 23-year-old San Juan Capistrano man said his journey home this weekend to be with his wife for the tricky delivery of their first child was “more exhausting than the whole ground war combined, honestly.”

“I’m pretty much emotionally drained,” Jones said after racing home to make the 4:30 a.m. Sunday birth of his healthy 5-pound, 5-ounce daughter at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center.

The birth marked a successful end to a weeklong effort by Jones and his wife, Denise, 25, to get him back in time for a premature delivery.

“The whole staff was so excited,” said Dr. Willard Blankenship, a Mission Hospital neonatologist who helped in the delivery. “Here’s a man who came off the sands of Saudi Arabia with his fatigues still on, everything but his (rifle).”

As recently as a few weeks ago, Denise Jones thought she could ride out her pregnancy to its completion in April. But complications arose, and tests showed the baby with a low weight, worrying her and her doctors.

“Try to hold off--we’re trying to get home as quick as we can,” she recalls her husband saying by phone two weeks ago.

“I really don’t think I’m going to make it much longer,” she told him.

So it became a race between Mother Nature and the military bureaucracy.

Jones, part of the First Reconnaissance Battalion out of Camp Pendleton, managed to get emergency leave orders with the help of his battalion commander. A recent graduate of military parachute-jumping school in Georgia, Jones also pulled a few strings with contacts from there to get a seat among 70 other personnel on a C-5 cargo plane out of Saudi Arabia.

The plane, loaded with helicopters and other equipment, left Saudi Arabia on Friday, with stops in Spain and Maine en route to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. In the meantime, Denise’s complications grew worse and doctors had ordered her to come to the hospital no later than 2 p.m. Saturday.

At about 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Jones made it, straight from the air base. Eight hours later, he had a baby daughter, Brit Ashley Jones..

“Even with all the complications,” Denise Jones said, “I knew when he walked in that door that everything was going to be perfect. Nothing could go wrong.”

Said Cpl. Jones: “The baby was in a rush to get into the world, but at the last minute held off until I got there. I can’t begin to tell you what that felt like.”