He Knows the Army Jeff Lucas wonders why his son's job was changed from a computer technician in a tank to a gunner in a humvee. (Photo Paula Gibbs)

A week ago, however, for reasons Lucas hasn’t been able to determine, his son was sent out as a gunner in a humvee. Joseph was killed by a roadside bomb, or IED (improvised explosive device). The father says he’s received very few details about his son’s death, including whether others died in the same explosion.

Jeffrey Lucas is a woodsman. He runs a skidder 150 miles from his home in Wiscasset. During the week he usually stays in Guilford, and comes home on the weekend.

Last Thursday night, December 15, he got a phone call from his wife, April (Dunning), the stepmother of his three sons, Jeffrey Jr., Joseph and Jason. April said she had been visiting a friend when she got a phone call from Jason, who told her there were two men in military uniforms at the door.

"I knew they were there for only one reason," Lucas said. "They had to wait for my wife to get home, because they couldn’t tell Jason. He’s a minor." Lucas said at the time he got his wife’s phone call, he was getting ready for bed.

"I didn’t wait for her to call back," he said. "I just started getting dressed again. I knew why they were there." Moments later April called to say Joseph had been killed in Balad, about 40 miles north of Bagdad.

"Jason was devastated," Lucas said. "Jason looked up to him like he was God." Jason, 16, is a junior at Wiscasset High School.

"Jason wanted to be just like his big brother. He wanted to do what Joey had done. He had all his paperwork ready to join the military. That night, he went and got all his paperwork and threw it in the woodstove."

"A year from now, or two years from now, at some point he may change his mind." An Army veteran himself, Jeff was in the military for six years. Joseph, in fact, was born on a military base in Kentucky on September 26, 1982.

Jeff and his wife, Barbara, came back to Maine and settled in Bath soon after he got out of the service. His second son, Jason, was born seven years after Joseph. But the couple divorced when Joseph was 14, and they let their sons decide where they wanted to live. Barbara was moving to Georgia, 1,100 miles away. Jason wanted to stay with his dad in Maine, but Joseph, he said, "wanted to go with his mother, so he could take care of her."

During his high school years, Joseph enrolled in ROTC. He loved it, his father says, and he planned to join the military after his high school graduation in 2001.

In May of 2002, he joined the U.S. Army, with the rank of E-3 because of his prior ROTC experience. Six months later, on November 9, 2002, he married his high school sweetheart, Heather, now 20. He was sent to Iraq in January of 2003, and spent about seven months there, his father says.

When he returned in the fall of 2003, he and Heather began planning their life together, starting with a search for a house they could afford. The following year, on August 3, 2004, the couple had their first child, a boy, whom they named Joseph Jr.

But just a few months later, in January of 2005, Joseph had to return to Iraq.

"When he was told he was going over for a second time, he told me he didn’t feel right about it," his father says. "When he was there the first time, he saw that some people wanted us to help them, and others wanted us to leave."

"But he had signed on the dotted line, to protect and serve in a time of war."

"He was supposed to come home this week," his father said. His arrival date in the U.S. was Tuesday, December 20.

"I don’t understand why they sent him out there," his father said. "Usually it takes two or three weeks to process somebody before they send them home. I never had any thought of him coming home this way, because he was always in a tank."

In addition to his sons, Joseph and Jason, Jeff has an older son, Jeffrey Jr., age 30, who lives in Phippsburg. Jeff and his wife, April, have four sons: Drew, 10; Jeremiah, eight; Johnny, six; and Dwight, three.

When Joseph was able to return home to Maine, his father said the younger boys in the family had a great time roughhousing with their older brother.

"They played with him like a big Romper doll," he says.

When he told the two older boys that Joseph had been killed, "I could see in their faces that they understood. The younger ones, especially the youngest, I don’t think they understood."

"But when they see Joe’s wife and baby, they’re going to say, "Where’s Joey?’

The service for Joseph will be two days after Christmas, December 27. April has already gone to Georgia, and Jeff says he is trying to get the money together to make the trip himself.

The four younger boys will be cared for - "spoiled," Jeff says, by April’s parents, John and Hope Dunning.

"It’s going to be a terrible Christmas for us all, especially Heather," he said. Joseph’s wife had just closed on a home he had never seen.

"I don’t know if she will keep it."

Asked what he will miss most about his son, he said, "Just being able to talk to him. I can’t stop thinking, why was he out there? He was supposed to be shipped home."