Not home for the holidays: JDCHS families pray for loved ones who are deployed in the U.S. armed forces

Friday, Jan. 16, 2015

By Ruby Rodriguez

Special to the Intermountain Catholic 

DRAPER — Juan Diego Catholic High School sophomore Samantha Lies traveled with her family to the San Diego airport on Oct. 25 to say goodbye to her brother, Eric Lies, who was boarding a plane that would carry him halfway around the world to a naval base in Bahrain. She will not see him for a full year.

Samantha learned her brother was being deployed by reading a Facebook posting. She had thought they would be able to spend Christmas with him, and he would not have to leave until January. The change of date shocked the whole Lies family. 

 Eric chatted with his parents while getting his gear out of the car. Then, he walked up to his little sister.  

“I don’t want you to go. I’m not ready,” Samantha said. 

He replied, “Samantha, I have to.” 

He walked away, up the escalator, into the airport, and Samantha left the airport in tears.

Eric Lies, 23, is an ensign in the United States Navy. A 2010 JDCHS graduate and 2014 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he is deployed on a cruiser, the CG-52 USS Bunker Hill, to Bahrain. His chances of engaging in combat are low, but his family still worries about him.

“It’s just that little sister vibe thing. The fact of losing my brother scares me, no matter how little the chance is,” Samantha said, adding that communication with him is inconsistent now. While Eric was in Annapolis, she was able to communicate with him more quickly. 

“It’s sort of similar, but then it’s not, because he’s gone for a little while longer and I can’t call whenever I want. It crushes [me],” Samantha said. 

Now, she has to wait for the occasional email and short calls that come about once a month.

“Sometimes, he’ll send an email saying, ‘Hey, I can call at this time, so be around the house phone,’” Samantha said. “It worked out pretty well. Although it was only seven minutes to talk, it was still fun.”

Communication and deliveries are much more reliable now than they were in 2003, when JD counselor Lena Puro’s first daughter deployed to Iraq with the National Guard for a year and a half. She, too, was gone for Christmas. 

“It was hard to send anything, because they went through it all before it got to her, so, it was mostly letters,” Puro said. She says she supported all five of her daughters in service while they were deployed, especially through a lot of prayer.

Senior Jack Maddox also has a brother, Alec, a JDCHS alumus who was deployed to Japan over Christmas last year. He was in the U.S. States Marine Corps. 

“Personally, [his deployment] didn’t bother me too much because he kept in good contact with us – a lot of phone calls, things like that – but for my mom, it was pretty bad. She was missing him a lot,” Jack said. 

Jack’s other brother, Tommy, who also graduated from JD, attends West Point and was able to come home for the holidays, but Alec was not.  

The Lies, Maddox, and Puro families are all familiar with the worry they felt for their family members. 

“It honestly depends on the situation, if they’re in combat or not, but besides that, what’s most important is that you keep in contact, talk with them as much as you can, and just let them know that you miss them and wish the best for them,” Maddox said. 

Samantha copes with her brother being gone by listening to music he likes and looking through pictures of him. 

“Sometimes, I read this letter that he gave to me. … One of the things he wrote in it was he wants me to succeed where he failed, and he won’t admit he loves me, which is funny because we’ve always done that,” said Samantha, who is able to focus on her brother’s safe return by searching for reminders of him. Even at school, she says she can find him. 

“Every time I go down the graduation hall (in JD), I always find my brother’s picture and I look at it and say, ‘He’ll be fine, he’ll be back.’”