Features

Reprinted from Newsday, July 29 

There was no ceremonial viewing of the body of Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter on July 28. His remains have not arrived here from Iraq. He was a spectacular 21-year-old who was killed when a convoy in which he was riding was attacked early in the morning outside of Baghdad. 

His mother, Cathy Heighter, spent yesterday afternoon sitting with relatives in her mother's house on Long Island. She expects the body back next week. Then there will be a public viewing. 

“I want to let people know he died for this country,” the mother was saying. “He died an American hero.” 

“He was supposed to be home in June,” one of the women in the living room said. 

“Been there too long,” an aunt, Barbara Adams, said. 

“They wanted to come home,” one of the others said. 

“They’ve been there too long,” Cathy Heighter said. 

She is a pretty woman of 45. She wore a cream blouse and blue pants and sat on a living room couch underneath front windows. She has a respiratory ailment that causes her to cough persistently. 

“The field commander called me,” she was saying. “He talked so very highly of Raheen. He said the troops looked up to him. He fought to the end. He emptied his gun. 

“I loved him,” she said. 

“He loved you,” one of the women said. 

Already her son has written the moving, memorable lines of the war. They were in a letter sent on June 20 and arriving at his mother’s house on July 2: “Today is a blissful day ... today is the first time I realized you have tried your hardest to bring the bestowed, hidden, optimistic and spontaneous qualities out of me ... as I sit here in tears, I thank you.” 

The mother never liked the idea of the Army from the start. He was 17, and she was in her beauty shop, “Beyond Images of Beauty” on Main Street in Bay Shore, when an Army recruiting officer came in. He said that he had seen Raheen in high school and the young man told him that he wanted to join. 

“The recruiter said he just needed my signature,” she said. “I told him, ‘Don’t even ask. Get out of here.’” 

Her son, however, saw his life ahead as something that he had to run right up to like a train on the tracks outside. 

Let me tell you what this country lost in Iraq the other day when Rasheen Heighter was shot dead because he was there. 

At 14, he came home from school and took a number two pencil and drew a father holding his son. Holding the child to his chest with a powerful left arm protecting the child from a world that the father, his face strong and simultaneously haunted by pain, could see ahead for the son. 

It is a wonderful drawing. 

He and his mother, who sells art out of her bright beauty shop, made prints of the drawing and sold them. He thought that was a good enough start, but he was going to go so much higher. He was going to pierce the sky.  

When he graduated from high school, he worked in a brokerage, and he studied for a license exam, but he saw so much more dancing on horizons that only he could discern. He wanted to go to college outside of New York. He had to. Sure, he would use such a place, with its walks through trees, with its professors, as an exciting studio for his art. But there were so many other things on his mind. He found the romance of thought overwhelming. 

The combined income of his mother and father, who was in construction, wasn’t spectacular but it was over the limit for scholarships and loans. 

There was one way. Out there in the high school halls and the gym and the football field were the military recruiters with their dark bargains. You put your body up and if nothing happens you get college paid for. Raheen took the Army. That is the contract signed by so many in the country. The Army buys them for a college degree. It works unless you wind up in Iraq and come home in a box. 

On Aug. 7, 2001, he walked into his mother’s shop and said he was leaving for the Army the next day. He had sold himself. He was now old enough to enlist without her written permission. “He put me in shock,” she said yesterday. “We got up at 5:30 the next morning. He had three big duffel bags packed. They told him to bring only one. I hugged him. I told him I loved him. I told him be a man.” Which was redundant. 

The other day at 10 a.m., she was on the phone in her beauty shop with a customer who was late and wanted to change times. Her oldest son, Glynn, and two Army officers walked in and stood nervously. “You think you’re seeing ghosts,” she was saying yesterday. “I’m standing there on the phone and I know they are there to tell me that my son is dead. How can this be happening? They are ghosts. I told the woman on the phone, ‘You can come anytime.’ I hung up. And then they told me.” 

“Why do we stay there?” an aunt said. “They don’t want us there.” 

“Shooting at us. They don’t want us there.” 

“They don’t want us there.” 

“Do they know why they’re there?” they were asked. 

“No. They don’t know. They’re there for their country. That’s what they know,” the soldier’s mother said. 

“Do you know?” one aunt was asked. 

“Oil.” 

“Oil,” Cathy Heighter said, softly and so sadly.