posted 11-11-2003 02:20 PM            

Right hand....salute!

Happy Veterans Day.

posted 11-12-2003 01:10 AM            

From the Oct. 29, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By MARK JOHNSON

Her heart had been set on Army, but now she longed to come home

Letters show spirit of Waupun GI slain in Baghdad mortar attack

Rachel Bosveld, daughter of one Army veteran and sister of another, knew where she was going after she walked across the stage at Waupun High School graduation in 2002.

"One day she came home and said, 'I'm going to join the Army,' " recalled her father, Marvin Bosveld, who served in the Army from 1967 to 1969 in Italy.

Although he worried "because she was a girl," Rachel reassured him, explaining that she was just as good as the boys. And though her mother was "devastated," and sat her down many times to discuss this decision, Rachel stood firm.

"There was no questioning her decision. It was final in her mind," said her mother, Mary Bosveld, who is divorced from Marvin Bosveld and lives in Oshkosh. "All there was left to do was to back her up."

But the young woman who went to Iraq in March, "anxious to get into battle," said her father, had changed in the last six weeks since almost dying in a burning Humvee.

"This is a story I only want to write one time . . . ," she said, describing the armor-piercing grenade attack in a letter to her older brother, Craig Bosveld. "(The grenade) must have struck our fuel line because almost instantly our entire vehicle was in flames. There was fire and smoke everywhere."

After that she was counting the days until March 2004, when she expected to leave Iraq. She wrote home often, addressing the envelopes to "Dad," and signing them, "Sweet Pea," his pet name for her.

One day following an anti-American riot, she wrote: "More and more people want us to go home. Believe me, we want to go home."

Monday morning, Marvin Bosveld learned that an Army official had been to the house looking for him, and he knew. His daughter was dead.

Pfc. Rachel Bosveld, a member of the 527th Military Police, was killed Sunday in a mortar attack on a police station in Baghdad. On Nov. 7, she would have turned 20.

Instead, Marvin Bosveld steeled himself for the birthday cards, which had been sent to Iraq and will now come back unopened. He could not bring himself to open the letter from his daughter that arrived in the mail on Tuesday.

"I just couldn't believe it, and I can't believe it today," he said of her death. "I couldn't protect her from that . . ."

Rachel Bosveld was the fifth Wisconsin resident to die in Iraq this year. She was the state's first female soldier to die since Sgt. Cheryl LaBeau-O'Brien, of Caledonia, who died in a helicopter accident during the Gulf War in 1991.

On Tuesday, the grief that visited Rice Lake in September and Beaver Dam in May came home to Waupun.

Bosveld's friends and loved ones remembered her as a talented musician who had played the violin since the fourth grade, an oil painter who created beautiful landscapes on canvas and a student director for the drama club who gladly painted sets and performed the non-starring but necessary theater jobs.

Most of all, they remembered a young woman of determination and kindness.

"Oh my gosh. I'll tell you this, she's my baby. She's my only daughter," said her mother. "We went everywhere together. She's very, very precious to our family. She was just a joy to parent."

Rachel wasn't 2 months old when she was adopted by the Bosvelds.

"We got her as a gift," Marvin Bosveld said. "She was my flesh and blood, and I was her daddy."

On the day he learned of her death, he called Rachel's birth family in Wisconsin to tell them she was gone.

Besides her older brother, Craig, she had a stepbrother, Aaron Krebs, who is 19 and in the Marines. She also had a stepsister, Jamie Krebs, a middle school student.

Rachel was especially close to her brother, Craig, 12 years her senior. Craig too had served in the Army.

"He adored her, and she worshipped him," her mother said.

After the Bosvelds divorced, Rachel spent her first two years of high school in Oshkosh, living with her mother. She came to Waupun to live with her father during her junior and senior years.

At Waupun High, Bosveld was described by Principal Diane Koehler as "creative, very caring, dependable," a student who played on the soccer team and sang in the choir. Her drama coach Gary Cross remembered her as a student director who was willing to do the unglamorous jobs such as getting posters and programs made.

"We have a small high school. Even the stars have to work. Some of the kids don't understand that," he said.

Rachel understood.

She entered boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., in June 2002 right after graduation, planning to serve in the military, then go to college with an eye toward a career in law enforcement. In October she graduated from boot camp, and within five months she was in Iraq.

The grenade attack she survived on Sept. 12, 2003, brought home in one swift, terrifying instant the danger she faced.

"The fire grew, my team leader's beside me now yelling something," she wrote in the letter to her brother. "He couldn't get his door, pleading for me to hurry. . . . More shouting. Seems so far away, like a voice at the end of a tunnel. Got to get the door open or we're going to die. Where's my gunner? I close my eyes and throw myself into the door. Still doesn't budge. This is it. This is how I am going to die. No! I open my eyes and throw myself once more. Oh Thank God, it opened. . . ."

The gunner with her sustained two shrapnel wounds, and her team-leader took one. Bosveld suffered no shrapnel wounds but bruised her shoulder and hurt her neck.

Almost everything in their truck was melted or destroyed. Only Bosveld's notebook and some letters home remained intact.

"Maybe it's a sign, telling me how many great things I have," she wrote to her brother.

In later letters, Rachel told Mary Bosveld that she had remembered some of her mother's sayings and took comfort in them. She had been telling herself, "This too shall pass. This too shall pass. This too shall pass."

"And yet I wonder, will it really?" Rachel wrote.

Still, Rachel tried to make sure her family didn't worry. She began her letters to her mother, saying, "I'm OK. I'm really OK."

She ended the letters saying, "Don't worry Mom. Everything is OK. I'll be OK."

Photo/ File/ Jeffrey Phelps

Marvin Bosveld reads a letter he recently received from his daughter, Pfc. Rachel Bosveld, 19, at his Waupun home Tuesday. "Dad, I'll be home in 147 days," she wrote. Bosveld has yet to open another letter he received. His daughter was killed Sunday during a mortar attack at a Baghdad police station.