ATTLEBORO -- If Charles Todd Caldwell felt nervous about serving
in Iraq, he kept it from Margaret, whom he married 8 days before leaving
for war.
Instead, in the tapes he and Margaret exchanged by mail, he filled his
side of the conversations with reminders of the walks they would take,
the seafood pasta they would eat, the shows they would see.
Still, Margaret remained anxious. When the buzzer to her and Todd's
Attleboro apartment rang at midnight on Monday, and she heard the voice
of a National Guard colonel on the intercom, "I just knew," she said.
Caldwell, 38, a native of Quincy, Mass., was one of two soldiers in
Rhode Island National Guard's 115th Military Police Company who were
killed Monday. Their Humvee struck a land mine on a main supply road
outside Baghdad. Caldwell, who manned the machine gun atop the Humvee,
died instantly, as did Staff Sgt. Joseph Camara, of New Bedford, the
National Guard said yesterday.
Caldwell, who went by Todd, was one of four children of Charles and
Gladys Caldwell, and an uncle who doted on his nieces and nephews. He
attended Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, where he earned a degree in
history, his wife said.
In 1996, he took a biology class at the University of Massachusetts at
Boston, sitting behind Margaret, a nursing student from Binghamton, N.Y.
He joined the National Guard in 1997.
Margaret fell for Todd's humor, and the way he was always throwing out
quirky facts. She liked how he held her hand everywhere they went.
"He made me smile," she said. "He calmed me down."
In November 2000, Caldwell joined Putnam Investments in Norwood, as a
senior specialist, handling 401(k) plans for large companies.
Two years later, he proposed to Margaret during a walk along the rocks
in Newport, and they began trips back and forth to Binghamton to plan
their wedding.
That wedding was supposed to be this past June. But on Jan. 30, the
National Guard called Caldwell and his unit to active duty.
Caldwell, his wife said, was ready. He kept his 5-foot, 9-inch frame in
fine shape, and was proud of what he had learned in Guard training.
"He wanted to serve," she said. "He wanted to show he could do a good
job."
In his typical forthright fashion, he began to prepare. He shaved his
goatee; he already kept his head bald. And he and Margaret called
Attleboro City Hall. They wanted to get married before he left.
They had both been traditional, Margaret said, deciding not to live
together before marriage. It was suddenly urgent that they had a real
home, she said.
"We wanted him to have a place to come home to."
They were married on Feb. 4 by the Attleboro city clerk, and eight days
later, the 115th Military Police Company left Rhode Island, first for
Fort Drum, N.Y., then for Iraq, where he and the other MPs conducted
dangerous jobs, such as building-to-building searches looking for those
who killed a U.S. soldier.
Margaret, a cardiac nurse at the Veterans Administration medical center
in Roxbury, Mass., found them a cozy place in a brick apartment building
in Attleboro, a town where it seems every other house has an American
flag outside it.
She moved all of their things into the apartment, and had told him about
it in her tapes and letters. There were two bikes on the balcony. Two
chairs at the table. Toys for their cat, Sugar.
She placed their wedding photo on a square of lace on a table in the
kitchen, and on the front door, a tiny flag and a yellow ribbon.
Now a 30-year-old widow, she was there yesterday, next to her box of
tissues and phone, which kept ringing. Friends stopped in. Margaret was
seated on her favorite chair, the one where she used to sit to make her
tapes to send to Todd.
"You just ramble about nothing," she said quietly. "I would sit in this
big chair and look outside at the trees blow. It would calm me down. I
would fall alseep. He would play them over and over again."
His birthday, July 3, had passed while he was in Iraq, she recalled. She
sent him a velvet rose drenched in her perfume, Le Sport. He told her he
put it in his Humvee and "made the whole Humvee smell pretty," she said.
In his correspondence, Todd told her that he was OK. But he missed his
nieces and nephews, his family, and his job. He was tired and hot and
anxious to come home. He was sleeping outside with a bug net over him.
"After a while, he had had enough," she said.
So had she. People would tell her, she recalled, "well, at least the war
is over, you don't have to worry."
What do you mean? she would think. He's over there.
"Not until he was home was it over," she said.
She stayed busy, working her 12-hour nursing shifts. She went on a beach
outing with the other military wives and mothers, who, like her, felt
frustrated and worried that the public was forgetting about those still
serving in Iraq.
"They tell you everyday another soldier died, then the next day they
forget about it," she said.
Recently, Todd told Margaret that he was finally getting an indication
of when he might come home. They were hoping for January or before
Christmas. They talked about how they might celebrate. He wanted to go
spend a night in downtown Boston, see a show, stay in a hotel --
something they had always talked about doing.
And they would celebrate with a wedding, a real wedding party, a way to
have "our day," she said.
"I bought the dress and everything."
"I'm planning a funeral instead of a wedding," she said, a few minutes
later. "It just breaks my heart."
