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CHRISTMAS WITHOUT JONATHAN -- They long to see him

walk through the door...This won't happen...Seven months

later, the wish for him exceeds all reason: Jonathan home,

now, at the holidays, just as he was before.

Sarah Pool holds her daughter, Lilly Winterbottom, 6 months, whose shirt memorializes her father, Cpl. Jonathan Winterbottom. (photo: Jahi Chikwendiu - The Washington Post)

Story here... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
/content/article/2007/12/22/AR2007122201743.html?hpid=topnews

Story below:

-------------------------

Christmas Without Jonathan

N.Va. Medic Killed in Iraq Lives in Hearts Across U.S.

By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer

They long to see him walk through the door of his family's home in Vienna -- muscular, dark-eyed, big-hearted Jonathan. The combat medic. The oldest son. The 21-year-old who had planned to fly back from Iraq in June for the birth of his first child.

His father knows this won't happen. Cpl. Jonathan D. Winterbottom was killed May 23 by a makeshift bomb in Nahrawan, Iraq. But seven months later, the wish for him exceeds all reason: Jonathan home, now, at the holidays, just as he was before.

"It seems like he's still around," says Robert Winterbottom, 57 ."It's like he's going to walk in one day. That's what everyone keeps saying."

For the Winterbottoms, this is the first Christmas without Jonathan. As the holiday season brings other families together, the reality hits hard.

It is softened only by memories and the baby he left behind.

The memories live in Texas, with Jonathan's best friend and the friend's father. In Georgia, where an Army staff sergeant thinks of him every day. In Nevada, the mother of his daughter longs for the sound of his voice.

They also live in North Carolina, with a mother whose son, one of Jonathan's Army buddies, died two years before him. With Jonathan gone, she feels she has twice lost a son.

* * *

Just before Jonathan left for his second Iraq tour, he got on his knees and rubbed Sarah Pool's protruding belly. "Now, Lilly," Pool recalls him telling the baby-to-be. "Listen to Daddy. Don't come out until I get back."

Less than two weeks before he was to return home for the birth, his Humvee was hit as it returned from helping another unit that had encountered a bomb. Two of the five soldiers inside were killed: Cpl. Victor Toledo Pulido and Cpl. Winterbottom. Jonathan had been back in Iraq for two months -- a beloved soldier with a lighthearted sense of fun who found passion in his work as a medic.

Sarah Pool met Jonathan through her sister, who served with him during his first tour. After Jonathan separated from his wife, they became close. Then his unit deployed earlier than expected, part of President Bush's "surge" in troop strength.

Now Pool, 18, shares a Las Vegas apartment with her sister as she tends to 6-month-old Lilly. When Lilly cries, she says, "I'll try to console her, and I can't do it. And then all of a sudden she's laughing, looking off in space."

"Jon, how do you do it?" Pool will ask aloud. "Tell me how you do it."

Jonathan often told Pool "it's the greatest gift in the world to know that men trust me with their lives." She recalls their days together: bets they made on everything, gentle teasing, intense emotions.

"He absolutely loved life," she said.

Now, she says, she calls his old cellphone number "just to hear his voice." Especially "if I'm having a bad day, I just call it, and sometimes when I feel like it, I just randomly leave a message."

In a blog about Jonathan, she wrote: "Nothing Will Ever Fill The Permanent 'Jon-Shaped' Hole In My Heart."

* * *

The day she heard that Jonathan had died, Summer Lipford screamed. She collapsed. The pain felt like April 17, 2005. That was the day she lost her youngest child, Pfc. Steven Sirko.

"It was like having the notification officers here again," she recalled.

Jonathan was her son's best friend in Iraq. When Sirko died, Jonathan phoned his buddy's mom -- not once, but often. He grieved with her.

"He never forgot that Steven had a family," she said.

From Iraq, Jonathan e-mailed her about nights when the men sat on a rooftop at their base in Iraq and talked about their dreams. "He gave me memories I didn't have of my own," she said. "He gave me his memories."

After the deployment ended, Jonathan tattooed his forearms, one with "Steven," the other with "Sirko."

"Those tattoos kind of talked to my soul," she said.

Lipford, 53, has not met Jonathan's father, but she feels a bond that started with their sons. Of Jonathan, she said: "I can't say enough about how much I loved him and how much I respected him and how much peace he brought me."

* * *

On his small ranch in Texas, Nathan Vervalin looks at Jonathan's smile on his refrigerator in photographs with his son, Miles, now 23, who served with Jonathan in Iraq. They were the kind of friends who took each other home for holidays and met each other's high school friends.

"Anybody that knew Jon or Miles knew these guys were inseparable," Vervalin said.

Miles escorted Jonathan's body home. Afterward, Miles did not return to Iraq.

Jonathan and Miles were big, strapping athletes who liked to party with their friends and push themselves physically. Vervalin was always touched that they did not hang up the phone without saying, "I love you."

"I think they knew that being in Iraq, and going back to Iraq, they might not get to say it later," he said.

Miles still talks about funny things the friends did. "It's a testament to Jon that the people who knew him and loved him, when they talk about him, there's always a big grin on their face," Vervalin said. "He was such an easy kid to like. He would laugh at himself. . . . His smile would just light up the room."

On Jonathan's first visit, Vervalin gave him careful instructions about how to ride a horse.

"He was just grinning at me, and as soon as I stopped talking, he kicked the horse in the side and took off across the pasture," Nathan recalled. "He was hanging off the side of the horse, laughing the whole time."

* * *

For Jeff Newell, 23, the holiday is hard without his friend from Falls Church High School. The two of them, along with Tony Hayduk and Danny Omana, were so tight when they graduated in 2003 that recently someone tagged them "the Fab Four."

In high school, Jonathan was a wrestler, a football player, a swimmer. He liked to work out, and it showed. Friends say some people told him he looked like actor Vin Diesel.

Now Newell wears a gray bracelet with Jonathan's name on it. Some days, Newell said, he still talks to his friend as he goes to sleep.

After Jonathan died, Newell organized a candlelight vigil in front of the family's home. Almost 100 people came on the day Jonathan would have turned 22. Newell brought a cake with the words, "Happy Birthday Jon."

"For a lot of us," he said, "it's very surreal, still." Newell created a Facebook page in his friend's memory. He named it: "Jonathan Winterbottom Affected My Life."

* * *

"It is me once again. I do not know what to say. I find myself constantly remembering my soldier and friend, when I have days and hours to think. My heart is filled with sorrow. . . . I shed true feeling and love for my medic."

Staff Sgt. Danny Hill posted that message online. For seven months, Hill has dwelled on Jonathan's death. Hill, 39, was the commander in Jonathan's Humvee the day he died.

Last week, he sent a collection of photos to Jonathan's father. Earlier, he attended services for Jonathan at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart, both in Georgia. He is determined that Jonathan will not be forgotten. During his first deployment, Jonathan had earned an Army Commendation Medal with valor, treating the wounded "before the smoke had settled," his platoon sergeant said.

Hill's 7-year-old son, he said, "will always know that Winterbottom was a true hero."

* * *

Cpl. Winterbottom was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Falls Church beside the mother who adored him, Evelyn Winterbottom, who died of lung cancer when Jonathan was 14.

Since that day, his father has grown closer to those who were close to his son: Nathan Vervalin, Jeff Newell and Jonathan's other "Fab Four" friends. He has exchanged e-mail with Hill.

In the fall, Sarah Pool brought Lilly to Virginia to stay with the Winterbottom family. As Christmas approaches, she and Lilly are back, and others have come, too.

One chilly December day, Robert Winterbottom holds the baby girl who looks like Jonathan. "Lilly's always going to have a big family because of Jon," he said. "He's created a lasting bond between us and his friends."

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --

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