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A soldier's sorrow

Coram father dies shortly before son's anticipated return from Iraq

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | STAFF WRITER

January 25, 2006

Army Spc. Joseph Iapaolo settled before a telephone in his Baghdad barracks, punched the number to his father's home in Coram, and waited for the calming voice that had offered him encouragement through his year at war in Iraq.

It was Jan. 8, and Iapaolo's tour would end in less than a month. Still, the dangers were no less severe. He wanted his dad to know he was OK. And he just wanted to talk.

On Long Island, Mark Iapaolo, 65, himself an Army veteran, fretted over his son's safe return during Joseph's Iraq tour. Even the sound of his doorbell ringing unnerved him. Counting the days, he kept a poster near the entry that read, "Welcome Home, Joseph!! We Missed You!!"

Their reunion was not to be.

Joseph Iapaolo's phone call that day went unanswered. Within hours of the call, his father, who was divorced, was dead of a heart attack. The man who had schooled his son on what it was like to be a soldier was gone.

Cutting short his tour in Iraq by a few days after learning of his father's death through the Red Cross, Iapaolo returned for the funeral on Jan. 13. Mark Iapaolo was buried in Calverton National Cemetery.

Of his call that day, Iapaolo, 22, a member of the 170th Military Police Company, said, "I just wanted to ... tell him I miss him. Over there, you didn't always want to talk about what was going on with the war. I just wanted to call home and talk about something different."

Iapaolo enlisted shortly after graduating from Newfield High School in Selden in 2001. He signed the enlistment papers at the Coram recruiting station, a mile from home and across a parking lot from where his father worked at Home Depot.

Once in Baghdad, his military police corps unit was assigned to help train Iraqi police. It would be a year of loss and near misses for Iapaolo, one of the worst coming on Thanksgiving Day, when he was riding in a convoy with Iraqi police.

A bomb hurled the column's lead Humvee through the air and into a canal. Two of his friends from the 170th, Pfc. Marc Delgado, 21, of Lithia, Fla., and Staff Sgt. Steven Reynolds, 32, of Jordan, N.Y., were killed in the blast, as were an Iraqi police colonel and an interpreter.

Another friend, Pfc. Marissa Strock, 20, of Troy, N.Y., lost the lower part of her left leg in the blast, and is recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Iapaolo was credited with saving her life by applying a tourniquet.

Shortly before his last attempt to call his father, a roadside bomb sliced into the Humvee riding just ahead of the one Iapaolo was in - the 21st time a convoy he had been a part of had been targeted. He wanted his dad to know he was fine.

"My father was really proud I was in the military," he said. "He thought I might surprise him by coming home for Christmas. ... But I couldn't this time."

Mark Iapaolo had been an Army M.P., serving in the early 1960s. In his civilian life, he designed interiors for Record World, a now-defunct chain of music stores. The job took him to locations in the Northeast, and when Joseph Iapaolo was still a youngster, his father would sometimes take him along.

During the trips, Joseph Iapaolo said, his father would recount stories of his Army service. At store construction sites, he'd let the lad wear a tool belt so he could feel like he was part of his father's crew.

In an interview, Strock, who said Iapaolo kept their unit loose with humor, said soldiers worry about what their relatives go through back home.

"I worried about my mom and dad the most, because I knew how upset they would get if I got hurt," said Strock. "And I see how upset they are now."

A longtime friend of Mark Iapaolo's, David Hodge, said his friend remained strongly supportive of America's war effort. He said that the subject of Joseph's service came up during the pair's once-a-month dinners.

"He was very happy that his time was almost up, and was looking forward to him coming home," said Hodge, of Floral Park, Queens. "But he was always on edge when the doorbell rang."

Last Friday, Iapaolo - who will soon be returning to his unit's base at Fort Lewis, Wash. - sifted through his father's effects at the Coram apartment.

There was baseball memorabilia collected during trips they shared to Yankee Stadium. There were photographs to be taken down from the walls. There was his father's clothing - familiar patterns, along with traces of his dad's scent. Iapaolo retrieved a hand-crank coffee grinder, with a wooden drawer for catching the grounds. He remembered grinding crayons in it once as a tot.

Hardly more than a week back home, and Iapaolo was shouldering the task of deciding what of his father's life to save, and what to let go of. It wasn't what he wanted for his homecoming.

"This is bringing back all these memories," Iapaolo said.