Adoration and honor

Published 11:49 am Friday, February 22, 2008

It was the middle of a school day when Kathy Hagen’s cell phone rang. With students waiting, she answered it with a heavy heart. She knew what the call was about.

“This is it mom, I’m off,” Hagen’s son, Scott Hagen, said. “I just wanted to let you know I was leaving.”

That was the last time Kathy, a first-grade teacher at Woodside Elementary, heard her son’s voice since he was sent to Kuwait January 25, 2003, in anticipation of the war with Iraq. The call came from 29 Palms in California, where Scott was stationed after boot camp and attending the School of Infantry.

During their brief conversation, Scott, 24, “said he felt he was ready to go,” she said. Scott’s group, the third battalion fourth Marine regimen, also known as “The Tip of the Spear,” was the first set of Marines to be sent into the war.

In March of 2002, Scott joined the United States Marines — without telling his parents. His sister, who is in the US Army, encouraged him to join.

“My husband was in the Marines, so when he told us, he was thrilled. But as a mom, I didn’t want him to go,” Kathy said. “He had said once that he’d like to do it, but that he didn’t think they would accept him.”

When Scott was 16, he suffered a spinal cord injury from a spontaneous hemorrhage in his brain and was paralyzed from the chest down. After emergency neurosurgery and 10 days in intensive care, Scott was given a 10 percent chance of ever walking again. But after years of physical therapy, he regained full use of everything but his left hand.

In the past few months, Kathy and her family have received five letters from Scott, detailing his experiences in Kuwait, Iraq, Baghdad and other cities in the Middle East.

“He wrote about being deprived of showers, sleeping in the desert, the camels that walk by and the horrible sand storms,” Kathy said.

A lot of support has come from the staff and students at Woodside, who, after 20 years, “have become like family,” Kathy said. When her co-workers found out that Scott had been deployed, they created a box decorated with the American flag in the front office to collect supplies.

To date, the school has sent 14 large boxes with tissues, lip balm, Slinkies, letters of encouragement and other gifts to Scott’s regime and other troops in Iraq. And while not everyone supports the war, Kathy Hagen said, she has felt support for her son and the troops from everyone.

She also has been able to piece together stories about the third battalion fourth Marine regimen from a website called marinemoms.com. The website serves as a common place mothers can go to see pictures from the camps and cities their children are in, hear stories from other families and share bits of information with each other as the war continues. From this website, Kathy found the name of a reporter covering the war who is traveling with her son’s regime. She has followed his stories as a way of knowing what her son is doing. It was in one of these stories, she said, that she found out her son had been in Baghdad when the statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down. A picture of the tumbling statue accompanying the story shows a tank bearing Scott’s regime’s name.

In a recent letter to her son, Kathy told him that he was a very lucky person.

“Most people spend their whole lives looking for their purpose and trying to decide what they are meant to do,” she said. “I told my son that through that experience, he has found his purpose – to be a part of making history.”