Ar Ridwaniyah, Iraq – Standing by his tank during a break in sweeps south of Baghdad, Sgt. Tobi Leiker pulled out a notebook and mused on elves versus gnomes.
“What’s that?” Pfc. Adam Bientema said from atop the tank.
“Oh,” Leiker said, “I’m writing down some ideas for my book.”
The book – “about a princess who follows her father into danger and learns how to solve a 1,000-year-old problem” – is a labor of love for Leiker’s 5-year-old daughter Aradia, and wife, Amber, 24, back home in Colorado Springs.
When the 3rd Armored Cavalry returns, Leiker said, he’ll give it to them. Meanwhile, writing helps him stay sane in a war zone.
He’s torn between his duties as a father and a warrior.
On one hand, he rolls through this dusty foreign land of palm trees and minarets training an M1A2 tank cannon on possible targets in a hunt for insurgents. On the other, the 28-year-old makes silly noises and crawls around a Fort Carson living room playing elephant when he’s back home. Anything to make Aradia smile.
“She just amazes me every day,” he said.
The war puts at least as much pressure on his wife, Leiker said. She’s had occasional back pain since breaking her tailbone as a girl, which complicates caring for Aradia, not to mention the pit bull, Odie, and two cats, J.J. and Garfield, wandering through the rented townhouse at Fort Carson.
Back home, Amber had been hoping to keep up her studies in psychology and sociology at Pikes Peak Community College. The waiting is difficult.
“If it was up to me, he wouldn’t be over there; he would be home with me,” Amber said from Fort Carson. “I know he will come home. I have to keep telling myself that; I know he will come home.”
Leiker said fatherhood changed his life. Growing up around Plano, Texas, he felt angry “at the fact that everybody around me was rich and I wasn’t.” That anger drove him to fight, drive drunk and race his ’69 Nova against Vipers and BMWs. Once he leaped from the roof of one moving vehicle to another, he said.
“I want Aradia to grow up with more boundaries – so she doesn’t go buck wild like I did,” he said.
This is his second combat stint in Iraq. The first time, in 2003, he injured his shoulder and had to return home for surgery. While healing, he grew interested in computer animation for children. And that led to writing.
Amber remembers how every time he wrote home during his first stint in Iraq, his letters contained a poem, “and it started from there.”
Leiker savors memories of how, at the end of each day in Colorado, he would return home and hear Aradia say: “Hi, Daddy.” He would hug her and Amber and ask about their day. Another memory Leiker clings to here: bedtime, where “we ask her to pick out a book.”
A proficient kindergarten reader, Aradia favored animal books. Sometimes, she’d read. Or she’d lie with her head on Leiker’s shoulder following the words as he read to her. Or he sometimes told her stories that he made up, Amber said.
Before Leiker deployed for a second time, he took Aradia and Amber to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Aradia learned about ancient Egypt, dressed up as an astronaut and played with “moon mud.”
He wished he had finished the “castle” with a slide he planned to build behind the townhouse.
In Iraq, he works on his 12-chapter book pitting gnomes – meant to represent ordinary workers – against elves, who represent an elite, “who live in the trees and practice magic.”
Leiker recently drafted part of Chapter 7, in which “Princess Aradia” pulls out a magic flute to try to tame growling wild beasts.
“She brought the instrument up to her lips and released her pent-up breath. To Aradia’s amazement, one of the most soothing and beautiful tones she’d ever heard flowed like a summer’s breeze. With her eyes closed, she could feel the energy of the forest flowing through her and out through the music.”
He circulates his draft – a gunner was interested – seeking feedback. And he has enlisted Pfc. T.J. Halverson, “an amazing artist,” to sketch illustrations.
But war intrudes. Some days, he can’t think about the book.
“If there’s anything going on, it’s dangerous to think about something like that because then your mind is not on what you need to do to go home,” he said.
He dreams of getting it published; any sales would help fund Aradia’s education. But just giving one copy to Aradia and Amber will make it worthwhile, he said.
And every night before sleeping out on the tank, Leiker whispers to them that he loves them.
Back in Colorado Springs, wife and daughter have placed pictures of him everywhere around the house.
“She looks at them and says, ‘I miss Daddy,”‘ Amber says.
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
