Part 1: From executive suite to Baghdad’s slums

‘An opportunity to go and serve’
Deierlein’s best friend Patrick O’Hanlon, a fellow West Point grad and a veteran of the first Gulf War, spoke of duty.

“You got called up,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to go and serve.”

Deierlein’s internal debate quickly grew one-sided. “My best friend and my fiancée said it was the right thing to do,” he said. “I knew it was the right thing to do. But I was just scared.”

He began making arrangements to leave his New York life behind. He had 30 days to plan a wedding sooner than expected and organize a leave from his demanding job as chief operating officer of Dynamic Logic, a company that researches the effectiveness of online advertising.

Three days before Deierlein was set to ship out for processing and training, he stood in his nearly empty apartment, watching the movers wrap up their work. The only furnishings left were his TV and his telephone.

The phone rang. An Army official started explaining to Deierlein that he didn’t have to report for duty after all. He may have remained in the Individual Ready Reserve, but his obligation to the Army ended years ago. He could resign his commission and stay home.

Deierlein’s reply: “I’m still going to go.”

Whirlwind courtship, and a quick goodbye
I have the full support of Hiwot, my fiancée, and something told me not to fight this but rather to embrace it and go ahead and serve my country with honor, dignity and pride.
— Excerpt from an e-mail message Tom Deierlein sent out to his staff on Oct. 14, 2005

Deierlein met his future wife over Fourth of July weekend in 2001. She worked as a flight attendant for United Airlines and also clerked at the front desk of a boutique hotel in Boston.

He stayed at that hotel during a trip to Boston for the wedding of two close friends. On his third day in town, he ambled into the hotel lobby and saw Hiwot behind the counter.

She was beautiful. Stunning, in fact. He did a double take. He couldn’t stop staring. She looked up at him.

Busted.

He decided to walk over and apologize. She smiled.

“Don’t worry, it happens all the time,” she said.

Tom started picking through the candy dish on the counter and attempting to make small talk.

“Don’t take any of the pink candies,” Hiwot chided.

“Pink?” Tom replied. “Who would want pink? Who would want peppermint?”

“It’s not peppermint! It’s watermelon.”

“Well, that’s even worse! It would be like a Jolly Rancher. Anyway, I’m looking for butterscotch.”

He spotted her first name on her name tag and asked her how to pronounce it (HEE-watt), where it originated (Ethiopia, where her family is from; Hiwot means “life” in Amharic), and whether she grew up in Ethiopia (nope; born and raised in the States). Tom struggled to keep the conversation going beyond that, but as he put it, “I had no rap.”

Tom didn’t see Hiwot again for the rest of the visit, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He decided to leave her a note before heading back to New York. The clerk working that day warned him that plenty of guys flirt with Hiwot and she probably wouldn’t remember him.

He taped a pink candy to his note.

She called him.

A jet-setting romance
Tom and Hiwot managed to see each other 45 of the first 60 days they were dating. As a flight attendant, she could trade lines with her co-workers and meet Tom in the different cities he had to visit for business meetings.

But the world was about to change for everyone. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, Tom watched the World Trade Center towers collapse from a 37^th-story office window at his company’s headquarters on Park Avenue.

“It was such a shock,” Tom recalled. “I headed to the hospital to try to donate blood. … In the end they didn’t really need it. There weren’t many survivors that day. Either you died or you made it out.”

The terrorist attacks sparked a radical shift in U.S. foreign policy. The “global war on terror” commenced.

They also had a crippling effect on the airline industry. Hiwot and hundreds of other airline workers were about to lose their jobs. That would give her even more time to spend with Tom, but it also left her with uncertainty about what she should do with her life.

Eventually she realized what she wanted to do: Be a pilot. She talked to Tom about it, and he had a plan.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Figure out what the best flight school is, apply, get in, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Hiwot applied to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida and was accepted. She and Tom bought a house in Daytona Beach where she could live while she attended school.

Before long, they were engaged. Tom proposed on Dec. 13, 2003, the same day Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a spider hole near his hometown of Tikrit.

Bittersweet celebration
They planned to wait until Hiwot finished flight school to have a huge wedding bash in New York in the summer of 2006, followed by another ceremony in Ethiopia a week later.

Courtesy of Tom Deierlein Tom Deierlein and Hiwot Taddesse had this engagement photo taken in Central Park in New York City before Deierlein got called up for military service.

But then Tom was called up for military service on Oct. 13, 2005. He only had one month before he had to report for duty.

“I knew it would be better to get married before I left,” Tom said. “It would be better for her than being my fiancée if anything happened to me.”

With the help of wedding planners, the couple pulled together a wedding outside Las Vegas complete with ice sculptures, champagne and lots of dancing. About 75 friends and family members were able to attend on Nov. 5, 2005, with just two weeks’ notice.

“There was not one slot machine around — I was amazed!” said Tom’s mother, Kitty Deierlein. “It was a very elegant, beautiful affair.”

Tom’s military service began on Nov. 13, 2005. He and Hiwot had one week together as husband and wife.

Then he went away.

MORE FROM CHARITY BEGINS AT WAR

Charity Begins at War Section Front

Part 1: From executive suite to Baghdad Journal: Called back to active duty — ‘No joke’ Day 2: Minimal training for a huge task Journal: Readying for ‘very dangerous job’ Part 3: Venturing ‘outside the wire’ Journal: ‘ThunderCat6’ arrives in Baghdad Part 4: It all comes back to garbage Journal: Goodbye Baghdad; hello bed rest Part 5: Charitable spirit survives Journal: A new foundation Charity Begins at War Section Front   Add Charity Begins at War headlines to your news reader: