Donna Blair saw the two men in uniform at her front door and knew instantly: The one thing they had to tell her was the one thing she did not want to hear.
John couldn’t be dead. They had just bought their new house before he deployed to Afghanistan. She had just sent him a more than a dozen letters that she had been saving up. She pleaded with the officer and the chaplain: Just tell me he was wounded.
But 1st Sgt. John Blair, 38, was gone, killed by an insurgent’s rocket-propelled grenade during an ambush. Crushed and crying, the new widow collapsed into a chair. She was unable to sleep for most of the next seven days.
“It’s just like everything in your whole life that was normal changed that minute and has never been the same since, no matter how long you live,” she said, her voice breaking.
John Blair’s comrades in the 48th Brigade Combat Team will begin returning home this week after a year in Afghanistan. Donna Blair has spent eight months coping with his death, and she has a thousand reasons not to be there when the Georgia National Guardsmen come home. But she’ll go. The first sergeant’s place is with his troops, and she will be there because he can’t.
And there’s another reason. John’s casket was closed. She never got to see his face after his body was shipped home and, on some level, cannot acknowledge the finality of her loss.
“It’s kind of like he has just been gone all this time, even though you know that ain’t so,” said Blair, 45. “But then you have to accept it when these other guys come home.”
John Blair is among seven 48th soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan. An eighth soldier died in a vehicle rollover there. About 3,200 soldiers from the Macon-based unit started deploying to Afghanistan in February of last year. They have been training that country’s police and security forces, a major part of U.S. plans to rebuild Afghanistan. Waves of 48th soldiers will start coming back from Afghanistan this week. The last group is expected to arrive in early April.
Filling his role
First sergeant is among the most demanding and important jobs in the Army. The first sergeant is responsible for all enlisted soldiers in his unit: He oversees their training and makes sure they’re properly supplied; he knows their accomplishments, their family lives, their tragedies, even their addictions. In short, as 1st. Lt. Jimmy Bellamy Jr. puts it, it’s the first sergeant’s job to take care of the troops under him.
Bellamy, a military chaplain who helped notify Blair of her husband’s death in June, suggested that as one of the reasons Donna wants to be there when the troops come home.
“She is pretty much fulfilling his part of the deal by being there for the soldiers,” said Bellamy, who served with John Blair in Iraq in 2003.
Since Donna and John Blair married in 2003, she has made many close friends in John’s unit. She helped plan a welcome-home event for 48th troops when they returned from Iraq in 2006. She is intensely patriotic and manages the American Legion hall in Calhoun.
She said her husband lives on through his fellow soldiers, so she can’t wait to see them return from Afghanistan.
“Even though my husband is gone, I still get to see my husband with what he has done with all these people,” she said.
A former Gordon County sheriff’s deputy and detective, John Blair served with the Georgia National Guard’s 1st Battalion of the 121st Infantry Regiment. Blair, a Florida native, joined the Army National Guard in Kentucky at age 17 and served with the military for the rest of his life.
At the time of his death, he was defending his convoy from an ambush, firing a .50-caliber machine gun from the turret of his vehicle, Donna Blair said. He left behind two stepchildren and a 4-year-old grandchild.
Donna relates a dark premonition she had in 2007. Two years before he deployed there, she dreamed that John had been killed in Afghanistan. She remembers telling him, “If you deploy, I am going to divorce you.”
He told her that it was just a dream.
Always a gentleman
Life has dealt Donna Blair a disproportionate share of tragedy. Her first husband died in a train accident. Her second husband died of cancer. Blair herself has survived two forms of cancer. But everything was all right when she married John Blair. He made her feel safe and loved.
Tears welled in her eyes as she talked about how he used to make her coffee every day, whether she asked for it or not. The two used to sit on their front porch in the mornings, drinking their coffee together.
They previously worked at the same meat processing plant in Calhoun. Friends introduced them at a night club in 1999. She remembers their first date. They went to see a Lookouts minor league ballgame in Chattanooga. Then they had dinner. It started raining heavily as they ate. He ran out to the car and pulled it up to the restaurant so she wouldn’t get wet. She smiled, remembering how soaked he got. He was always a gentleman. She never had to open a door for herself.
When he first asked her to marry him, she thought he was joking. To show her he was serious, he asked her again — on one knee in front of hundreds of people at a Planet Hollywood restaurant in Orlando. She said yes.
He loved her so much that he serenaded her in the American Legion hall in Calhoun, using a karaoke machine to sing her George Strait’s “Carrying Your Love With Me.” He loved his two stepchildren, Dallas Bryant, 23, and Georgia Priest, 25. Donna remembers how he got permission to leave in the middle of his missions in Iraq to surprise Georgia on her high school graduation day in 2003. He appeared at the ceremony on the football field, wearing his dress military uniform.
“You would have thought you had handed her Fort Knox,” Donna said of Georgia. “She was so excited.”
Building a memorial
Last week, she sat in the den of her large log cabin home in Plainville. The house is quiet, and now it feels too big to Donna. It sits at the end of a long drive, which branches off from a rural road. The isolation and the loneliness are almost palpable.
This was her husband’s dream house. Here is where he planned to build a pond, so he could fish with his beloved 4-year-old grandson, Nolyn.
Donna keeps herself busy building a memorial to her husband in the basement, complete with his photos, medals and other belongings. She wants to create a space where his fellow soldiers and law enforcement officers could visit and connect with him again.
She believes she will see him again. Above a mirror in her bedroom is written: “Just One Lifetime Won’t Be Enough For Us.” When she misses him, she sits in the Ford F-150 truck she bought him as a gift after he returned home from Iraq in 2003. She presses a button on the driver’s side sun visor and there he is in a recording he made of himself talking to her and their bulldog, Ranger.
“Ranger, tell Momma you love her.” Ranger woofs a few times. And then this: “I love you. Bye.”
His stepson, Dallas, listened as his mother played the recording for a visitor.
“That recording,” Dallas said,” is the best thing we have right now.”
Following the 48th
Starting this week, about 3,200 soldiers from the Georgia National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team will start returning home from Afghanistan. Here’s a brief history of the Macon-based unit:
November 1990: The 48th mobilizes for Operation Desert Storm but does not deploy to the Persian Gulf.
May 2005: The brigade starts deploying to Iraq by way of Kuwait to fight insurgents, train Iraqi soldiers and guard U.S. supply convoys.
October 2005: The brigade helps secure polling places for Iraqis to vote in their country’s historic constitutional referendum.
April 2006: The brigade starts returning home from Iraq. Twenty-six of the brigade’s soldiers do not return, victims of accidents or casualties of war.
February 2009: The brigade begins deploying to Afghanistan to train its police and security forces.
February 2010: The 48th starts returning home from Afghanistan. More will return in March and April. Seven of the brigade’s soldiers have been killed in action in Afghanistan. One more dies in a vehicle rollover there.
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