‘I Just Want to Know’

Randy Kiehl raised his son as best he could. He taught him all the rules he could think of: that a proper pair of pants doesn’t droop down over your rear end, that if you run off with somebody’s car, you’re going to wash and wax every firetruck in town.

He slapped every uniform he could find on him -- the marching band, the basketball team -- and taught him how to fire a gun.

The boy grew up straight and narrow, called men “sir” and opened doors for women. Just like his dad, he found a uniform of his own: He joined the U.S. Army right out of high school to learn computers. He wound up in Iraq, proud as can be, but his company took a wrong turn behind enemy lines.

Now Spc. James Michael Kiehl, 22, is gone -- “duty status whereabouts unknown,” as the Army puts it.

This morning, after another graveyard shift at a factory, Randy Kiehl will drive home to Comfort, past the rocky crags, the bluebonnets and the bobcats of Texas Hill Country, past the flea market and the Dairy Queen where James worked one summer making banana splits. He will sink into a blue desk chair under a portrait of John Wayne, light a Winston cigarette and continue his desperate quest to learn his son’s fate.

And he will tell himself that his son is dead.

If he says it enough, he figures, maybe it won’t come true.

On March 23, U.S. troops encountered fierce resistance while marching toward Baghdad, and soldiers from a support unit based at Ft. Bliss, Texas, were told to hook up with an infantry division near Nasiriyah. About three dozen soldiers from the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company -- including James Kiehl and Pfc. Jessica Lynch -- apparently made a wrong turn and were ambushed, according to military officials.

Two were killed. Five were captured. Eight, like James and Lynch, were classified as missing.

Kiehl still holds out hope that his son is safe, hiding in a ditch or surviving in captivity. Those hopes were strengthened Tuesday night, when word came from U.S. officials in Qatar that Lynch, a supply clerk from Palestine, W.Va., was rescued from an Iraqi hospital.

At this point, though, it’s easier to accept the worst than hope for the best.

“I’m ready. Ready for the news,” says Kiehl, 47, folding his large arms behind his head. “And I’m starting to relax. He was an excellent son.”

Kiehl lights another cigarette -- he had quit for a year before the ambush -- and corrects himself.

“He is an excellent son.”

*

Randy Kiehl does not like the word “dead.” Like the military brass, he prefers “killed in action” or, even more removed, “KIA.” He’s back at his computer, staring at fuzzy Internet images of soldiers who are definitely dead, and his heart is breaking, because he thinks one of them is James.

The 17-inch monitor is part of a desktop computer that James, a computer whiz, fine-tuned before he left Comfort (pop. 1,400) three years ago for basic training. It is the centerpiece of an informal “command post” Kiehl has set up in his home to search for information.

The ambush remains a great mystery of this young war, and Kiehl has many questions: If the soldiers were carrying global-positioning system devices, how could they get lost? Why would the 507th -- cooks, welders and, like James, computer specialists -- be sent into enemy territory with no protection? Why were they, as military officials have suggested, ferrying ammunition when there are other soldiers in Iraq trained to do just that?

“How in the hell did they make a wrong turn?” Kiehl asks. “And what in the living name of God are computer geeks doing out there?”

He has spoken to politicians, the International Committee of the Red Cross and military officials from Ft. Bliss to Washington. He knows the number for the White House switchboard from memory now. But the answers have been slow in coming, so Kiehl finds himself on an amateur detective hunt.

After the ambush, Iraqi forces took video of at least four dead U.S. soldiers, then gave the tape to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network. Largely out of respect for the families of the soldiers, American television networks did not show the video.

Kiehl, using a search engine, found the video on the Internet -- on an adult Web site.

Shaking his head with dismay as he scrolls past references to “naughty girls” and “Southern amateur girls,” he finds the link he’s looking for toward the bottom of the screen: “One reason Iraq should be bombed.”

The video lasts three minutes, 54 seconds, and shows Iraqi soldiers, in a concrete bunker, poking and prodding the bodies.

“Those two are not my son,” Kiehl says, hitting the pause button to freeze images of young men with what appear to be bullet wounds in their heads.

Kiehl stops on a third frame.

“The nose is too wide on this one,” he says.

Then there is the young man in a corner of the bunker, wearing camouflage pants and no shirt, the one whose face is partially obscured but whose gaping wounds are clearly visible. Kiehl won’t show the video to his wife, Janie -- James’ stepmother -- but he has watched it a hundred times now. The body is lanky. James is 6-foot-8.

“This is the one. This is the one that I think is my son,” Kiehl says. “I’ve been looking at the belly hair, the chest hair, whatever you want to call it. I know it sounds funny. But it looks right.”

He pauses over a frame of the video as an Iraqi soldier flips the body over.

“OK, now look at the face,” he says. “Now, look at that picture.”

He points to a wall next to him. There are 19 photographs of James on the wall: James playing his trumpet, standing at attention and wearing the white gloves of the marching band; James wearing his No. 80 football uniform, his No. 40 gold basketball uniform, standing with his teammates for a photo commemorating a district championship.

It’s the photograph of James in his Army uniform, though, that he’s pointing to. It looks like a match, and there’s no longer any reason to dance around it.

“I would be very surprised if it’s not him,” Kiehl says. “It weighs me down pretty heavy. No parent wants to get that last word. No parent does. But I can’t hold my breath forever. I just want to know.”

*

The answer may come soon. U.S. officials have discovered four bodies in southern Iraq, and a forensic team is en route to determine whether they are the remains of American soldiers, Marines or Iraqi troops. Eleven more bodies were discovered at the hospital where Lynch was rescued, military officials said Wednesday, and some are believed to be Americans.

Until he hears something, Kiehl wants to talk war.

Some relatives of soldiers captured or killed in Iraq have voiced concerns about whether this is a just war, about whether President Bush exhausted his options before attacking.

Kiehl has no such reservations.

James Kiehl’s wife, Jill, who is living with her parents in Iowa while her husband is overseas, is due to deliver the couple’s first child in May. It’s a boy. James phoned home after a sonogram to report that “this apple has a stem.” He will be named Nathaniel Ethan Kiehl.

“James called before he left for the war,” Kiehl says. “He said, ‘Dad, I’m not going to raise my son in fear of terrorism. And the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s regime is the first step.’ This was out of the mouth of a 22-year-old. That’s damn brave. I was proud of him.”

Instead of raising questions about the war, the images of dead soldiers -- and accusations that Iraqi troops are posing as civilians, setting off suicide bombs and shooting at Iraqi residents trying to flee the fighting -- have only hardened Kiehl’s resolve.

“Some friends have asked me how I can still be supportive of our president,” he says. “But if James was killed, knowing he was doing his job to fight terrorism is enough for me. Saddam Hussein and his regime are like a cancer.”

He places both palms on his desk with an air of authority.

“Eliminated. Eradicated. That’s what needs to happen,” he says. “There is no subtle way of putting it.”

It’s tough talk, and it helps. Kiehl, who served in the Army in the 1970s, was a strict father. That’s how he’s always shown his love for his family, and he figures that’s not going to stop now. (James Kiehl’s mother, Carol Howland, lives in Arizona.)

“I want to see him walk through the door so I can give him hell for causing all this aggravation,” Kiehl says. “I’m going to ask him: Do you see what we went through? How could you get lost?”

When James was safe, Kiehl spent his days looking to the future, to retirement from the baked-goods factory where he works, to grandchildren, to the piney-woods acreage he’s got waiting for him in east Texas.

Now that James is missing, Kiehl spends his days thinking about the past, piecing together a eulogy that may be premature.

He remembers the time James rejected a Dodge he had bought him, though the family didn’t have much money, because it was a “grandpa car.” He remembers that he continued calling James “munchkin” even after the boy grew a foot during high school. He remembers the three backboards that James broke once he gleefully discovered he could dunk.

“I was doing pretty good until now,” Kiehl says, holding back his tears with his fists balled to his face. “See, now the monster is loose.”

The wind is blowing hard outside, though the Texas sky is as blue as deep water. The spaniels, Duke and Callie, are barking in the backyard.

Kiehl rises from his desk to let them inside.

“Hurry up and come home, son,” he says to no one in particular, shuffling toward the back door.

“Dad’s getting tired.”