'100% soldier' leaves widow, son
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
Staff Sgt. Oscar Medina, 32-year-old Colombian-American and the father of a 13-year-old boy, was a big man and a professional soldier who took duty and devotion to service seriously.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
Because of his size, his strength and the trouble he sometimes had expressing his feelings, it could be difficult for those who didn't know him well to see beyond his military bearing.
Beate Medina cherishes a photo that husband Oscar sent a few weeks ago. It shows him with two stray dogs he'd befriended.
"The Army was his life," said Beate Medina, his wife of four years. "He was 100 percent soldier."
But it was Oscar Medina's soft side — the one he showed to her when they were alone, the one she could see in a photograph he'd sent her from Iraq a few weeks before he was killed, posing with two stray dogs he'd been feeding — that she will hold closest in her memory.
Medina, 32, of Chicago, and Spc. Ramon Ojeda, 22, of Ramona, Calif., both of the 84th Engineer Battalion, 25th Infantry Division (Light), were killed in an ambush Saturday when their convoy came under fire south of Al Amarah, Iraq.
Ojeda's wife was also serving in Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division and was expected to arrive in California yesterday to attend to funeral arrangements, military officials at Schofield said.
Funeral arrangements for Staff Sgt. Todd Nunes, another 25th Infantry soldier who was killed last weekend in a separate attack in Iraq, and for Spc. Phillip Witkowski, who died after being injured in Afghanistan, are also pending.
Beate Medina said that when her husband's body is returned from Iraq, his funeral will be in Hawai'i, where he had wanted to retire. Some of his ashes will be scattered over his grandmother's grave in Florida.
She clutched her husband's favorite football jersey as she spoke, putting it down only to pick up his photo. He wouldn't name the dogs he'd befriended in Iraq, she said. The ones in the photograph. That would have made it too hard for him to leave them.
She'd met him in Germany when she and her father saw him struggling over a large road map on his way back to base. They were married four years ago.
He loved football, motorcycles and their two dogs — Brandy the chow chow and Kennedy the pit bull.
He was glad to go to Iraq, she said. It was where he could do his job. He never complained when he called. The last call was on the Thursday before he died.
"You know I can't tell you much," he said. "I can tell you that you won't hear from me for a while, but I'll call you when I can."
Beate Medina has been sleeping with her husband's favorite jersey — inhaling his scent — since he deployed to Iraq in January. It has given her strength, and when she needs more, she relies on support from the wives of his fellow soldiers.
She is proud of her husband, she said. He was principled, and he was brave. He was a soldier who was afraid of just one thing.
"I'm scared of retirement," he once admitted. "I don't want to get old."
Reach Karen Blakeman at 535-2430 or kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.
