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Among LI's military families, worry, fear continue

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | martin.evans@newsday.com

5:20 PM EDT, July 23, 2008

The phone call came early Monday of last week, while Beth Delli-Pizzi was vacationing in Maine and her soldier husband was deployed in Afghanistan near the lawless Pakistan border.

"Did you see the cover of Newsday?" her mother asked. "It says nine guys were killed in Afghanistan."

So began days of anxious phone calls, e-mail inquiries and sweaty-palmed waiting, as relatives and friends of the 160 soldiers from the Bay Shore-based Army National Guard 69th Infantry Regiment sought information that would confirm whether their loved ones were alive or dead.

America's nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan and five in Iraq have bound tightly the friends and relatives of the regiment's recruits. Their home front is a place of worry and anxiety, where a headline or a news report can set off a chain reaction and where information about a loved one is precious.

In the hours after copies of the July 14 edition of Newsday hit Long Island's driveways and front porches - "Attack In Afghanistan/9 U.S. Soldiers Killed" - soldiers' family members called each other to urge calm, offer support and run down rumors.

Friends of the fighting men - U.S. infantry units are all male - wondered what had become of their warrior buddies.

Delli-Pizzi is president of the 69th Infantry's Family Readiness Group, which assists family members whose loved ones are deployed. Hoping for information on who the nine were, she worked her contacts among soldiers in Afghanistan, calling them to inquire about others who could not be reached.

With a few phone calls, Delli-Pizzi was able to determine that the attack had not taken place at a location where most of the Bay Shore unit was stationed.

But she knew that some members of the unit were serving elsewhere in Afghanistan.

That meant that one or more of them might have been at the attack scene, a hostile mountainous region near the Pakistan border. Navy Seal Lt. Michael P. Murphy, of Patchogue, had been killed in those mountains during a 2005 ambush, along with 18 other U.S. sailors and soldiers.

Still, the lack of certainty added to the worry. It was two days after the front page headline scared Delli-Pizzi and the other families before she heard from her husband, Lt. Lou Delli-Pizzi, when he telephoned from Afghanistan. He was safe.

For her, after spending days reassuring her fellow military wives while harboring her own private fears, the wait was finally over.

"You're always on pins and needles until you know for sure," she said.

Government policy often works against the fast flow of information. The U.S. Department of Defense withholds information pertaining to incidents resulting in troop fatalities until the next of kin of all of the dead have been informed, meaning that family members of soldiers who survive fatal incidents may be in the dark for days.

The military also imposes a 24-hour blackout of details following casualty incidents.

But with the pervasiveness of cell phones and Internet connections available to soldiers serving overseas, worried civilians routinely seek assurances from loved ones in real time.

Jean Dudenhoffer, of Islip Terrace, worried for 12 hours about her son Mark Dudenhoffer, until she was able to reach a National Guard buddy of his. The guardsman assured her he had received an e-mail from Mark after the attack.

The dead from the July 13 attack were members of the 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), which had been deployed with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, whose home base is in Italy.

The DOD Web site did not post the names of the dead or the unit in which they served until July 16, three days later.

"The worry can go on for days," said Delli-Pizzi, an immigration lawyer from West Islip. "So there were e-mails and calls - 'Have you heard anything, have you heard anything?'"