Wednesday's Internet Edition, August 27, 2008.
welcome home soldier
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| HOME SWEET HOME- Lt. Col. Clark Denman is home on leave in Hamilton from Baghdad. His neighbors put up a sign welcoming him home. |
On one side of the highway is a porch lined with American flags and other patriotic decor.
On the other side, the same theme, including a banner that declares, “Welcome Home Clark.”
Home in Hamilton for 18 days of RnR from his 15-month tour of duty in Baghdad, Denman is enjoying time with his family, wife Karen, who works at Ann Whitney Elementary School, and their four children, Clark Jr., a junior at Hamilton High School this fall; Lee Ann, a freshman; fifth-grader Gabby and third-grader Rachel. They have been to Ohio to see relatives as well as to the lake for a few days of tubing and boating.
While he’s home, he’s just Dad, but when he’s at work, the G-33 Orders Chief is responsible for organizing, planning and writing orders for maneu-vers and attacks for the 4th Infantry Division out of Fort Hood, aka Multi-National Division, Baghdad.
Denman has been in the Army 21 years, and this is his last tour. He will return to Fort Hood in February and plans to retire some time in 2009. After that, he looks forward to settling down in Hamilton, and “losing money on cattle.”
A plaque on the wall of their living room states that “home is where the Army sends you.” Below the saying are smaller signs naming the places the Army has sent the Denman family. Four hearts depict stations where the children were born. The bottom sign: “Hamilton, Texas.”
Their move to Hamilton was no accident, and in fact has been in the family’s plans since 1994.
Then, when Denman was a lieutenant stationed at Fort Hood, the couple decided they would like to buy a few acres of land in Texas.
“My mother’s family is from Texas, so we decided we’d like to buy five acres or so,” Denman said. “There was an ad in the Fort Hood paper about land for sale in Hamilton.
“We came and looked at this land on Highway 2905, out where the big fire was last week. It was on Pecan Creek, and we fell in love with it and bought it.
“We couldn’t afford it, and it was 225 acres, a little bigger than we wanted. But it was the smartest thing we ever did!”
When Clark was stationed back to Fort Hood last year from Heidelberg, Germany, the family bought the Cecil and Sue Nix house on Main Street and moved to Hamilton.
“We’re still finding out how wonderful Hamilton is,” he said. “We have wonderful neighbors.”
“We’ve never lived where there was no Army post,” Karen Denman said, “but eve-ryone has been great about eve-rything. We were worried about the kids, especially with a son in high school. In the Army, you see new people every day, and you are all in the same situation, and you help each other out, but in a small town, we didn’t know what to expect.
“The school has been just wonderful. Like with the cookies…”
When the local Girl Scout Troop was selling cookies ear-lier this year, a few people bought cookies to donate to the soldiers, Gabby explained. It turned in to a huge deal, with more and more people picking up on the idea. Before long, there were hundreds of boxes of Girl Scout cookies donated to the troops.
“When it came time to mail the package, we asked (elemen-tary principal) Mrs. (Jennifer) Zschiesche if we could have a bake sale or something to raise money to pay for the postage,” Karen said.
“But she just said she would pay for the postage.”
“There was a ton of cook-ies,” continued Clark. “I spread them over the division head-quarters, and they certainly put smiles on everyone’s faces.”
Neighbors like the Wagners, who put the banner on their home to welcome Clark home, and Scott Weatherford and the Koethers, who have helped with fencing out on the place, and Dr. Jerry Zschiesche, who offered to help with feeding cows… “Everyone has been great. We’re very happy to be in Hamilton,” Clark said.
“The whole town has been wonderful,” he said. “We’ve lived all over America. We’ve lived all over the world – Rome, Paris, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Louisiana, California, Kentucky – but this was a no-brainer. Hamilton is great. We could tell from the start.”