KILLEEN — Ashley Hudgins remembers the heartache of not only learning her husband of four-and-a-half years had been killed by enemy mortar fire in Iraq, but also watching her then-3-year-old daughter trying to come to grips with the news that her daddy was not coming home.
“He would Skype with her a lot,” said Ashley, a New York native now living in Killeen. “She knew how to go on my laptop, go to where the Skype icon was, find her dad’s name on the contact list, and all you would hear is the Skype music trying to connect to the other caller.
“That gets me every time I think about it. For her, being 3 years old and not understanding why he is not picking up (the call) was the hardest part. But it’s OK because we had to go through those phases.”
Staff Sgt. Quadi Hudgins died on April 2, 2011, along with another soldier, when their living quarters at F.O.B. Kalsu was attacked. It was his third deployment to Iraq. Ashley and daughter, Nyima, had moved back to New York from Killeen to be with family while he was gone, and so she did not receive notification of his death right away.
“When a soldier’s family moves around during a deployment, they’re supposed to let their chain of command know,” Ashley said. “All they had was my old address, so it took them 24 to 48 hours to find me. After looking around and trying to figure out where we were, they contacted his mom, who was the second emergency contact. That’s who got in touch with me.
“All that stuff you see in the movies – soldiers walking up to the door and all that – that’s what happened at his mom’s house. So when she got the information, she called me immediately.
“She was crying and really couldn’t talk. I kept saying, ‘What is wrong? Do you need something? Are you OK?’ She never called crying like that. She handed the phone to my sister-in-law, and she said, ‘Ashley, there’s a guy at our door and he said that Quadi passed away.’
“I hung up the phone and was just staring at it in disbelief. Then the phone rings again, and it was my sister-in-law. She was, like, ‘Ashley, did you hear what I said?’
“I was quiet. This was real. There was a captain there – a casualty assistance officer – who was part of the funeral detail and he got on the phone and he said, ‘Ms. Hudgins, we need your address so we can send a C.A.O. to come to your home and help you through this.’”
Quadi was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full honors, including the horse-drawn Caisson Hearse, soldiers accompanying in dress blues – “They had taps on the bottom of their dress shoes,” Ashley said, “and they walked in sync, so there would be one tap (with each step).” – a 21-gun salute and Taps.
Ashley says she tried to hold it together during the service, but it was all too much.
“I was 23 years old, and I feel like even when we were going through the burial stuff, I was sad, but it’s also bittersweet to see how beautifully they honored him. Then you look around, and you’re in a cemetery,” she said.
“I feel like I numbed myself to be strong. I was in shock. I think that lasted for almost a year. I don’t think anything hit me until after he was buried and at peace, and I could no longer get video calls on Skype or Yahoo. I didn’t get any weird, long-digit numbers calling my phone at weird times of night. That’s when it became real.
“Had we been having this conversation during the first year or two years (after Quadi’s death), I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said. “Some memories still choke me up, but I can make it through and talk about it now. I can deal with most of the emotions.”
Something that still brings a flood of tears is talking about trying to explain things to little Nyima, who was too young to fully understand the situation, but also bright enough to know something was wrong.
“She would always ask, ‘Mom, when is Dad coming home?’ She knew about God and the skies and birds. So I just pretty much told her that Daddy is now in heaven with God in the sky,” Ashley said. “She said, ‘Daddy’s not coming home?’
“I said, ‘No, not anymore.’
“She says, ‘Mommy, I wish I was a bird so I could fly up in the sky and see Daddy.’ My mom and I looked at each other. We were like, ‘What did she just say? Did she really put that together?’
“I will never forget that.”
Ashley also served in the military for a time, joining the Army a year after graduating high school in Sodus, New York, in 2005. She was a standout basketball player on a team that went 21-0 her junior year, when a serious knee injury ended her career.
“I couldn’t play basketball anymore, so it was, like, ‘What do you want to do now?’” she said. “A lot of my family members are military. My mom’s father; my dad’s sister, nephew, brother-in-law … all military. So I leaned on them. I thought, well, I’ll get to travel, work out, and go to college for free. So I enlisted (in 2006).”
Basic training was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, followed by AIT at Fort Lee, Virginia, where she trained in logistics. Then it was off to her first duty station at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where she met Quadi. They got married in 2007, and after Ashley got pregnant, they started talking about her leaving the service.
“After we had Ny and he deployed – I didn’t get to see him my whole pregnancy, and he wasn’t able to be there for the birth – he came home a month after she was born and we had a long conversation,” Ashley said. “To be accepted into the military with a blown ACL (knee ligament) and still be able to exceed their standards, I was looking at it as a career. But knowing that they were sending moms (overseas) six weeks after having a baby, that was it.
“I couldn’t see myself leaving this little one, so we agreed he would stay in and I would stay home with the baby.”
Ashley and Ny started making annual trips to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the gravesite, and back in March of this year, they went to the 639-acre facility in Arlington, Virginia, largest cemetery in the country and final resting place of more than 400,000 people, to take senior pictures as Nyima, now 18 years old, prepares to graduate from high school.
“Any milestone that she has, we go and visit,” Ashley said. “It’s still important to take her where he is buried and keep him in the loop with everything. Any milestone that she reaches, that’s where we go.
“We have some little rituals and traditions that we do. Whenever we bought roses or flowers, we would make it harder for the cleanup detail. We would take roses and peel the petals back and sprinkle them all around his grave area. At Arlington – and I think with any military cemetery – they have cleaners clean the headstones and around the graves, so we would make it difficult for them every time we went. We put flowers and petals on the ground all around his headstone … basically making a mess but having fun doing it.
“It was maybe year one through four, we cried. Then we decided to celebrate instead of crying. We didn’t want to cry anymore. Let’s just have fun with balloons and flowers and giving the cleanup crew a hard time.
“It’s bittersweet. There have been times that we are there on a regular visit and you can hear the 21-gun salutes, the bugle being played in the distance … so sometimes it’s almost like you can hear someone else’s ceremony.
“It definitely refreshes the memory of the day you had your ceremony.”
Along with taking senior pictures at the gravesite, Ashley surprised Ny back home in Killeen with a fully restored 2003 black Chevrolet Trailblazer that once belonged to her father.
Ashley says the military did an excellent job supporting and helping her in the wake of Quadi’s death. Now a mother of four, she and Ny are doing well, although the memories are always there, along with the occasional, “what if?”
“I wonder where we’d be today, if it had never happened,” Ashley said. “I think about everything that brought me to the point where I am right now.
“My family believes in God, and that he doesn’t make mistakes. When the F.O.B. came under fire with mortar rounds, if it had happened 10, 20 minutes prior to the time that it happened, he would not have been in his room. He was a boxer, so he was always in the gym.
“We got to see him a week before that happened, when he came home on R and R. My grandma is very spiritual and she said, ‘God allowed him to come home one more time before he passed.’
“I’m thankful that my first time being in love, having my first child, I actually had a very good relationship with him and I thank God for that. You just want to cherish the time, because now you can’t get that back. I want to argue again about who left the toilet seat up – little stuff like that.
“I’m not going to say that I’m not satisfied with how my life has brought me to where I am, but I have grown. I have learned to be a better mom. I have learned to be a better companion. Where I am in my mental space now, I am satisfied. I’m OK.
“Here are a few words I’ve held onto over the years:
“Our struggles do not define us. It may feel like the end, but it is just our new beginning. You are stronger than you know.”