The phone rang at the Pickinpaugh home. Dawn Pinkinpaugh answered the phone and recognized the voice on the other end of the phone.
“It was Chad (Nelson),” she said. “I asked him, ‘Is his it?’”
“This is it,” Sgt. Chad Nelson of the 267th Ordnance Company said.
Dawn’s husband, Sgt. Shannon Pickenpaugh and the members of the Nebraska Army National Guard’s 267th Ordnance Company were heading overseas as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“The Gering detachment (that Sgt. Pickinpaugh is with) was activated for a month to get the equipment for the Nebraska Army National Guard’s 1057th Transportation Compny ready to go overseas,” Dawn said. “We figured that was going to be their part in the war.”
“I never thought it would happen,” she said. “I never thought they would go overseas.”
When Shannon was going through the paperwork for deployment Dawn asked him, “don’t you think you will be state side?”
“No,” Shannon answered. “We’re going overseas.”
Until then being married to a National Guard soldier was a one weekend a month and two weeks out of the year.
“I was just getting use to him being gone for two weeks out of the year, then he gets deployed,” Dawn said.
Shannon and Dawn sat down with their kids Tyler (8), Tandi (6), and Tanor (2) to tell them dad would be leaving for a while.
Tandi “took it really hard,” Dawn remembered.
“I was scared and sad,” Tandi said.
“Same thing with me,” Tyler added.
“The hardest part was saying goodbye over and over and over again,” Dawn said. “We said goodbye four different times. You never knew if this time was going to be the last.”
On Feb. 5, 2004, Sgt. Pickinpaugh and the 267th headed overseas.
“I was afraid I couldn’t do this my myself and I was agraid he wouldn’t come home alive,” Dawn said.
It would be nine days before she heard from her husband.
“That was the longest we’d ever gone without talking to one another,” she said.
At that time Shannon was in Kuwait and “we finally got the year (of deployment) started.”
They set-up a phone schedule and it was over the phone “sometime in April” when he told her he’d been shot at for the first time.”
“I was scared,” she said. But, “I didn’t tell the kids anything. I didn’t want them to live in fear like I was.”
Over the next year Dawn tried to avoid news reporters and shelter the kids from the danger their dad was in.
“I learned that no news is good news,” Dawn said. “If the media is reporting information and if it was your soldier you would have known by then.”
“When you heard a soldier was killed you were sad, but you were relived you didn’t have someone knocking on your door.”
In Iraq “dad was putting armor on Humvees,” Tyler said.
“He started doing that then his mission was to recover vehicles that had broken down or gotten hit on the roads,” Dawn said. “He was put out there, he was more of a target.”
Dad came home on leave sometime in October for two weeks.
“It didn’t even seem like two weeks,” Tyler said. “It seemed like two days.”
“It was hard knowing he was going back and the kids were going to be without a dad again,” Dawn said. “But I keep thinking it’s only three more months, it’s only three more months.”
Finally, 21 days ago Sgt. Pinkinpaugh and the 267th left Iraq. They are now waiting in Kuwait to come home.
“They should be back home, in Scottsbluff, in two-and-a-half weeks,” Dawn said.
Having dad in the National Guards is “sort of good and sort of bad,” Tyler said. “I’m very proud of my dad but I don’t like him being gone.”
When he comes home Dawn said the guys need to see the public out (welcoming them home) and see that they are supported.
“I’m real excited to have dad home,” Tyler said. “It’s been a long time since he’s been home.
Brad Staman 