Maine soldier loses his final battle

After surviving a one-year deployment in Iraq and enduring the journey back to the United States, Michael Jones had one more stop before heading home to his wife and three children in Unity, Maine.

At Fort Drum in upstate New York, Jones was scheduled for a standard layover of a few days for processing paperwork and reacclimation. But hours after his arrival on Feb. 23, the 43-year-old began complaining of abdominal pain. He was rushed to surgery to clear arterial blockage, but his condition worsened.

Yesterday, the father of three died, hours after his fellow soldiers in Bravo Company of the 133d Engineer Battalion of the Maine Army National Guard had returned to Maine.

Jones's death marked the fourth loss for the 548-member battalion, some of whose members narrowly escaped one of the bloodiest attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, the suicide bombing of a mess hall in Mosul in December. Two of the battalion's members died in that attack, and 10 others were injured. Another soldier died earlier in a roadside bombing.

Jones ''did such a great job over there, going through mortar attacks, and to come home and have this happen -- it's just unbelievable," said Major Peter Rogers, a spokesman for the Maine National Guard. ''It's a real tragedy."

Jones, a native of Maine, was a truck driver for a distribution company in Augusta. He made his home in Unity, a town between the capital and Bangor. He had devoted 27 years to the National Guard, in which he held the rank of sergeant first class.

He was the father of three children: Alissa, 18, another daughter who is 23, and a son who is 20. He would have been 44 next week.

Memorial services have not yet been planned.

Alissa Jones said her father was devoted to the 133d Battalion, happily giving his weekends to duty.

''That was his life," she said. ''He was absolutely in love with the 133d."

It was an appreciation, she said, that she only fully understood after attending the welcome-home ceremony Wednesday night for the other returning soldiers in her father's company. There in the town of Belfast, surrounded by cheering throngs of soldiers' families, she said, it struck her. ''Every one of those soldiers was amazing," she said.

She said her father had not been in the mess hall in Mosul when the bomb exploded there in December, though he was in the vicinity. Her father, she said, tried to avoid crowds while he was in Iraq.

''He always told us he stayed away from big crowds, because he said the bad stuff happened in the big crowds," she said.

Rogers, the Maine National Guard spokesman, said Jones had arrived at Fort Drum on Feb. 23 and complained of pain the next day during the demobilization process. Doctors in Syracuse advised that his situation was grave, and the Guard flew Jones's wife to the hospital.

''She had been with him ever since," Rogers said.

Alissa Jones said she received the bad news when her father called the evening of Feb. 24. She said he could barely talk and eventually put the nurse on the phone to explain the situation. Her father was rushed into emergency surgery at a Syracuse hospital the next day to repair arterial blockage in his stomach, a condition he had suffered before. The following morning, he underwent another surgery to remove his colon, said his daughter.

''Everything went downhill from there," she said. ''Everything just started shutting down."

If he had felt ill in Iraq, Alissa Jones said, he never told his family or anyone else.

''He was just so excited to come home," she said.