Mom: Ohio soldier was protector, fulfilling dream

TROY, Ohio (AP) — Sandy Whee­lock stared down at the tiny fig­ure stand­ing in front of her, clad from head-to-toe in a black ninja costume.

From behind the black ninja mask, with eyes beam­ing, came a muf­fled voice: “I checked every­thing out, Mom. Every­thing is OK.”

“He would always wear that lit­tle ninja cos­tume with a wooden spoon tucked in his belt because I didn’t like guns,” Whee­lock said. “He would play out­side and when he would come in, he would tell me, ‘I checked every­thing out, Mom. Every­thing is OK.’ He was always wor­ried about pro­tect­ing me. His whole life, that’s how he was — he was always wor­ried about pro­tect­ing his mom and his sisters.”

That was more than 15 years ago, when Jef­frey Rice was a young man grow­ing up in Troy. On July 19, Army Pri­vate First Class Rice, 24, lost his life while serv­ing in Afghanistan as a part of Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom. Early Sun­day morn­ing, Whee­lock was at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet her son’s body as it arrived from the Mid­dle East. Funeral ser­vices still are pend­ing and the United States Depart­ment of Defense has yet to reveal any details regard­ing his death.

“All they will say is that they still have to do the inves­ti­ga­tion and the autopsy,” Whee­lock said. “I really don’t know any details — and I don’t think I want to know any details.”

While details of his death may be unknown, those who knew Rice best are will­ing to offer plenty of details about his life. His mother remem­bers him as a vora­cious eater who would devour her home­made Rice Krispie treats by the pan and con­sume pack­ages of Ramen noo­dles by the half-dozen. She said he “loved fish­ing, look­ing at the stars through this big tele­scope he had and drink­ing beer.”

Much more than any of that, how­ever, the peo­ple in his life — par­tic­u­larly the women in his life, his mother, aunt, sis­ters and nieces — remem­ber him as some­one who always put fam­ily first and looked to pro­tect his loved ones.

Even while sta­tioned in Afghanistan, Rice would fre­quently call and write to check up on his nieces, Ali, Kris­ten and Makayla. Rice also grew up lov­ing foot­ball. He played his first two years in high school and, enter­ing his junior sea­son in the fall of 2005, the 6-foot-2, 220-pound Rice appeared ready to assume a start­ing role along the offen­sive line for a pow­er­house Troy team that had just been to the play­offs the year before.

Just before the sea­son started, how­ever, Rice gave it all up to help take care of his fam­ily. Rice’s father, Bruce, had suf­fered a stroke in 2003.

He never recov­ered from the stroke, and Rice quit foot­ball to help take care of his ail­ing father, who passed away in 2007.

His junior year, Rice, a Troy High School stu­dent, began tak­ing classes in Piqua at the Upper Val­ley Joint Voca­tional School, which has since been renamed the Upper Val­ley Career Cen­ter. He stud­ied weld­ing, which his mother said seemed a nat­ural fit.

“He was always tak­ing things apart,” Whee­lock said. “I would come home and there would be parts left over from what he had taken apart. I’d find pieces and parts that didn’t go with anything.”

His weld­ing skills were enough to earn him a schol­ar­ship to the Hobart School of Weld­ing fol­low­ing his high school grad­u­a­tion in 2007, but by then he already had decided to pur­sue his life­long dream of enter­ing the military.

Fol­low­ing grad­u­a­tion, Rice worked briefly at Speed­way, the Troy Bowl and for his aunt’s FedEx busi­ness. On Sept. 22, 2008, Rice entered the United States Army.

Rice was assigned to the 20th Engi­neer Bat­tal­ion, 36th Engi­neer Brigade in Fort Hood, Texas. His nat­ural curios­ity for tak­ing things apart and putting them back together, cou­pled with his weld­ing back­ground, served him well when he was shipped off to Afghanistan in Jan­u­ary 2010.

Rice served as a field engi­neer in Kan­da­har, Afghanistan.

“If bridges were blown up or what­ever, he would rebuild them,” Whee­lock said. “It was a dan­ger­ous job.”

Whee­lock knew her son was putting his life in dan­ger and feared for his safety. Rice, how­ever, always was quick to try to put his mother at ease.

“He was so proud of what he was doing,” Whee­lock said. “I knew that’s what he wanted to do. On the inside, I didn’t want him to go, but I wasn’t going to stand in his way.”

Rice would spend nearly two years in Afghanistan before return­ing home in Decem­ber of 2010, just in time for the hol­i­days. He imme­di­ately wanted to return to the Mid­dle East, but, as usual, was con­cerned about his mother, par­tic­u­larly fol­low­ing his father’s death sev­eral years ear­lier. Once he got the green light from his mother, though, he signed up for another tour of duty.

In Feb­ru­ary of this year, Rice was again deployed to Afghanistan. Every chance he got, he would call or email his mother to let her know how he was doing.

This past Thurs­day, Whee­lock was greeted at her front door by a pair of army offi­cials who let her know her son had died while in Afghanistan.

“I didn’t open the front door right away, because I thought, ‘Nobody ever rings the door­bell here; they always just come in through the garage,’” Whee­lock said. “It was like a movie.”

As she sat at her kitchen table Mon­day morn­ing recount­ing her son’s life, she read over an email he had sent her. Tears filled her eyes as she read the email. It would be the last one she ever received from her son.

The clos­ing read: “one last thing i really really miss you and i love you mom. write you soon”

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Jul 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.