Daughter was Bellevue soldier's 'reason for living'

Editor's Note: This is the seventh of occasional stories about the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.

Tracie Hall had to muster the courage to tell her 3-year-old daughter that her Daddy was killed in Iraq.

She sat Rachael on the couch and, surrounded by her parents and in-laws, softly told her that her Daddy -- Army Spc. Robert E. Hall Jr. -- had been hurt.

"Did they take Daddy to the hospital?" Rachael wanted to know.

"No, honey," her Mom said. "He was hurt so bad that God had to come take him to Heaven."

The girl screamed.

"That scream could've made your skin crawl," Hall said in the living room of her Findlay home.

Two years later, Tracie Hall and her daughter are trying to figure out how to move on with their lives.

Hall, who was 30 when he died, is one of more than 3,500 U.S. soldiers killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He'd been in Iraq seven months, assigned to the Army Reserve's 467th Engineer Battalion based in Greenwood, Miss.

He was guarding his base's entry gate on June 28, 2005, when a suicide bomber drove up and detonated a car bomb.

"The pain never goes away," said Tracie Hall, 29, who lived with her husband in Bellevue. "All it takes is for me to look at his picture, and I fall apart."

Hall worked for Waste Management Inc., in Ambridge. Although he knew going to Iraq was something he had to do, he was reluctant to leave behind his wife and daughter. He was planning a leave to come home for his daughter's birthday.

"She was his life," said Hall's mother, Midge Beachem, of Ross. "She was his reason for living. She really liked her Daddy, too. They were very, very close."

Knowing that Rachael was too little to understand the concept of war, the Halls told her that Daddy was going overseas to help poor people. She was proud of that. On the day before her Dad died, while they talked on the phone, they sang together a song about bumble bees.

Months after Hall died, on Rachael's 4th birthday, she had a special wish.

"I'm going to wish that God bring my Daddy back," she told her mother.

When her Mom told her that wouldn't be possible, Rachael offered to rent a car and drive to wherever he was -- if only for two weeks.

Tracie Hall says it's unbearable to know her husband will not be around to see Rachael graduate from high school or walk her down the aisle at her wedding.

"When she lost her first tooth, I lost it," Tracie Hall said. "Those are things he should've been here for. Those are things that he anticipated seeing."

Hall himself was 3 when he lost his father in an industrial accident.

Beachem -- whose other children, Lori Unver, Tara Seamon and Steven Hall -- remember little of their father, fears Rachael won't remember her Dad when she grows up.

"When you ask her where he's at, she'll say in Heaven," said Beachem, 55. "And butterflies will remind her of him ... but I don't bring it up. I don't want her to cry."

Tracie Hall believes Rachael is adjusting well, and asks questions about things her Dad liked to do. She played soccer last year because she knows her Daddy liked soccer.

Their home is filled with pictures of Hall, and a memorial with a tall flagpole and headstone sit at the entrance.

"I don't want (Rachael) to ever forget her Dad," Tracie Hall said. "That would be devastating."