On Home Front, Families Fight Battle of Their Own

Colleen Phillips fights back tears as she slices through the tiny butter-cream firefighter on her son’s birthday cake. Lisa Deucore, eight months pregnant, thinks about giving birth alone a few weeks from now.

These small private moments loom large in the lives of the wives and children left behind by the largest deployment of U.S. citizen soldiers to combat roles since the Korean War.

More than 900 members of the National Guard from California left for Iraq seven weeks ago, part of a plan to replace up to 40% of the active-duty soldiers with National Guard and Reserve troops. They will be gone at least a year, but their families already count the days and the milestones that pass with a bittersweet regularity.

Connor Phillips turned 6 Sunday and, as he did last year and the year before, he wanted a firefighter on his birthday cake. Red-faced, his skinny arms awhirl, he cavorted inside an inflatable bounce house on the lawn. Firefighters from Engine 94, just down the way from his Lakewood house, dropped by to let him climb aboard their rig for a few minutes. With his father, Staff Sgt. Kevin Phillips, 42, a Long Beach parks policeman, Connor has been a frequent visitor to local firehouses.

Two weeks ago, Connor’s brother, Joshua, 10, strode to the plate at his Little League baseball game. He hadn’t shown much hitting promise yet. Colleen, 40, searched for some encouragement. “I shouted, ‘Do it for your dad!’ ” she recalled. “He hit it so far, so fast.”

The wish that her husband could have been there to see it remained unspoken.

“They never warn you about what it’s really like,” Phillips said. “You become a single mom. You either get humbled, if you’ve been one before, or you just don’t know what to do with it. You’ve got to have hugs and kisses. I mean, you’ve got to have all that and when you don’t get it, it’s very hard.”

Harder still, added Elsa Versteeg, is “when my daughter asks, ‘Is that where Daddy’s at?’ whenever she sees anything on TV. That’s the hardest thing, because I don’t want to say he’s over there.”

Versteeg, 25, whose husband, Jake, 23, traded a fencing job for combat duty, drove from Riverside to join Phillips at Connor’s birthday party. Patricia Gaskill, whose husband, Mike, 38, was searching for a job when he was called up, drove in from Fullerton. Since their husbands were activated, the three women have come together in an informal support group. Their husbands are all attached to the 1st Battalion, 185th Armored Regiment, headquartered in San Bernardino.

While their children frolicked, the mothers tried to be stoical. Gaskill, 39, toyed with a duplicate set of her husband’s dog tags, which have not left her neck since he left for Iraq. When the children swarmed inside for birthday cake, she spoke of his letters and telephone calls.

“He told the youngest one not to grow up. And the other one, he just said to be strong,” Gaskill said. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she spoke. “He said to be strong and just to do your best.

“For us, the hardest part is we have to wait for him to call us,” Gaskill said. “We can’t call him. You know, somebody is at work, you can call them at work and say, ‘Hey, I heard this happened down the street. Are you OK?’ When they’re there, you can’t. You don’t have a phone number to call and see if everything is all right or just to say, ‘I miss you,’ or whatever.”

The letters Gaskill gets are proof of life, but they’re out of date from the moment they’re posted. “You have to wait for their letter to get to you while two weeks go by,” Gaskill said. “And then the letter finally gets to you and you’re like, ‘OK, this was two weeks ago and he was OK. How about today?’ ”

The California soldiers are split among three desolate desert camps along the main supply route between Baghdad and Kuwait. One of the camps, Convoy Support Center Scania, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, was described by a visitor as having “all the ambience of a landfill.”

In letters and e-mails, the soldiers say camp conditions are bleak but tolerable.

Though the National Guard troops tend to be older and more settled into domestic life, many saw active duty when they were younger. Sgt. Sean Murphy, 32, a telephone lineman from San Bernardino, said things had improved from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when he served in Iraq as a young Air Force military policeman.

“We have [air conditioning], coolers for cold water on our post, and we don’t sleep outside in the weather,” Murphy wrote in a May 2 e-mail to The Times. “We also have phone privileges and the Internet.”

Compared to what his family faces back home in the Inland Empire, Murphy said, “my job is easy. They have to deal with everyday life.”

His wife, Suzanne, 40, at home in San Bernardino, focuses on the details close at hand to distract her from constantly thinking about her husband.

“I just try to keep as busy as I humanly can,” she said. “I take a Jazzercise class. I take care of an elderly woman who needs assistance. I clean houses on the side. Once a week, I take our 4-year-old son to a Christian meeting.”

But at night when the house is quiet, “I’m just sitting there idle,” she said. “You turn on the news and most of what you see is all bad, and that is what gets your mind going.”

There are few idle moments for Jennifer Hamilton, 26, who must find time for her nursing studies while seeing her 10-month-old daughter through yet another ear infection. Her husband, Cpl. Joshua Gay, 26, a mortgage loan processor, has been gone since mid-March.

“The toughest part of all this,” Hamilton said, “is not having him around to help out in day-to-day life and to participate in our little milestones. He missed Tayler’s first steps. He’s going to miss my graduation from nursing school. He’s not here to coach our 9-year-old daughter’s soccer team.”

Hamilton’s husband, weary after a three-year hitch in the regular Army, switched to the National Guard in Sacramento in September 2002. As a guardsman, he thought there’d be less chance of being summoned to active duty in an impending war.

“It was really good for a while,” said Jennifer Hamilton. “His career was going pretty well. I was in nursing school. We were planning to buy a house. And then we got the news that the National Guard was being sent. Everything was just torn from underneath us.”

Like the other wives, Hamilton is proud of her husband. She cringes when she overhears nurses at work bickering about the war. She was heartbroken when someone kept tearing down a yellow ribbon she affixed to her mother’s home.

The couple, married in Lake Tahoe four years ago, had looked forward to renewing their vows. “I can’t even plan for it now,” Hamilton said, “because I have no idea when he will come back.”

Lisa Deucore, 34, knows that her husband, a heavy equipment operator, won’t be back home in time to celebrate the birth of their second son later this month. She and her husband, Sgt. Darryn Deucore, have already chosen a name -- Connor, like Phillips’ 6-year-old.

At home near Murrieta, she tries not to break down in front of her two other children when a radio station plays their song, “I Cross My Heart,” by George Strait. “ ... And if along the way we find a day it starts to storm, you’ve got the promise of my love to keep you warm.”

“It’s not good,” she said, laughing about her choice of music. “When he first left, I’d throw the CD in the CD player in our bedroom. It would help me go to sleep.”

As Deucore spoke, Brandon, 4, interrupted to ask, “Mommy, can I have a doughnut?”

When she put him off, the boy seemed on the verge of throwing a tantrum.

“Oh, we’re going to have a fit?” Deucore said. “Do you guys want to paint? Do you want to paint pictures for Daddy? That will keep you occupied for a while.”

Megan, 6, set to work painting a heart with “I love Daddy” in the center. Brandon started with yellow and orange and ended with a brown blob. He said it was a front-end loader.

“He’s going to fight in the war,” Megan said of her father. “Nobody can go over and kill him,” she added firmly.

“She was really concerned when they left, when they said goodbye,” Deucore said. “She said, ‘My daddy’s going to die.’ She thought if he went over there, that’s what that meant. So we prayed and we talked about it.”

Megan showed her the heart painting.

“Daddy’s going to love that,” Deucore said.

Then Megan added a yellow stick figure of herself. She paused, then daubed black dashes on the cheeks.

“Mom, look at me,” she said. “I’m crying.”

A Web page devoted to this series about California Guard units is at latimes.com/guard goes. It includes earlier articles in this series, photographs and other features and links.