Iraq: A Soldier's Life

First Sergeant Christopher Coffin knew how to stay close to his wife Betsy even when he was far away. Before he left in February, bound for the Persian Gulf, he took her outside on a cold, clear Maine night, pointed to an especially bright star and told her he would be able to see it from Iraq. They could both look at it, and find each other. "Every night when I walked the dog," Betsy says, "I would stop and talk to the star. The dog was so confused; she could tell I was talking to Chris, but she couldn't see him."

After he had left, Betsy began finding notes hidden all around their Kennebunk condo. He had tucked them in the pocket of her jacket, between the cans of dog food, on the bathroom mirror, under her pillow. She has no idea whether she has found them all, in the months since he has been gone.

"I miss doing the laundry with you and helping you hang it up," one said.

"When you take [the dog] to the beach, remember us taking her and how much fun we had," said another.

"Dearest Bets--Right this minute, I'm thinking of you, and smiling." They were signed "Trobs," short for Trouble, her nickname for him since they started dating in college 25 years ago, when she would spot him and say, "Here comes Trouble."

He tried to call from Iraq nearly every day, even just for two seconds, especially if there had been some incident--one more dead soldier in the news. Chris' Army reserve unit was a civil-affairs team, the ones who hand out medicine and rebuild schools and are supposed to stay a safe distance from actual combat. But somehow Chris had wound up leading convoys back and forth between Kuwait and Baghdad, and Betsy knew that was a much more dangerous mission than normal. On June 30, he phoned Betsy from Iraq to tell her he was heading back to Kuwait. "I'll be there for a little while, so you'll be able to breathe a little easier and relax--I'm going to be there for my birthday," he said. "I love you, and I'll call you tomorrow when I get back to Kuwait."

But that night Betsy was still restless. It was nearly midnight, and she found herself wandering through the living room when her eyes fell on their wedding albums. "I hadn't taken them out in ages." She started paging through the pictures of their ceremony on Swan Mountain in Colorado, where they loved to ski and where she had married her soul mate. It was not until the next evening that she learned what Chris was doing at that very moment.

Betsy always kept the TV on at home, checked the Internet at work. The next afternoon she heard there had been another attack. "He hasn't called," she told a colleague at the hospital where she is a social worker. When she got home, Betsy found a pair of Army officers waiting in their car. They had been there most of the day.

Chris had not made it back to Kuwait. His vehicle had apparently swerved into a ditch trying to avoid a civilian vehicle outside Baghdad; he died shortly after being airlifted to a hospital south of Baghdad.

But by the next day, Betsy had learned there might be more to her husband's death than a highway accident. And even weeks later, the Army cannot tell Betsy exactly what actually happened to Chris on the morning of July 1.