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Ambulance
driver Holden continued to help the wounded and fired his M-16 rifle
through an open window to cover the medics as they worked.
Virginia Holden said she
will never fathom how her husband felt during the furious battle in Iraq
that left him wounded in both hands last week.
What she knows is pride
and no small amount of fear.
Last Friday, Cpl. Luke
Holden, 22, an ambulance driver with the Marine Corps 2nd Tank
Battalion's Charlie Company, was shot in one hand and received a serious
shrapnel wound in the other during an ambush in At Tuwayhah, a town on
the Tigris River 11 miles south of Baghdad. He is getting medical
attention in Spain and will be home soon for some time off.
Virginia Holden is
glad. But she has lived with fear and uncertainty since Jan. 31, the
last time she saw her husband, an Elmira native whose family moved to
Rensselaer three years ago.
On Thursday, her
daughter, Alexandria, 3, ran across the room of their Partition Street
apartment and picked up a framed picture of her father and hugged it.
"This is my
daddy," she said, peering over the top of the frame. "He said
he's got a boo-boo."
Alexandria's 1-year-old
brother, Christian, turned the pages of a scrapbook Virginia Holden has
put together to keep her mind off the war. He fingered a brown plastic
envelope that once held a ready-to-eat military meal. Luke Holden used
it to mail to his wife a disposable camera with pictures of himself and
his buddies.
"The kids have
been my strength, actually," Virginia Holden said. "When I'm
sad or worried, they always cheer me up. Alexandria will say, 'Don't
worry, mommy. Daddy will come home soon.' "
"It has at times
been too much. I got so depressed I went to St. James Church a couple of
weeks ago and lit a candle for him and broke down crying," she
said. "The priest and a woman came to me and hugged me, and they
talked to me for a while."
The Marine's injuries
and the battle along the Basra-to-Baghdad highway was the subject of a
Thursday article in the Dallas Morning News.
Charlie Company's tanks
came under heavy fire from sniper's nests and rocket-propelled grenades.
One hit an open turret hatch on a tank dubbed "Let's Roll" and
killed the tank's cannon loader, Cpl. Bernard Gooden, 22, of Mount
Vernon in Westchester County, the article said.
The ambush left three
Marines dead and five seriously wounded, including the company's
commander, Capt. Jeffrey Houston.
Holden and battalion
surgeons got Houston and others in the ambulance, but Holden took a
bullet through the left hand as he grasped the steering wheel. Despite
his injury, Holden continued to help the wounded and fired his M-16
rifle through an open window to cover the medics as they worked.
Later, as a Marine
CH-46 helicopter landed to evacuate the wounded under heavy fire, a
blast lodged shrapnel in Holden's right hand. He was put on the chopper
and taken out of the battle.
"I talked to him
yesterday, and he said they will be able to save the fingers on his
hands," Virginia Holden said. "The only thing he feels
strongly right now is he wants to go back to be with his unit. He just
can't get over that he can't go back to help them."
March 2003
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