Eastport woman finds stepson on front page

EASTPORT – You can imagine Helen Archer’s surprise when she picked up a copy of the Bangor Daily News on Thursday morning and saw a picture of her 31-year-old stepson on the front page, gun upraised, preparing to join a convoy headed to the Iraqi border.

The Associated Press photograph showed tank crews from an armor regiment performing a Seminole Indian war dance. The caption information didn’t identify the soldiers.

But she knew.

The man with the thin mustache at the center of the picture is Sgt. Roscoe Archer IV, a Shead High School graduate, father of two and member of the Alpha Company tank crew, 4th Battalion 64th Armor Regiment, based at Fort Stewart, Ga.

His father, Roscoe Archer III, and Helen Archer have been anxiously watching television and reading accounts of the war.

This is the sergeant’s first combat duty, and the couple wants to know everything they can about where he is and what he is doing.

Archer has been in the Army for the past nine years.

When he was growing up, he lived with his mother in Virginia, but moved to Eastport during his senior year in high school. After graduation, he moved back to Virginia, where he worked at various jobs before joining the Army. He has two sons, Ross, 4, and Sam, 2, with his wife, Tami Archer, and they live in Hinesville, Ga., just outside Fort Stewart.

The Eastport couple headed to Georgia in September, when they learned Archer was going to ship out.

“We stayed down there with him for almost two weeks,” Helen Archer said Thursday.

About a month ago, Roscoe Archer called his parents from Kuwait and told them his unit was waiting for the president “to decide what he was going to do.” He had little to say about the mission or where his unit was going, but the Archers knew the target was likely Baghdad and Saddam Hussein.

“He had talked to his sons on the phone [previously] and they wanted to go fishing and he said that was the first thing he was going to do” after he got back, she said.

Helen Archer is worried because she knows her stepson will be on the front line when ground forces are sent into Iraq.

“As a matter of fact, his wife had called and she said they were moving [the soldiers]. This was a couple of weeks ago, because they were in Camp New York [in Kuwait], and they moved their division out into the desert, and they were sleeping in their tanks in order to make more room for troops to come in,” she said.

Archer said that at first she did not support the war, but that she has been persuaded by President Bush’s argument that if nothing is done now, something will have to be done later.

“We stand behind the troops 100 percent,” she said.

She also said the couple is praying.