Aurora – A video conference Monday bridged the gap between Iraq and Colorado, allowing a Marine to see his newborn daughter for the first time, just hours after her birth.
“It’s the next best thing to getting him here,” said Andrea Denham, wife of Sgt. Zachary Denham. “This really, really helped.”
Denham, on his second tour of duty in Iraq, was able to hook up with his wife and other family members from a camp in Fallujah through the Freedom Calls Foundation.
The couple’s second child, Hailey, was born at 6:48 p.m. Sunday at the Medical Center of Aurora.
As Hailey, wrapped in a receiving blanket, slept in her mother’s arms, Denham lovingly looked at them.
“I think we did pretty good,” he said.
“I think we did too,” she replied.
Meanwhile, 18-month-old Hunter Denham, the couple’s firstborn, ran up and down hospital hallways with relatives in hot pursuit. Hunter wasn’t even walking when Denham left the U.S. on his current assignment.
“He is really surprised at how much his son has grown up,” Andrea Denham said after wrapping up the video call.
“It was really important to make it work for the family,” said Beverly Husted-Petry, a medical center spokeswoman.
The Freedom Calls Foundation is a public charity that connects U.S. military members with loved ones back home free of charge.
The foundation has three facilities in Iraq with 50 computers and a satellite network that allows 24-hour, seven-day-a-week Internet connections.
Contributions can be posted to the foundation’s website at www.freedomcalls.org.
Denham is expected to be home in a couple of months, but he now has a head start in his daughter’s life.
“It helped him feel like he is part of it even though he’s far, far away,” Andrea Denham said. “This will be a big moral boost and get him through the last few weeks and get him home.”
Staff writer Kieran Nicholson can be reached at 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
