Twist of fate reunites Army couple in Iraq Eastport woman tells of daughter’s luck

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EASTPORT – She met her husband on the road to war-torn Baghdad.

Army Sgt. Teresa DeWitt-Huff – who grew up in Maine – called her mom in Eastport this weekend to let her know she had managed to meet up with her husband of five years after both had shipped out separately with their respective units.

DeWitt-Huff, 27, was already in Iraq when she learned that her husband, Sgt. Eric Huff, 27, and his 4th Forward Support Battalion, 4th Infantry Division, had shipped out, too.

Last week, she saw his unit and went looking for him. She found him sitting in the back of a U.S. Army truck.

On Easter Sunday, the daughter called her mom, Gwen Lujan, back in Eastport with the news.

“She said, ‘Mom, you’re not going to believe this. I got to see Eric,'” Lujan said Tuesday.

Lujan said her son-in-law had been scheduled to go to Turkey, but after the Turkish government initially refused to allow the U.S. military to use eastern Turkey as a staging area, he remained behind in Texas. Suddenly, two weeks ago, he got his orders: He was headed to Iraq.

Lujan said her daughter learned the 4th Infantry Division was in Iraq and on its way to Baghdad and she decided to see if she could find Eric. “Knowing that there’s 20,000 people in the 4th Infantry Division,” Lujan said, “she said she could see some of these trucks coming in, and she stuck her head around to look in one truck, and there he was.”

Although there is little that is romantic about Baghdad right now, their commanders allowed the couple to spend a short time alone, Lujan said.

Sipping coffee at her Spear Avenue home, Lujan’s eyes danced Tuesday as she talked about the reunion and her daughter’s five-year Army marriage.

Lujan described her daughter as a scrappy young woman who drives a heavy equipment transport truck for the 96th Transportation Company based in Fort Hood, Texas. Her son-in-law also is stationed at Fort Hood.

And she boasts as well about her son, Jason DeWitt, who is a petty officer in the U.S. Navy. He has been stationed in Singapore for the past two years, assigned to logistics in the Pacific Command.

Lujan was born in Lubec and grew up in Eastport. Her two children were reared in Westbrook, but she says they call Eastport home.

It was her daughter who surprised her in 1995 by joining the military.

Lujan said she had known her son was interested. So she wasn’t surprised when she returned home from work one day and found an Army recruiter’s car parked in the driveway.

“Their buddies were there, the recruiter, the paper was on the table, and the telephone rang. I said, ‘Hello,’ and I turned around and looked and she was signing the [recruitment] paper. I had no idea that she was going into the military,” Lujan said with a chuckle.

At Fort Campbell, Ky., Teresa DeWitt met Eric Huff.

They eloped in 1998.

The newlyweds spent their wedding night sleeping under the stars with their fellow troops. They had been put on standby and did not have a clue where they were going.

“They had to get into full gear, their heads were on a backpack and they slept under the belly of a plane on the tarmac. They thought they were all going,” she said. But they didn’t know where, and later they were ordered to stand down.

The Army gave the couple a week before DeWitt-Huff was sent to El Arish, Egypt. After she returned to Fort Campbell, the couple re-enlisted and were sent to Fort Lewis near Olympia, Wash.

“They had six months together and Eric was sent to South Korea,” she said. “He spent a year over there and he came back.”

After his return, they both were promoted to sergeant and in 2002 transferred to Fort Hood.

They were there just a few months before DeWitt-Huff’s unit was ordered to Kuwait.

Lujan has a picture of her sunburned daughter sitting inside her transport truck in the Kuwaiti desert.

Like thousands of other moms, Lujan found she could hardly leave her TV set after the war in Iraq began.

When U.S. Army infantry units and Marines were fighting their way toward Baghdad, Lujan knew her daughter’s unit was not far behind.

Although television was a lifeline, it also gave Lujan anxious moments, especially when a supply unit was fired upon and prisoners were taken, including an Army woman from Texas. “She [Shoshana N. Johnson] was from Texas, she was support, she was transportation, and they didn’t give a name and they didn’t give a base. I sat right down on my butt. I thought, ‘Whoa, who got captured?’ You don’t know,” Lujan said.

Johnson and a half-dozen other U.S. POWs were later found and have returned home.

While Lujan said she was excited to hear that her daughter and son-in-law met – however briefly – she said it must have been difficult for the two to say goodbye again.

Although the bombing is over, Lujan noted, Iraq remains a scary place: “There is still the unknown. We’re still at war,” she said.