Mainer injured in Iraq sent to German hospital

PITTSFIELD – An attack last week in a town west of Baghdad that killed one U.S. soldier also injured a soldier from Pittsfield, his wife said Tuesday.

“All I know is that they were on a mission on top of a building and apparently a rocket was shot and they got hit,” said Annie Allen, wife of Army Spc. Frederick James Allen Jr. “He has a broken femur in one leg and tissue damage in the other.”

Frederick Allen, 24, is a 1998 graduate of Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield. He was stationed with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., before the Army sent him to Iraq in August.

Annie Allen said she spoke to her husband Tuesday morning from an Army hospital in Germany.

“He’s doing fine,” she said. “He just got out of two surgeries from yesterday, but he’s doing OK.”

She said she didn’t know her husband’s medical prognosis.

“They’ll keep him there until the end of this week and ship him back to the States by the end of next week,” she said. “Right now we don’t know if he’ll be shipped back to Fort Bragg or not.”

Annie Allen, who is pregnant with the couple’s second child, and her young daughter now live in Pittsfield with her mother-in-law, Brenda Allen.

She started her move to Maine, with the couple’s 21/2-year-old daughter, on Aug. 9, after hearing of her husband’s impending departure for the Middle East. That was the last time she saw her husband.

“He shipped out about a week after from North Carolina,” she said.

The rocket that injured Spc. Allen exploded early on Oct. 31 in Khaldiyah.

“We didn’t get notified that he was injured until Saturday afternoon,” said Allen’s sister, Linda Cianchette. “He called Monday at 2:30 in the morning our time to say he made it to the German hospital. He was very weak at the time.”

Cianchette said her brother joined the Army right after his high school graduation. He had just returned from serving a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan when he found out he would be going to Iraq.

She said, before the injury, her husband was expecting to retire from the military in November 2004.