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FAMILY KEEPS FLAME ALIVE FOR SOLDIER KILLED IN ACTION

By Deborah Horn/SPECIAL TO THE COMMERCIAL
Saturday, November 14, 2009 9:29 PM CST

WHITE HALL — The White Hall home looks the ideal cover for a home-and-garden magazine. Perhaps more like a cozy cottage. It’s cocooned by a cover of native trees and despite the sprinkling of red, yellow and orange fall leaves covering the long, winding asphalt driveway, it is picture-perfect.

At her White Hall home, Billie Doster holds a picture of her son, James Doster, with his daughters, Kathryn, left, (then 6 years old) and Grace, right (who was 3). Special to The Commercial/Deborah Horn

The comfortable and welcoming home, built in the mid-1960s by Charles and Billie Doster, would prove an exceptional place to raise their two boys, Robert and James. At the end of the drive is a long-forgotten basketball goal, but nonetheless, it remains shiny and inviting, as if waiting for a dunk or two, and the unfettered laughter of youth.

The Doster boys, who spent many hours shooting hoops, grew up, left home, started their own families and pursued careers, determined to leave their own mark on the world.

Sure, they returned home to celebrate holidays, marriages, the birth of a child or to attend a funeral.

But one son won’t ever return to his childhood home again.

Army Sgt. First Class James Doster was killed Sept. 29, 2007, in a roadside bombing in Iraq.

The early years

While Charles Doster worked at the Weyerhaeuser Paper Co. in Pine Bluff, his wife taught elementary school in the Pine Bluff School District, and after years of trying to have a baby, the couple decided to adopt. About 13 months after the arrival of their adopted son, Robert, whose mother calls him “Rob,” Billie Doster found out she was pregnant with James.

She describes the 9 pound, 1-ounce boy as their “miracle baby,” who was “very much wanted and loved.”

“He (James) was a very sweet little boy,” recalled Billie Doster while sitting in her home.

Once while walking past the meat department at a local grocery store, Billie Doster remembered (she tells this story with a smile) seeing a big steer hanging on a large meat hook.

Little James said at the time, “Wow, they sure killed a big chicken this time.”

“We ate a lot of chicken at home,” she explained.

Neither Rob nor James was particularly athletic but Billie Doster says they tried. Instead, Rob Doster, a nature lover from a young age, studied biology, eventually earning a Ph.D. in the subject.

James Doster graduated from White Hall High School and signed up for classes at Hendrix College in Conway. During his sophomore year he joined the Army.

Much of James Doster’s 17-year Army career was spent as a recruiter, but he served in Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf War (known commonly as the first Gulf War). He was in one of the first tanks to cross the battle line, his mother said.

“He was young and didn’t have a family then. He was less gung ho this time. He had two young girls and a very happy marriage to leave behind,” his mother said about his Feb. 4, 2007, deployment.

“He loved what he was doing,” Billie Doster said. “I think he liked the structure of the military.”

Ironically, it was as recruiter in Grand Junction, Col., that James Doster met his future wife, Amanda Garner, who was contacted by the Army as a potential recruit.

“I met him quite by chance,” Amanda Doster said from her home in Wamego, Kan. “There was a message on the answering machine.”

When she returned the call to the recruiting office, James Doster answered.

“We started talking,” and they spent about two hours on the phone, she recalled. Before the day’s end, she drove to his office.

“We looked at each other,” she said. The rest is romantic history.

While Amanda Doster was medically disqualified as a soldier, she married into the military about 16 months later.

“I remember looking down at my engagement ring, and thinking I’m the luckiest girl in the world. I’m marrying the guy of my dreams,” she said.

They were a perfect match, sharing important core values.

“He was patient, a morning person, he made his ‘j’s’ backward,” said Amanda Doster, who gave birth to their first daughter, Kathryn, during their first year of marriage. Their second daughter was born three years later.

He was very much “hands-on” with his daughters, even willing to get up in the middle of the night, she said.

“He impressed me as a father.”

Unfortunately, the career soldier, who often worked 80-hour weeks as a recruiter, didn’t get to spend as much time with his daughters as he would have liked. He had few hobbies; instead choosing to spend his down time with his wife and children.

The couple loved comedies and scary movies and would spend hours watching “Friends” on DVD.

Amanda Doster described her husband as “very quiet”; in fact, “if he was speaking,” she listened. Like James Doster’s father, Charles Doster, “if he was talking, it was important,” she said.

Married nearly seven years and together for nine, Amanda Doster confided, “He was a huge part of my life. He took care of me; he sheltered me.”

“He made it his duty to make things better for us and (later, during the second Gulf War) for his guys at the combat outpost,” she said.

“He lived his life with dignity and integrity.”

“My truth and

my treasure”

Amanda Doster was making cookies when the doorbell rang. She was busy, a little annoyed at the interruption, but nonetheless she threw open the front door without looking through the peephole first.

Earlier in the afternoon, she had noticed “a large, strange truck” in her neighborhood and “wondered who they were visiting.” The young Army wife didn’t realize the Army “Reconnaissance Team” was scoping out her house, waiting for her to return.

In front of her stood a two-man team in their best dress uniforms. She stared at the chaplain who stood in front. He broke eye contact and somewhere deep inside Amanda Doster knew what they were there to tell her.

But for 20 minutes, she ran around the house, turning off the oven, calling her mother and a neighbor who came over to take charge of her two young girls. Kathryn was 6 and Grace was 3 when their father was killed.

“I feared losing control,” she said. She felt that if the words weren’t said out loud then James Doster was still alive.

Why, she had only talked with him the day before and he was full of excitement about his upcoming mid-tour leave.

“We didn’t have any real plans. He wanted to sleep, hang out,” she said.

“It hurt. He was my soulmate, my truth and my treasure. He was my soft shoulder,” she said.

Finally, while standing in the kitchen, one of the soldiers asked, “Do you have any health problems? Is there anyone we can call?”

It was then that they broke the news about her husband’s recent death.

Amanda Doster, feeling it a super surreal moment, remembered saying that she didn’t want to be the one to tell her mother-in-law.

Back in White Hall

September is a bad month for Billie Doster. The previous week had been the first anniversary of her husband’s death. They were married for more than 45 years.

Billie Doster was completely unprepared when she answered the door at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 29, 2007, to learn that her son, a couple of weeks from turning 38, was killed in action in southern Baghdad.

“It was of the worst days of my life,” she said, now two years later.

James Doster, who had volunteered to leave his desk job for active duty in Iraq, was killed Sept. 29, 2007, in a roadside bombing. Platoon Sergeant for B Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division based out of Fort Riley, Kan., James Doster died from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated near his vehicle.

James Doster was the 53rd Arkansas soldier to be killed in the Iraq war.

At that time, Billie Doster told a reporter for The Commercial: “It’s so easy to read ‘an American soldier was killed’ in the papers. You don’t really make the connection,” she said, quietly weeping. “When it’s your own, you find it a lot harder.”

A final farewell

Recently, Billie Doster recalled fondly the many “kindnesses” paid to her in the days following her son’s death. She remembered people lining the road, many saluting as her son’s body made its way through White Hall one final time.

The day of the funeral, dozens of American flags waved in the breeze along the route that took the soldier and his family to Lakeside United Methodist Church in Pine Bluff.

The Thursday celebration of James Doster’s life was heralded by the full force of about 100 Patriot Guard Riders, a national motorcycle group composed mostly of former soldiers who escort and stand sentry when fallen soldiers are brought back home.

In addition to this duty, the group takes on the responsibility of keeping the Topeka (Kan.) Westboro Baptist Church protectors separated from the family. “They did a great job,” Billie Doster said.

Gov. Mike Beebe honored James Doster on the day of his funeral, Oct. 11, 2007, by officially ordering all flags be flown at half-staff.

Both Beebe and U.S. Rep. Mike Ross attended the funeral.

Young Kathryn had been counting the days until her daddy was supposed to be home. In the days before the funeral, Kathryn was heard more than once saying, “It’s not fair.”

Doster’s close personal friend and former pastor, the Rev. Dan Barber of Miles City, Mo., required a few moments to choke back tears as he stood over his friend’s flag-draped coffin before declaring. “He died with honor. He died with grace.”

“So if Kathryn’s young heart couldn’t understand the reason for her father’s death, the service — in its full, honorable patriotic regalia — surely made one thing crystal clear to her: Her father died just as he had lived — a hero,” a Commercial reporter wrote at the time.

Now, it’s not unusual for a soldier who served with James Doster to e-mail or call Amanda Doster or at times request to come by her home to talk and meet the girls.

“His guys wear memorial bracelets,” Amanda Doster said. “I feel cheated because I won’t get to grow old with him.” A few days ago her youngest daughter blew out the candles on her sixth birthday cake. “It’s hard.”

Amanda Doster said she doesn’t want another woman, whether an American or Iraqi mother, wife or daughter, to lose a loved one. But she’s not bitter and doesn’t feel her husband died in vain. Instead, he died doing what he loved and what he believed in, she explained.

Even today, James Doster is never far from their hearts. Not too long ago, Amanda Doster bought a new vehicle and the girls dubbed the passenger seat “daddy’s seat.”

“He’s in our lives every day.”

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