Fifteen Days by Christie Blatchford

Author:Christie Blatchford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307371904
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2008-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

SOMETIME IN LATE APRIL or early May 2006, Nichola received a message confirming that she was to be posted to Wainwright at the end of the tour. The day before her death, Beam began the process of getting pre-approved for a mortgage so they could buy a house.

On the morning of May 17, he was at his computer, going through some of the mortgage paperwork. “I heard the screen door open,” he says, “but didn’t hear a knock or doorbell. I thought it was someone dropping off some flyers or something, so I went down to the front door to check.”

Standing there was Liam McGarry, the acting CO of 1RCHA, and a padre. “At this point, I had realized what had happened,” Beam says. He asked for a minute, let the dogs out, then let the men in. McGarry broke the news bluntly, as soldiers are trained to do. “Liam then left me with the padre, and I called Nich’s parents.”

Sally was at the library, doing research; Tim was home, but on the phone. Beam left a message, and in a few minutes Tim called back. “You talk about tough jobs you have to do in your life,” Sally says. “That must have been right up there, to tell somebody that their daughter’s been killed.”

Sergeant Dave Redford, Goddard’s FOO Tech in Kandahar, was in Canada on leave, Beam had the presence of mind to remember. He had the padre call him.

Then Tim Haveman arrived.

For almost a year in 2005, Tim and his wife, Lisa, both artillery officers, lived right across the street from Jay and Nichola. Haveman himself was slated to deploy with Goddard, but after years of being mysteriously ill and malnourished, he was belatedly diagnosed with celiac disease, a chronic condition in which the enzymes needed to digest food are blocked. Despite trying every diet he could find, he wasn’t able to declare himself operationally fit because he couldn’t eat the rations, and if he couldn’t eat the rations, he, like Beam, didn’t meet the “universality of service” requirement. He too will be given a medical release.

Because he and Goddard were in the same unit, he knew her better than he knew Jay. Once, when she couldn’t get a new beret to shape properly, “she walked across the street to my house to ask me to help her.” He ended up giving her his spare one. “She looked great in it,” Haveman says, “and I was proud that my beret was now hers. A soldier’s headdress is perhaps the most important part of his or her uniform.”

More tellingly, on that awful day in the fall of 2005, when Haveman had to face the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to deploy, Goddard had helped.

“If I wasn’t sure that I could function at my prime, in the worst of situations, then I was not going to potentially put the lives of others in danger, or do further harm to my already damaged body.” He had to tell Steve Gallagher, the battery commander.

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