Hawai'i family mourns victim of Fallujah mob
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
Kevin Dayton • The Honolulu Advertiser
HONOKA'A, Hawai'i — One of the four American contractors ambushed in Iraq and then dragged from their vehicles and mutilated by an angry mob this week was born and raised in rural Kukuihaele on the Big Island.
Aloha Dela Rosa holds a picture of her brother, Wesley Batalona, and his wife, June, on their wedding day. Batalona, who grew up on the Big Island, was one of four civilian contractors killed in Iraq this week.
Neighbors and family cried and gathered yesterday after official notice arrived of the death Wesley J. Batalona, 48, a retired U.S. Army Ranger sergeant who was raised in plantation housing near Waipi'o Valley.
Aloha Dela Rosa, Batalona's younger sister, said her husband, Fredo, tried to talk Batalona out of going to Iraq at a February birthday party for a family member in Haina. It was the day before Batalona left the Big Island for the Middle East.
Batalona, who lived with his wife, June, in Pa'auilo, wouldn't consider staying home, his sister said.
"He said, 'Braddah, you know, it's not your life. I gotta go,'" Aloha Dela Rosa recalled. "He was worried about the (Iraqi) kids up there. He said he needed to be there to help them."
The ambush of two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles took place in Fallujah, a city about 35 miles west of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle. Members of a crowd that gathered after the ambush beat the bodies, dragged one from a car and hung two charred corpses from a bridge, displaying them and celebrating.
The slain contractors worked for Blackwater Security Consulting, a North Carolina company that hires former military personnel to provide security training and guard services. Blackwater was hired by the Pentagon to provide security for convoys that delivered food in the Fallujah area, according to the company.
Dela Rosa said she considers her brother a hero but believes what happened was "a mistake."
"What a way to die, dragged through the street like that," Dela Rosa said. "The family is so angry at what's going on. This war is not supposed to be, it's not supposed to be."
Yearbook photo from Hawai'i Public Library
Officials from Blackwater visited Batalona's widow yesterday, and his body is in Kuwait awaiting the return home, Dela Rosa said.
Wesley Batalona, front row center, is shown with friends in a photo taken from a Honoka'a High School yearbook. Batalona, who was killed this week in Iraq, had been student body president.
For Stella Abarcar, who watched Batalona grow up in the house next door to hers, his death reminded her of her classmates who were killed or injured in Vietnam. "This is too close to home," she said, weeping.
Batalona, a former student body president at Honoka'a High School, had a 22-year-old daughter, Krystal, in college in Georgia, family members said.
Abarcar, 54, recalled Batalona as a quiet, thoughtful boy, one of three boys and five girls in the family.
Batalona's father, Joseph Sr., worked for Hamakua Sugar for many years, and Batalona grew up in a home in the middle of a row of plantation houses, a close-knit community where neighbors bartered vegetables or other goods to supplement their plantation pay.
"We all fought and laughed and made up," Abarcar said. "It was a very good childhood."
Batalona played junior varsity and varsity basketball, and "just got along with everybody," Dela Rosa said. He married his high-school sweetheart, and entered the Army soon after graduating in 1974.
"When you need help, he's there. When you need anybody to talk to, he's there. You need any kind of advice, he's there. He was that kind of a guy," she said.
Batalona family photo
Abarcar said Batalona's military training obviously matured him, but he remained the same nice, humble boy she remembered after he entered the Army.
Wesley and June Batalona are shown dancing at their wedding. Batalona was working for a security firm in Iraq when he was killed.
"When a country boy goes into the military, there's got to be a reason," said Abarcar. "He really wanted to make a life for himself. I guess he wasn't the taro-patch type."
Dela Rosa said at the beginning of his career Batalona was a happy-go-lucky young man — a "hang-loose kind of guy" — but quickly became "an Army gung-ho kind of guy; everything was Army."
Military records indicate Batalona retired from the U.S. Army in 1994 as a sergeant first class. In a recent Internet posting on a Web site dedicated to U.S. Army Rangers, Batalona indicated he had been affiliated with the 1st Ranger Battalion.
Dela Rosa said her brother was a veteran of the 1991 Iraq War, where he served with the Rangers.
After retirement Batalona moved his family back to the area where he and his wife grew up, and for a time worked on the security staff at the Hilton Waikoloa, Dela Rosa said. He took up guitar, and would play for the family in backyard get-togethers.
He seemed to feel a tug back to the action, Dela Rosa said, although she never knew much about the work Batalona did for Blackwater. "When he comes home, it's nothing about Army. It's eat, drink and be merry," she said.
Batalona's extended family is scattered throughout the rural communities of Honoka'a, Pa'auilo and Kukuihaelei, and Batalona's father still lives in the house where he raised his family. Batalona would stop by for visits with his wife, bringing loads of groceries, said Lehua Scott, common-law wife of Batalona's brother, Ka'ai Batalona.
"I just hope God took him quickly, and he didn't have to suffer," Scott said. "All I have to say is he's a hero, and I just wish we had more time with him. He was young."
Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.
