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DEL.ICIO.USJonathon Haggin: Death won’t end love story
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kingsland � The pains started Saturday morning. Anna Haggin said they felt like contractions. Her stomach tightened. She began to bleed. She worried she was losing her baby.
Jonathon HagginAnna rushed to the hospital. She kept telling her mom, “Nothing can happen to this baby.”
Things were just starting to get better. She had been reconciling with her ex-husband, Spc. Jonathon Haggin, and she had become pregnant. The Georgia National Guard soldier was now thousands of miles away in Iraq, but they were already talking about getting back together and becoming a family again.
The emergency room doctors tested Anna’s blood and listened to the baby’s heartbeat. Everything was OK. They had no explanation for her pains.
The next morning, however, a pair of U.S. Army officers in dress uniform showed up at her apartment. They told her the baby’s father had been killed by a massive bomb in southwest Baghdad the night before.
Anna believes the pains were no coincidence.
She won’t learn the sex of the baby until later this month, but she already has a feeling it’s a boy.
“I’m praying to God it’s a boy. If it’s a girl, she will have to be named Jonathon,” Anna, 21, said Tuesday as she sat in the comfort of her mother’s home, where she has been grieving for the past few days.
Jonathon learned Anna was pregnant with their second child while he was recovering in a hospital in Germany this summer. He had been wounded by an insurgent’s bomb in Iraq. It broke three of his ribs.
The former Marine got bored resting in the hospital. He wanted to get back to his unit with the 48th Brigade Combat Team.
“He begged and pleaded to be sent back to Iraq with his squad,” Anna said.
Somehow, Jonathon persuaded the doctors to send him back before he was fully healed. But his buddies kept hiding his gear to keep him from going out on patrol. On July 24, while Jonathon was still recovering, four soldiers from his unit were killed in a bomb attack. He was angry that he wasn’t there. He wanted to find the people who killed his friends.
“It was just eating him alive,” Sgt. David Grimes, a fellow Georgia National Guard soldier and longtime friend, said in a telephone interview from Camp Striker, Iraq. “It bothered him badly.”
Finally, on Saturday, less than two weeks after returning to the field, Jonathon went outside the wire again. Grimes remembers their last conversation.
“I told him, ‘Jonathon, if you see the shot, take it.’ He said, ‘You know it.’ “
Jonathon was 26 when he died.
Grimes’ wife, Michelle, hung by Anna’s side Tuesday. They joined Anna’s mother, Edna Martinez, and a friend at a cozy Italian restaurant in St. Marys on the southeast Georgia coast.
The four laughed as they reminisced about Anna’s and Jonathan’s early dates. At first, the two disliked each other. But his cynical sense of humor attracted her.
On their first date, she placed her hand on top of his as they rode in his “busted” 1997 Ford Probe, which was three shades of blue. He jerked his hand away and told her to stop. After a few more tries, he wrapped his thumb around the back of her hand. “He likes me,” she thought.
On another early date, his car broke down on I-95 and they had to push it off the road. “The engine blew up,” Anna said. “We were sweating and I was mad.” Later in their relationship, she totaled the 1990 Thunderbird Super Coupe she had persuaded him to buy.
“We never doubted our love,” she said. “We had a lot of tests and a lot of trials through our dating.”
The couple married young. She was 17. He was 22. They divorced in December and were living apart when he left for Iraq.
When she started to dwell on Jonathon on Tuesday, Anna nervously rubbed her hand up and down a red plastic cup of ice water glazed with condensation.
She wonders how she will tell their 2-year-old daughter, Leaundra, what happened. Leaundra was Jonathon’s world, she said. A trained sniper who avoided emotions, Jonathon frequently bought his daughter white seashell necklaces and lovingly called her “Angelbutt.” She has his brown eyes. She started saying “daddy” before “mommy.”
Tuesday afternoon, little Leaundra danced on the dark- blue-carpeted floor of her grandmother’s living room and played with a small hamster figurine dressed in a Marine uniform. She wore one of her father’s seashell necklaces and sported a red U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap. Turning to a visitor, she proudly declared, “My daddy is in Iraq.”
Comments
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By Charla
August 3, 2005 08:34 AM | Link to this
Our prayers are with you and your family, he was a very brave man.
By TLH
August 3, 2005 08:45 PM | Link to this
My husband worked with Haggin both in and out of the Army, so I knew him pretty well. He always greeted you with a smile and he loved to joke around. My heart goes out to his family. You are in my prayers.
By BPW
August 4, 2005 01:39 AM | Link to this
I am so sorry. May God console you in your time of sadness.
By Mary-Ellen Maier
August 4, 2005 01:02 PM | Link to this
May God grant you the peace and comfort that you need to get through this. My son, Pete Schneider is with the 48th.
By C Oakes
August 4, 2005 06:07 PM | Link to this
Anna, the memorial service was beautiful. The slide show pictures of Jonathon… when you were dating, at your wedding, at your daughter’s birth, with his and your parents, hanging out with you and your precious daughter, and in uniform in Iraq with his buddies… were perfect. Not a dry eye in the church. My boys were sad to have not said good-bye; they can hardly believe they will never get to play basketball or video games with Jonathon again as “he was so cool”. Love you!