Soldier’s welcome

This was from “Redding.com”

By Tim Hearden Tehama Today
Sunday, September 28, 2008
A wounded Iraq war veteran stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., Army Sgt. Lalena Heathington-Adams knows what it’s like not to have much of a homecoming.

With her family living across the country, the former Red Bluff resident didn’t know anyone when she got off the plane from her deployment overseas.

“You get off the airplane and they put you in an airport hangar, and there are a lot of ‘Welcome Home’ banners up and there are news crews,” Heathington-Adams said.

While some soldiers are greeting their families in front of the cameras, “the rest of us are standing against the wall feeling saddened by the fact that we don’t have the same homecoming,” she said. “Some of the soldiers don’t have families at all. Everybody enters the Army for different reasons.”

So Heathington-Adams decided to help. She’s started putting together care packages for troops set to return to her Army post in the coming months, and she’d like to someday expand her effort to other bases.

“When I came home, that’s when I realized I wanted to do something,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what it is I could do. At that time, my husband (Erik Adams) and I were flip-flopping tours. He would be in Iraq and I’d be back.”

Heathington-Adams was known as Lalena Ellis when she was growing up in Red Bluff, attending Mercy High School and later Red Bluff High School before graduating from Santa Rosa High School.

Her grandparents are Bill and Gayle Kemp, owner of Gayle’s Tuxedo Rentals and Casual Clothes on Main Street.

Heathington-Adams entered the Army when she was 19, nearly 10 years ago, and became an operating room technician.

“My job is to assist the surgeon during the surgery,” she said. “It’s basically instead of two hands, you now have four.”

After being stationed in Missouri, Texas and later Germany, Heathington-Adams first went to Iraq in 2004. She was assigned to the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Tallil, an airbase southeast of Baghdad, in the middle of the desert.

She was later transferred to Baghdad, where her unit was followed by an HBO crew that was shooting a special titled “Baghdad ER.”

“It showed a really genuine feel of Army medicine,” Heathington-Adams said, “and the compassion behind the soldiers and patients, how we’re treating the patients and how personal and moving it is.”

In Baghdad, Heathington-Adams developed a seizure disorder, as have other soldiers stationed there, and “there’s no definitive answer how it developed,” she said. Within 15 days, she and her husband found out they were expecting a child, and she kept having the seizures through the duration of the pregnancy.

“He was very premature,” she said of her son. “He was born on the first day of the seventh month and remained in ICU for two to three weeks, and since then he has been fine. He’s been a healthy baby boy.”

Heathington-Adams is on medications and has been seizure-free for nine months. But the disease will prevent her from returning to overseas duty, and she’s studying for degrees in global studies and journalistic photography.

In the meantime, she’s started the Warrior Transition Act, a nonprofit organization that puts together gift baskets full of small merchandise donated by local businesses and parents of soldiers.

She started by filling some stockings with movies, recordings of “Saturday Night Live” and other things that “guys would like” and sent them to 50 soldiers in her husband’s platoon in Iraq. In each of them, she put a handwritten thank-you note.

“That’s what I could do personally with my own money,” she said. “But then, becoming a disabled veteran cuts your income in half.”

Then she thought of doing something bigger. So she’s planning to put together gift baskets for as many as 25,000 soldiers who will be returning home in the coming months.

“A lot of the things are positive things to do, like movie passes,” she said. “Some baskets are more family-oriented. … So far, I’ve gathered roughly $3,000 in merchandise. It’s just me right now, and I’m trying to help as many as I can.”

Heathington-Adams would like people in her hometown to help. The easiest things to send would be gift cards to places like Target, Wal-Mart or a fast-food restaurant, she said. A T-shirt, hat or even a thank-you letter would also help, she said.

“I would like to help as many soldiers as possible,” Heathington-Adams said. “I think they all deserve as much as the next soldier, so I think it should be equalized. At this point, I’m just one person.”

Reporter Tim Hearden can be reached at 529-5110 or at thearden@redding.com.