GoMemphis.com February 18, 2003
Silence over baby stymies crisis master
By Laura Coleman Noeth
noeth@gomemphis.com
Dan Richard has sent helicopters to rescue people all over the Mid-South for the past 13 years.
But there's a baby in Turkey he can't help - a 4-month-old boy, the only child of Richard's only child. A baby with a mom and dad serving in the Air Force.
When he's not answering calls from ambulances or dispatching helicopters from his console at Med-Com Communications, Richard, 50, can glimpse news programs updating the military buildup around Iraq.
But he's most interested in Turkey, where his son and daughter-in-law, Daniel and Sarah Richard, work at Incirlik Air Base and where his grandson, Michael Richard, lives with them.
He's somewhat encouraged by NATO efforts over the weekend offering defense of Turkey from attacks, but that hardly allayed fears for his grandson.
Richard has never seen little Michael, and hasn't seen his son since his wedding just days before 9/11.
He last heard from his son in a three-line Feb. 6 E-mail.
"Yeah, things are starting to get pretty ugly over here," Staff Sgt. Daniel Richard II wrote.
Richard, 23, is an aircraft mechanic, and his wife is a military police officer. Until the recent buildup, the elder Richard said, the couple expected to keep the baby with them until they returned to the States.
But increased instability in the area and the threat of war made the couple decide to have the baby sent to the States to stay with his maternal grandmother in California.
For reasons the elder Richard doesn't know, something has delayed that, and none of the couple's family in the United States has heard any more.
"It hits me sometimes that I'm totally helpless about this, and it's frustrating," said Richard. "I've never been one to sit back and wait for things to happen."
Incirlik Air Base is owned by the Turkish government but used by the U.S. Air Force as a major installation. According to GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area defense think tank, one of the base's primary missions is enforcing the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. "I don't think it's very likely that Iraq would attack the base," said Tim Brown, senior analyst with GlobalSecurity. "It's out of their range."
But Richard has fears of his own. "My worst fear is that some suicide bomber will hit the base. That's what scares me the most. It just scares me for my son and his wife and for the baby."
Shortly after graduating from Bartlett High School, the younger Richard first thought of becoming a pilot, then trained to be a mechanic after enlisting in the Air Force, his dad said. The day before he left to begin his military career, father and son drove to the Shiloh battlefield near the Tennessee River. They walked quietly in the woods, talking about Daniel's new career.
A couple years later, the two took a drive up the California coast and talked some more. "I told him to do his job, that other people were depending on him," Richard said. "And he understood that."
Daniel Richard has been in Turkey since November 2001. When his wife was seven months pregnant and the couple felt sure they wouldn't have another miscarriage, they called the elder Richard to let him know he was about to become a grandfather.
"I was just so happy to be having a grandson, even though I told people I wasn't old enough to have a grandchild," Richard said.
And now, as he awaits word on when he'll see the baby, Richard writes to his son every morning and every night. When he can distract himself from his worries, he plays the old guitar he bought with paper-route money as a kid. When he can't, he prays.
"(Sunday) was a real bad day. I tried to play the guitar, but I couldn't. I just couldn't get my mind on anything else. I wonder what he's doing, if he's trying to crawl all over. And I worry that I might never get to see him or hold him, and that ain't right."
But Richard also talks about what he'll do when he sees the baby: "I'll snatch him up and hold him tight. And I'll probably cry."
Copyright © 2003, The Commercial Appeal is an E.W. Scripps Company newspaper.
