Pregnancy prevents soldier from going to Iraq

A Maine National Guard soldier who had to leave her 4-month-old son to train with her unit for deployment to Iraq returned home early Thursday after a surprising discovery: She’s pregnant again.

Platoon leader Amanda Bolduc weaned her son, Brayden, and left him in the care of her husband to join the 133rd Engineer Battalion in Fort Drum, N.Y. But she was left behind when the unit shipped out to Iraq.

A pregnancy test required of all female soldiers before shipping out revealed the second lieutenant was going to be a mother again.

“It’s completely unexpected. We were not expecting to have another child this soon, that’s for sure,” her husband, Robert Bolduc, said Thursday after the family was reunited at home in Skowhegan.

Her arrival – at 1:30 a.m. – means she’ll be able to spend the first Mother’s Day since Brayden’s birth with family.

“It’ll be a special one for Amanda to spend it at home. We’re just counting our blessings that she’s stateside and not over there,” he said.

Amanda Bolduc’s deployment was news across Maine because of the hardship forced upon her family. She had planned to nurse Brayden until he was 6 months old, but Army policy required her to ship out when he was 4 months old.

Bolduc, who joined the National Guard to help pay college expenses, faced her situation with conflicting emotions.

While she didn’t want to leave her family behind, she didn’t want to let down her unit, either.

“We had been training extremely hard to prepare ourselves for what was ahead. And they were looking to my leadership,” she said. “When I found out I was not going to be with them I was really upset. It’s difficult to explain but soldiers have a special bond.”

There’s also guilt. One of the members of the 133rd was killed when a convoy was ambushed; one of the members of her platoon helped to stabilize the wounded until they could get treatment.

“We’ve already lost one soldier. So I feel really guilty – it’s more guilt than anything,” she said.

Bolduc was no stranger to active duty. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she was called to duty for airport security. She had been working for the counterdrug unit at Camp Keyes in Augusta since then.

She learned in November, when Brayden was just 4 weeks old, that her unit eventually was going to go to Iraq, and she left on Jan. 29 for Fort Drum, where her fellow soldiers were training.

As a platoon leader, Bolduc was in charge of a 24-member group of carpenters, plumbers and electricians who were part of the 133rd, which is building and repairing buildings and bridges in Iraq.

At Fort Drum, Bolduc was responsible for administering the pregnancy tests in her unit. She was the only one to test positive.

Robert Bolduc said it wasn’t exactly a happy phone call when his wife called on March 12 to inform him of the pregnancy.

“She was torn about the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong. She was excited. But we know how much she put her heart into this deployment … and then she found out she wasn’t going,” he said.