By Ayala Ben-Yehuda
Like many military families throughout the country, Glenda and Howard Lynch of Rosedale greeted the deployment of their two sons to the Middle East this year with a mixture of pride, apprehension and a strong sense of patriotic duty.
The couple’s older son, Staff Sgt. Glendon Lynch, was sent to Jordan with the Air National Guard in January to set up a communications base there.
The 33-year-old resident of Brentwood, L.I. had served with the Air Force during the Gulf War and was called out of his job with Verizon to coordinate the laying of phone and cable lines at the new communications center.
“At first, I wasn’t concerned,” said Glenda Lynch, a TimesLedger employee. But then Glendon told her of the strong anti-American sentiment he encountered in Jordan, and it worried her.
“He said it’s written all over the walls, ‘Go home Americans,’” she said.
Glendon Lynch, who is scheduled to stay in Jordan at least a year, even asked his mother to send him a special fighting knife for protection, and she obliged.
“If they can’t trust the people that are part of the host country, it leaves me a little nervous,” she said.
Asked whether she feared her son would be attacked, she said no because he was not on the front lines. Still, she acknowledged that “anything could happen.”
As for her son, he is not spending his time pining away for home.
“He’ll stick it out and do what he has to do,” said Lynch. “He is very patriotic.”
The Lynches’ younger son, Airman First Class Eric C. Lynch, returned home earlier this month from a six-week stint in Qatar and is currently back on his Air Force base in North Dakota.
Eric Lynch, 22, had also been assigned to Qatar last summer with the 319th Air Refueling Wing as a crew chief of a KC-135 airplane.
“He was saying it was like 110 (degrees) in the shade,” his mother recalled with a laugh.
Eric Lynch volunteered to go to Qatar in someone else’s place to escape the boredom of North Dakota, his mother said.
“They may bump up his rotation so he has to go back a lot sooner,” Lynch said, noting that most of the planes in Eric’s division had been sent to the Middle East.
Asked whether that worried her, she said it did “especially now, because of the fighting.”
Although there are understandable concerns, military service is a tradition in the Lynch family. Eric and Glendon’s grandparents are veterans of World War II and the Korean War, and Howard Lynch served with the Air Force in Vietnam.
“My husband is watching this (war) coverage a lot more than even the 9/11 coverage,” said Lynch, because of his sons’ work.
Besides, she said, “we’ve got friends in the military. They all watch out for each other.”
Reach reporter Ayala Ben-Yehuda by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 1-718-229-0300, Ext. 146.
