She is looking for a man. A soldier, to be precise. For no reason other than to know if he made it home.
“He has burned his memory in me and my boyfriend’s mind,” she wrote.
Her name is Adrian McCracken. She lives in Waynesville, N.C.
In an e-mail, she wanted to know how she could place an ad in the newspaper to find him. I finished reading it and picked up the phone.
It happened July 21. She, her boyfriend, Robert Rose, and their little boy, 15-month-old Levi, were on their way home from a doctor’s visit when they saw the soldier sitting on a guardrail along Interstate 40 near Canton, N.C.
It was miserably hot. He was just sitting there, eating a bag of Doritos, “like he hadn’t eaten in months,” she said. No soldier, the couple figured, should be in such a place.
Robert got off at the next exit.
“I told Adrian,” he said later, “the least we could do was to take him as far as we were going.”
The soldier, dressed in his field uniform, was very polite. What was he doing on the side of the road?
He was on his way home.
From Fort Bragg? she wondered. That was a six-hour drive away.
He told her he was headed for Denver. His wife had left him, cheated on him while he was in Iraq. A buddy in Denver said he would take him in if he could get there.
“I didn’t catch his name,” Adrian McCracken said, “but from studying him like I was studying a book, I do remember his rank. He was a staff sergeant. An infantryman.”
The patch on his black beret said “Airborne.”
“You could tell he’d been in war,” she said.
Could they give him a ride? He accepted and climbed into the bed of the truck.
It was a 15-minute ride to Waynesville. They handed the soldier a bottle of water and their last four cigarettes. Adrian also handed him her lucky lighter.
A cashier and waitress at Shoney’s, she made the most money whenever she had the lighter in her pocket. She had it with her when she met Robert.
The soldier thanked them. She heard him giggle as they climbed back into the truck.
“I guess we made him happy,” she said. “That giggle was the best sound I had heard since Levi was born.”
Immediately, they knew that couldn’t be it.
They drove to a corner market, bought two 1-liter bottles of water and a new pack of cigarettes, and caught up with the soldier on the interstate.
He didn’t have enough money for a plane or a bus ticket to Colorado, he told them. And he started crying.
Soon, another truck pulled up. Did the soldier want a ride? the driver asked. The soldier tossed his backpack into the bed and climbed in front.
Adrian McCracken, even without a name, has searched for the past month for the soldier. Facebook, MySpace — she has tried them all.
She just wants to know if he made it to Colorado and that he is OK. Maybe he will read this, she said.
“It has been eating me up inside,” she said.
She remembers very well the last thing he did.
“Before he got into that truck, he turned and blew us a kiss before snapping a salute to us like he was saluting the president.
“It took our breath away. He drove away, and we sat in our truck, bawling like babies.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
