EL PASO — Even with an early rushed start to the day, Landrea Hatchell is wide awake as she stands cradling her two-month old in a crowd of anxiously waiting people at the bottom of an escalator at El Paso International Airport. She keeps replaying the upcoming welcome scene over and over in her mind.
The people around her chatter excitedly as new arrivals whisk past dragging their compact suitcases. She glances at all the pairs of shoes that emerge slowly from the escalator. Pair by pair, the shoes gradually become face after face of the wrong persons. She watches, waiting her turn, as those around her embrace the new arrivals. She shifts her little son in her arms glancing at her watch, carefully calculating the time it takes to disembark from the plane and walk down the seemingly endless El Paso terminal. Finally a pair of tan military desert boots appear at the top of the escalator. And with them her husband.
This is usually where the man and woman run toward each other, with big, goofy grins, dropping the luggage along the way, and embrace. For Landrea and Brandon Hatchell, even after almost eight months of separation, the reunion scene didn’t play out tha way. Instead, it was a more intimate moment. Upon seeing her husband Landrea said, “Oh my gosh. Look at your hair! It’s so long. It looks like you have bangs.” Chuck replied, “What you don’t like it?” Landrea soothed his wounded ego, “I just have to get used to it.”
The Hatchells like many young military couples living in El Paso were separated by the war in Iraq. And like many returning soldiers, Brandon is meeting his son for the first time. According to the Pentagon’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense – American Forces Information Services, approximately 357,000 military wives became pregnant in 2006 before their husbands were deployed.
Brandon, 25, has short, ashy blond hair that has been allowed to grow a bit during his R&R time and his eyes, a shade darker than North Carolina Tar Heel blue, stand out in contrast to the sand colored army fatigues that clothe a body of average height and build.. His ears stand out a little too, not because of size, but because of a tiny silver hoop through each earlobe. And to complete the look of a modern American soldier add a few pieces of tattoo art to his limbs and a mysterious diagonal scar just below his left cheekbone covered by a five-o’clock shadow. Brandon has been hearing for weeks from his friends and family back home that his son bears a striking resemblance to him. Brandon Hatchell II’s name isn’t all he got from his father. Despite numerous eyewitness accounts and daily photos demanded by Brandon Sr., who goes by the name Chuck D for reasons unknown, he did not believe that Baby Brandon looked like him. So in the airport, Landrea was excited to finally prove this resemblance to her husband.
The presentation of his first born child went the way the rest of the encounter did. “I just sort of threw the baby on him,” Landrea says. To which Chuck replied, “I told you he doesn’t look like me. His hair is reddish blond. Plus, he doesn’t have any tattoos.” While Baby Brandon may not have the multitude of tattoos strategically placed throughout his body like his father just yet, it isn’t hard to imagine what he would look like if he ever got them.
Chuck and Landrea may not have acted in the way a script writer would imagine, but the excitement was similar. They just approach it in a different manner. At times like polar opposites. Landrea, also 25, is a woman of delicate features. An oval face frames high cheek boneand and russet eyes. Her naturally brown hair falls just past her shoulder blades in waves of altering lengths. Her movements are graceful, even when reaching for her crying baby. This is most evidenced when she speaks with her hands. Her fingers curl into her palm as she is explaining something. A slightly curved pinky is the only thing her son inherited from her.
Landrea dresses in stylish, yet confortable clothing. Her fashion trademark being an obsession to be completely matching. Only she knows the careful planning it took to wear a beaded necklace that match the colors in her sea-foam green shirt, khaki capri pants, and brown flats.
She sits next to her husband in a Cheddar’s Cafe. It is easy to see the influence she has on him. Chuck is wearing a pair of nondescript shorts and a John Deere hoody, but accompanied by a silver cross and a silver Fossil watch to match his earrings. While he leans back in the booth, except to sip on a girly drink called a Bahama Mama, Landrea sits with her back straight, with her son on her lap and her Coach diaper bag at her feet, she represents what he doesn’t —finesse.
He barks over text messages to friends, “Why the f— haven’t you come to see me since I got in?” And disregards the answers as excuses. This is the same man who lectures women about the improprieties of foul language. The man who asked his wife shortly after the birth of Baby Brandon (or CJ for Chuck Junior as he is also known), “So do you like him?” Chuck teases his wife that she is too mean and needs to work on being nicer to her employees at the bank where she works. He commented that Landrea and her sister Caroline, who is staying with Landrea while Chuck is deployed, “Look like a couple when they go out in public with the baby.” Their son is sometimes thought to have inherited his father’s charming personality. Landrea’s normally sweet disposition changed during her pregnancy at times. Her friends blamed this on “Chuckie’s” influence, much to her dislike.
The couple are not without their moments of affection. Landrea teases, “Well, which were you more excited to do? See me or sleep?” Chuck taunts back, “Well, sleep of course.” A wounded, yet playful look on Landrea’s face was soon replaced with one of delight when Chuck leaned in to kiss her forehead and say, “You know I was excited to see you.”
Chuck has made sure that Landrea and Baby Brandon, are well taken care of while he’s away. He entered the service when he graduated high school and is currently ranked as an E6 in the Army. He is a Staff Sergeant with the Military Police and enjoys a position that most people his age would envy. By working his way up, Chuck has already accomplished what many college graduates his age are still struggling to do. He likes to point out that his sister-in-law/nanny is a college graduate and she works for him, who has a high school diploma.
This position has also put him in a strenuous situation. He is living in a war zone and can’t even tell his own wife what his work day was like. Details of operations are not to be divulged, which leaves Landrea often in the dark. Despite trying to keep her up to date on the status of what’s happening, there have been scares when Landrea doesn’t know if her husband is safe. In one instance, his squad was involved in a shooting, and Landrea had to wait in panic to find if her husband was okay. She waits anxiously by the phones, checks her email accounts, and watches her instant messaging list to be ready for when he contacts her. She can’t call him.
Chuck has enjoyed his time here at home, catching up with his friends here and family back in Abilene, Texas, where he met Landrea in high school. He has gotten to know his son in the brief time he had here before shipping back out.
Now back at the airport, Brandon is once again in his army fatigues. All morning he has been holding his son. Cherishing the time. Landrea is dreading this goodbye, which is, “Harder than saying good-bye the first time. Because now, we’ve gotten used to him being here, seeing him with the baby.” Seeing him now with Baby Brandon is bittersweet to Landrea. She is reminded of how much she likes seeing them together, and how much she’ll miss him when she can’t. Chuck keeps asking him, “You wanna go to Iraq with me?”
Airport security allows Landrea to go through clearance and to the terminal with Chuck since she is a spouse of a soldier returning to Iraq, but Chuck doesn’t allow this. “It’ll be too hard on you,” he says. Landrea wonders if she is the only one who it’ll be hard on. She wants to hear that he’ll miss her. “It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright,” Chuck will only tell her. “Stop saying that,” Landrea bites back at the entrance to security clearance. Just a few steps from where she stood at the bottom of the escalator a few weeks before.