‘I told you I’d make it’
Post Falls woman, among last troops to leave Iraq, welcomes short leave
The dust of Iraq still clung to the items crammed inside Spc. Blythe Briggs’ rucksack when she landed thousands of miles away in chilly Spokane.
“I feel bad for her,” her brother, Austin Briggs, 20, said before she deplaned at Spokane International Airport late Friday. “She’s going to have climate shock.”
Briggs, a 25-year-old Army medic with the 3rd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division, of Fort Hood, Texas, was among the last American soldiers to leave Iraq as the nearly 9-year-old war came to a close.
When she arrived in Spokane, she exchanged a tight embrace with her mother, Ruth Briggs.
“I’m back,” she told her mother as the two hugged. “I told you I’d make it.”
And Briggs, of Post Falls, who hasn’t seen her family in nearly a year, made it just in time for the holidays.
“Our biggest gift is walking through that gate,” said her father, Frank Briggs, who wore an American flag shirt and held a sign that read “Welcome Home, Soldier Girl.”
“She’s home safe and that’s the main thing,” he said.
She would have arrived home a little later if it weren’t for the generosity of an airline employee who got her on an earlier flight for no additional charge.
“I got the last seat and it was in first class,” said Briggs, who was planning on sleeping in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and flying home Saturday afternoon. “I wasn’t even expecting it. They were very generous.”
Like many soldiers returning from a deployment, Briggs doesn’t have elaborate plans for leave but is looking forward to “just spending time with family.”
“Just (to) get a chance to sit back and relax,” she said. “I’ve been running around like crazy for the last year.”
Exhausted after a long deployment, days of travel, sleeping in airports and sitting through a host of debriefings, the next couple weeks will be a welcome change of pace for the soldier.
“We were responsible for over 600 soldiers’ health and welfare,” she said. “You name it, we’ve dealt with it.”
During her deployment, her family only spoke with her intermittently online or, even less frequently, by phone.
“It was just sporadic,” Ruth Briggs said.
The 3rd Brigade was one of the last to depart Iraq, and soldiers from the brigade have been pouring into Fort Hood over the last week. Briggs was part of a convoy that crossed into Kuwait from Iraq last week.
“We actually lucked out,” she said of being one of the last remaining soldiers at Contingency Operating Base Adder near Nasiriyah, Iraq. “We didn’t have any problems with indirect fire.”
Briggs, who enlisted in April 2009 and deployed in February, said it was strange being one of the last soldiers.
“It went from very full … to a ghost town,” she said.
She’ll be in the company of her family for the holidays, but it may be the last time they see her again for quite a while. Briggs recently re-enlisted and will leave for duties in Germany this summer, and her brother is gearing up to go to college, so the family of four isn’t sure when they’ll all be together again.
While she’ll be home just two weeks, the family will take what time together they can get.
As Frank Briggs said, “A short time is better than no time.”