Serving with
a heavy heart

By Diane Prokop
Times Staff Writer

It’s supposed to be the other way around — a son continuing his father’s war mission. But for Chief Master Sgt. Steve Bush, 44, a Northeast Philly native, his deployment to Iraq continues where his son Adam Harris’ left off.
The young Army infantryman was shot and killed by a sniper in Mosul on Sept. 22, 2004, five days after his 21st birthday.
Harris, of Abilene, Texas, had been assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment. It was just a few months earlier that his son had been back home in Texas for a visit, Bush recalled in an e-mail from Iraq last week.
"We spent the July 4th weekend in Dallas and had a great time," said Bush, who was stationed at the Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene. "Had we known that his life would end just a few short months afterward, we would have never let him go back to Iraq."
When Bush hugged him goodbye that last time, he could see in his son’s eyes that he didn’t want to go back.
"We had a conversation earlier when he first got home from leave. We had just finished eating dinner and went out to the patio to talk and drink a few beers," Bush said. "During our conversation he told me he was scared when he went out on patrols. I told him if he weren’t scared then something was wrong with him. I told him to use his fear as a positive and powerful motivator to keep you alive."
Bush, a 1981 graduate of Father Judge High School, volunteered in early September 2004 for deployment to the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country whose border neighbors include China and Uzbekistan.
"I wanted to show Adam that he wasn’t alone in this fight against terrorism, and that his dad was out there taking the fight to the bad guy as well," he explained. "Our role in Kyrgyzstan was to provide combat support to war fighters on the ground and in the air in Afghanistan. I felt good about what I was doing, but it was nothing in comparison to what Adam was going through in Iraq."

• • •

At that point in 2004, his son was due home in late October, with plans to get married when Bush returned from Kyrgyzstan in January 2005.
"I felt good about his future and would sort of brag to people that I was deployed in Kyrgyzstan and that my son was in Iraq doing a great job," Bush said.
But on that September day nearly three years ago, it was 2:15 in the morning when Bush’s captain came into his tent, shined a flashlight in his face and said they needed to talk outside.
"I got a terrible, sick feeling through my body. I stepped outside my tent, and standing there were the wing commander, group commander and my unit commander," Bush recalled. "I looked at them and said, ‘No! What’s wrong?’, and the wing commander said in a calm voice, ‘Sergeant Bush, I regret to inform you that your son Adam Harris was killed in action on twenty-two September at approximately 12:05 p.m.’
"At that point I fell down to my knees and cried my heart out," Bush wrote in his e-mail.
Consumed by his emotions, Bush, at the time a 24-year Air Force veteran, was carried to the command section of the base. Attempts were made to calm him.
"I remember praying with a Catholic priest. We were holding hands and praying. I couldn’t stop thinking of my wife and how this was going to tear her to pieces," he said.
Denise Bush, a civilian secretary for the wing commander at the Dyess Air Force Base, was at work.
"When the Army people came to tell me . . . when they called me in, I didn’t know if it was my husband or my son," she said by phone from her home in Abilene.
Steve Bush, who still has family in the Northeast Philadelphia area, had to be with his wife. Their Air Force family never left her alone until he got there.
"My home unit got hold of me and they put my wife on the phone and I could feel her pain as we talked and cried, comforting each other," Bush said. "Soon after, the Air Force got me back home within a day to be with my family and to lay our son to rest."

• • •

The military life is all Denise Bush has ever known. Her mother and father were Marines. Last Wednesday marked 15 years that she and Steve Bush have been married.
The Bushes have a blended family. Adam was 8 when the couple married, and Steve has two daughters from a previous marriage, Stephanie, 22, and Leslie, 20. The couple’s youngest son, Brandon, just turned 12.
Adam’s death has shaken Denise’s outlook.
"I don’t think I ever worried deep in my heart that something would happen," she said. "You put a bubble around them. Unfortunately, that bubble has shattered."
In February, Bush told his wife that he was going to Iraq. For the first time in her life, the chance that something would happen was all she could think about.
At the time of his deployment, he could see in her eyes that she was scared and angry at the same time. She asked him not to go, to find a way out.
"I could have gotten out of the deployment but I didn’t want to. I told her I just couldn’t do that," Bush said. "I had to do this and let Adam know that I’m going to take over where he left off. I felt that if I didn’t deploy I was dishonoring what my son died for and believed in."
Bush left for training in May, on Mother’s Day, to be exact.
The Air Force chief master sergeant is embedded with an Army unit about 60 miles north of Baghdad, at the Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Balad, Iraq.
"It’s kind of ironic that I’m serving my son’s Army brethren, and that, in itself, is an honor," Bush said.
His duties include facilitating diplomatic, congressional and military visits to Balad and serving as the liaison to the U.S. Embassy and Multi-National Corps-Iraq.
Denise Bush keeps busy, working full time as a Department of Defense civilian, and gets through each day. The fact that her husband stays inside his base in Iraq makes her feel a little more at ease. She also gets to talk to him by telephone and e-mail.
"I say a lot of prayers," she said.
As for getting through each day, she noted, there really is no choice.
"You deal with it. You have to be a pretty independent person," she explained. "You do it to take care of your kids, take care of the house. You just do what you have to do. I can’t let my other kids down."
But that doesn’t make the couple’s loss any easier to cope with. Bush plans to retire from the military next year and bring his family back to Philadelphia.
"We will always think of Adam as a hero," Steve Bush said. "No one told him to enlist in the Army and go to Iraq. He did it willingly and with conviction. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t think of Adam and the 3,648 American heroes that gave their lives in order for others to be free. Our son served his country with honor, and now he serves the Lord." ••
If you’d like to leave a message for the Bush family and honor the sacrifice of PFC Adam Harris, visit www.Adam-Harris.memory-of.com
Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com