19- year-old wanted to get ‘ life started’

Six days before she died on June 5, Army Cpl. Carrie French wrote home about her amazing good fortune. A soldier with the Idaho National Guard who spent her 19th birthday in Iraq on Feb. 28, French wrote that her boyfriend, Army Spc. Matt Harvey, had just been on another dangerous convoy mission but had come through OK.

“ That’s his second one,” French tapped on her keyboard in an email to her mother, Paula Hylinski, back in Caldwell, Idaho. “ I can’t believe how luckywe are. I thank God every day for him!”

French poured her heart out in these letters and e- mails, particularly in one long correspondence drafted three months into her deployment that captured the longings and regrets of a very short life.

“ I’m quiet on the phone when I call lately,” she wrote by way of an apology to her mother on March 1. “ I’m homesick. . . . Holidays aren’t anything here. On Valentine’s Day, Matt and I fought, so that ruined that. My birthday was just another day I had to work. Most of the day, I forgot itwas even my birthday.

“ I want to be home getting my life started.” High school graduation: Carrie French with her parents, Paula Hylinski and Rick French, in June 2004. She left for boot camp not long after that.

Hylinksi could see a maturing young woman in the words. “ She was growing up,” says the mother about a daughter whose two fundamental dreams were to gather enough money for college and law school and to one day buy a Dodge Ram pickup. French had joined the guard while in high school. She was an ammunitions specialist.

“ Life is going to go on back at home, and I’m going to miss out on so much,” she wrote. “ The hardest is knowing that when I do > nally get home, there’s a good chance I’ll have three less grandparents. I could never see them again.”

She was referring to a grandfather suffering from cancer, retired Lt. Col. Ralph Little, and two greatgrandmothers, Clarice Lightfoot and Lavetra Upshaw, in ill health. “ I can’t go ask grandpa for help with my ( essays) or eat his jelly bellies. Who’s going to call us ‘ dingbat?’ I’m not going to get to listen to Grandma Lightfoot’s stories or let her give me kisses on the cheeks that leave lipstick prints. Grandma Upshaw might not be there to sew us blankets and be sassy!”

There was a penitent nature to the soldier’swords. “ I wish I would have done things different when I was home, when I had the chance,” she wrote. “ I wish I took time to hang outwith my dad instead of always running off. . . . I wish I wasn’t so mean to ( 8- year-old halfsister) Mikala. . . . It wouldn’t have hurt me to play Barbies with her.”

Her great-grandmother Lightfoot, in fact, died on Oct. 15.

Four months earlier, on June 5, the great- granddaughterwas in the passenger seat of a fuel tanker in a convoy driving through Kirkuk when a roadside explosion killed her immediately. She was the only casualty in the attack. love letters “Can’t be without you”: Christine Bellavia reads letter from her late husband, Sgt. Joseph Bellavia. Bellavia: “ Luckiest man alive.”

Family photo