This young man was due home this month. God rest his soul.
Soldiering was Metairie man's dream
By Kate Moran
East Jefferson bureau
A life’s calling is not always so obvious as it was to Matthew Joseph Vosbein, a Metairie native who spent his childhood dressing up in fatigues and later married a military girl.
Vosbein consummated a lifelong dream when he enlisted in the Army in September 2002 and became part of the first wave of soldiers to push into Iraq. He died there Aug. 29, less than a month before he was scheduled to return home, when a roadside bomb exploded while he was on combat patrol in Sadr Al Ysifiyah.
Family members describe Vosbein, 30, as an infantryman who saw grueling combat duty — he once nearly died of heat stroke — but who used to write home about the hospitality of the Iraqi civilians who offered soldiers tea after the Americans had swept their houses for weapons.
“He liked the people. He has a lot of pictures of him grinning away with his arms around civilians and kids doing peace signs around him,” his wife, Lynda Vosbein, said. “In a combat zone, you cannot be friendly to everyone, but he liked to talk to people when he felt it was safe to stand there and have a conversation.”
His family called Vosbein a devoted father to two sons, Connor, 5, and John, 7, both of Louisiana, and a stepson, Brandon Jackson, 12. His attachment to his kids fueled his sense of purpose in Iraq, where he was troubled by the precarious conditions in which many children lived.
“It was very hard,” his mother, Anna Williams, said of Vosbein’s time in Iraq. “He felt very bad for the kids and the women because of the way they lived.”
“He had a strong sense of God, family and country, and he was willing to defend his beliefs,” added his father, Gene Williams.
Vosbein grew up intimate with the outdoors, camping and fishing with his brothers and spending weekends and summers with his grandparents at their remote cabin in Illinois. His younger brothers said he would accompany them to Boy Scout jamborees at Camp Robert and Camp Salmon.
“He was always playing army and dressing up and playing guns and camping,” his younger brother, Hagle Williams, said. “He was always an outdoorsman, showing us how to be in the woods, showing us what kind of plants we could eat.”
At Riverdale High School in Jefferson, Vosbein spent four years in the Reserve Officers Training Corps and served as corps commander during his senior year in 1995, according to his mother.
After graduation, he worked for two years as a correctional officer for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and then trained as a welder at the Northrop Grumman Avondale shipyard. He and his first wife, Tara, with whom he had his two sons, also lived in Wyoming before he enlisted in the Army in 2002.
Vosbein fed his passion for all things military with a collection of antique rifles and memorabilia, some dating to the Civil War. When he left for his first tour of duty, he brought the most personal of those mementos with him: a survival knife that his grandfather, a Navy veteran, used in the Pacific theater during World War II.
When he returned from his first tour after 18 months, he brought a souvenir of the latest war for his sons: an album of photographs from Iraq.
The period between his two deployments was a decisive time for Vosbein. At home in Tennessee, he met an Army reserve officer named Lynda Dodge at a country-western dance hall. He swept her onto the dance floor moments after they were introduced and married her less than a year later, in February 2005.
Vosbein had re-enlisted in the Army by then and learned that he would be stationed in Germany. Family members said he requested a transfer to Iraq because other members of his unit, based in Fort Campbell, Ky., were headed to the Middle East.
He served with the 101 Airborne Division in the Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team. One hundred and sixty-nine soldiers from Fort Campbell have died in the Iraq war, more than 150 of them from the 101st Airborne Division.
“He said, ‘Dad, if my men are going back, I want to be there with them,’¤” Gene Williams said.
That summer, before he left for his second tour of duty, Vosbein who was promoted to sergeant.
“All I know is how his sergeants talked about him when they came back from their first tour,” Gene Williams said. “They were very impressed with his leadership abilities.”
Vosbein was raised by his mother and her husband, Gene, in Metairie, but when he was a teenager, he decided he wanted to meet his biological father, Tim Lingle of Illinois. His family says he put on his ROTC uniform, asked for the military discount on his plane ticket and set off to Illinois.
“He got to know him well, and they formed a close relationship. Matt did not limit his heart by little things,” Gene Williams said. “Anna and I were always open with him about his heritage. He reached a time when he wanted to meet his biological father, and he took the initiative and did it. He was that type of person.”
His family these days is scattered between Louisiana and Illinois, where Lingle and his wife Amy live, and where Gene and Anna Williams are spending time while their Metairie home, which sustained wind damage during Katrina, is under repair.
Vosbein is survived by his two sets of parents, five grandparents, six brothers, two sons, a stepson and his wife. Friends may call on the family from 4 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Parker-Reedy Funeral Home in West Frankfort, Ill. The burial will take place at 10 a.m. Saturday at St. John’s Catholic Church in the same town. The family will celebrate a remembrance of his life that evening at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post.