Beate Medina, widow of Staff Sgt. Oscar Medina, displayed the most recent photo of her late husband in Iraq during a brief press conference yesterday at Schofield Barracks. She said he called her a week ago with news he was accepting a dangerous assignment.
Fallen GIs
remembered
at SchofieldAfter a prayer service for two
killed in Iraq, a widow reflects
on her husband's last call
A week ago, Staff Sgt. Oscar Medina called his wife from Iraq to tell her that he would be on a dangerous mission.
"It was 1 in the morning," his German-born wife, Beate, said yesterday. "We talked. He said: 'I can't tell you much, but you won't hear from me for a while. As soon as I can, I will contact you again.'"
What Medina couldn't say was that some of his unit, the 25th Infantry Division's 84th Engineer Battalion, was being sent to Fallujah -- the scene of some of the most bitter fighting in southern Iraq.
On Saturday, Moqtada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army attacked a military supply convoy outside the southern city of Amarah, killing Medina, 32, and Spc. Ramon C. Ojeda, 22, of Ramona, Calif.
Medina and Ojeda -- members of the 84th Battalion -- became the latest Tropic Lightning casualties in Iraq. To date, five 25th Infantry Division soldiers have been killed since its 2nd Brigade Combat Team was deployed to Iraq for a year. Medina was a member of Alpha Company's maintenance platoon.
A prayer service was held at Schofield Barracks' main chapel yesterday, and a memorial service for the two slain soldiers will be held in Iraq tomorrow.
Medina was born in Colombia and migrated to Chicago when he was 8. He has a 13-year-old son from a previous marriage. Ojeda's widow, Lesliee, also is assigned to the 25th Infantry Division and was in Iraq. She accompanied her husband's body to California for his funeral. The couple have a 14-month-old son.
Beate Medina wants to hold a funeral service and bury some of her husband's ashes here "because this is where he wanted to retire."
The rest of the ashes would go into a grave next to his grandmother, who is buried in Florida.
"He really had a special relationship with his grandmother, and that was very important to him," Beate Medina said. "He will now be with his grandmother. ... She raised him, basically."
The couple met four years ago when Medina was stationed in Germany. "He was standing in front of his car looking at a big map. He looked pretty lost. My father is a policeman and asked if he needed help. ... He invited us to a American German folk fest."
Beate Medina said her husband, who enlisted in the Army 12 years ago as Vargas-Medina and was in the process of dropping Vargas from his last name, was deployed to Alaska when the Iraq war began last year.
"He felt useless there," Beate Medina said. "'Why am I in Alaska when I could be Iraq doing my job?' He was one of the persons who wanted to go and be a soldier and fight for his country and democracy."
Beate Medina said "the Army was his life. He was 100 percent a soldier, 100 percent soldier."
She said her husband had been trying unsuccessfully to extend his current 2 1/2-year tour in Hawaii beyond July when he found that he was being sent to Iraq for a year. "He was one of the first to leave for Iraq in January."
Now every night, Beate Medina lays out her husband's favorite blue-and-orange Chicago Bears football jersey bearing No. 54 and the name of linebacker Brian Urlacher.
"When he left, I took the jersey out," she said, "and put it where he normally sleeps and put a little cologne so it smells like him. It comforted me when he was gone, and it comforts me now."
