Thankful for Thanksgiving together

Coming home for the holidays is always a joyful time, but imagine the joy one would feel coming home for the holidays when returning from war. It’s an almost inexplicable joy. That is just what 36-year-old USMC Chief Warrant Officer 4 Tom Kircher felt when he knew he would be returning home from his third tour of duty in Iraq. The joy is even compounded when you are returning to a wife who is seven months pregnant with her first child, as was Kircher’s wife, Heather. “I found out that we were pregnant about a week and a half after he left,” she said.

Heather is a levelheaded attorney who works for Riverside County as a Deputy District Attorney Prosecutor, yet when her husband went to war it was “an emotional rollercoaster.”

“I would run to the window every time I heard a car door slam because I was sure that it was a government car,” Heather related. “When I heard on the news that something had crashed or some Humvee had exploded, you find yourself praying, ‘Oh God, not mine’…I finally took Tom’s advice and stopped watching the news.”

CWO Kircher has been a Marine for eighteen years and is based at Camp Pendleton, working in the field of Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear Defense. He takes care of personnel and equipment dealing with each of the above potential threats. Kircher makes sure the equipment is ready to go and the personnel know how to operate it in the disaster environments. Part of his job is to anticipate casualties in order to be fully prepared. “It’s a little bit of FEMA and HAZMAT.”

He was deployed to Iraq with the 15th MEU when they initially invaded Iraq, then he returned to Iraq (Fallujah) until October 2004. CWO Kircher again left for Iraq on February 7 of this year and was based at Camp Taqaddum, where he served as a senior watch officer with the 1st Marine Logistics Group. His job was to advise the commander of changes in battlefield activity. “It was a very intense job for one person to have,” he said. Chief Warrant Officer Kircher was “elated” when he was able to return home on August 21.

Heather’s fears for Kircher’s life were not unfounded; when in Iraq he was in situations where mortar fell within thirty feet of him. “We were in an established base, but it didn’t keep them from shooting mortars at us,” Kircher said. “One day our radars picked up nineteen different mortars. Every day I prayed to God to get me through.”

In 2004 a 122 mm rocket landed thirty feet from CWO Kircher while he was working. The rocket killed a good friend of Kircher’s, who was in another office thirty feet away, but Kircher himself was unharmed. “It came right in his window and then ricocheted throughout the room,” he said.

This holiday season, the Kirchers are looking forward to attending the Thanksgiving and Christmas services at their church, Christ The King Lutheran in Fallbrook. “In four years we haven’t been able to attend the holiday services,” Heather noted.

They will be having dinner at their home in Murrieta with their family as well as another Marine and his family. “I feel so blessed to have him home,” said Heather. “It is so nice to have the time to just relax.”

It will be a different holiday season this year because in previous years Chief Warrant Officer Kircher was getting ready to return to Iraq. “It is strangely weird not to have a timeline or any pressure,” said Heather. “He doesn’t have to see this grandma or that relative because he has to leave and it might be the last time he will see that person.”

CWO Kircher said that it was “absolutely a blessing” to be here for the birth of their daughter six weeks ago. Heather e-mailed a digital recording of little Paige Eleanor’s heartbeat, but Kircher said there is nothing like being there in person.

During this Thanksgiving holiday one Marine family will be together with their new little addition, only six weeks into this world. When the Kirchers sit down to their Thanksgiving meal surrounded by family and friends they will surely thank God for His providence, and rejoice that the family is able to, once again, be complete.