Deghand remembered 10 years after his death

Editor’s note: This is the 28th in a series of stories about past and present Jackson County residents who earned the Purple Heart Medal, which is awarded to military personnel wounded or killed in the line of duty.

The names of those profiled in these stories will be placed on a special monument for Purple Heart Medal recipients to be built soon in Holton’s Linscott Park.

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It was 10 years ago this Thursday that Jackson County received the tragic news that one of its own made the ultimate sacrifice in the Global War on Terror.

And for Lisa Deghand of Mayetta, the mourning period for her husband — Sergeant First Class Bernard Lee Deghand of the U.S. Army — still isn’t over.

“I still go through it,” she said.

The man known to family and friends as “Bernie” had spent nearly a quarter-century in the military before his death on Sept. 15, 2006, from small arms fire in Spira, Afghanistan, when his unit encountered enemy forces using small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades during combat operations.

Deghand was in Afghanistan with the 35th Division Artillery of the Kansas Army National Guard in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, serving as a trainer for the Afghan National Army (ANA), teaching mechanized infantry tactics using armored personnel carriers, it was reported.

Born June 30, 1964, in Topeka to Raymond and Barbara Vorhies Deghand, Bernard Lee Deghand graduated in 1982 from Shawnee Heights High School, but he had entered the U.S. Army’s Delayed Entry Program a year earlier. He trained at Fort Sill, Okla., and joined the Army Reserves after high school graduation.

He would transfer to the Kansas Army National Guard in 1986, and in 1997, he entered the Active Guard Reserve program, serving as the Readiness NCO and Operations NCO for the 35th Infantry Division Headquarters in Leavenworth.

Lisa Groves Thurber had been dating Bernie Deghand for a few years before they were married in 2000. Introduced through mutual friends, she at first thought he was “kind of wild.”

“He looked fun, and he was really outgoing,” she said. “He really grew on me.”

Bernie brought a daughter, Jamie Deghand, to their marriage, while Lisa brought her son, Craig Thurber. Not long after that, their first daughter together, Emma, was born, and Bernie went to work building the family’s “dream house” near Mayetta.

In December of 2002, he deployed to Bosnia as part of the NATO Stabilization Forces, and in August of 2005, he mobilized with the Division Headquarters for humanitarian relief following Hurricane Katrina.

He found himself wanting a promotion at work, Lisa Deghand said, and in early 2006, in order to receive that promotion, he was given the choice of a year’s deployment to either Afghanistan or Iraq. He chose the former, she said, because at that time, “Iraq was getting all the press.”

And even though Lisa said it was hard for her to let him go, he left for Afghanistan that March. It was reported that he had been scheduled to come home in October for a two-week leave.

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Lisa said she and her husband rarely, if ever, spoke about his military activities when he was at home, supposedly because he never wanted to worry his wife and children about it. However, she does have two accounts of attacks that occurred during his time in Afghanistan, provided to her by military officials.

In the first account, Bernard Deghand was conducting “routine duties” at Forward Operating Base Aned, located near Orgun in east central Afghanistan, during the early evening hours of April 27, 2006. His base came under fire from a 107-millimeter shell, and he estimated that the shell landed about 100 meters away from him.

He ran back to his tactical operations center to warn other members of his training team that the base was under attack. He spotted the point of origin of the shells, contacted a team of 120-millimeter mortar shell operators and gave the team approximate coordinates of the enemy shells’ launching site.

After the attack, Deghand and other members of the team conducted a “cordon and search” mission of several compounds in the vicinity of the enemy shells’ point of origin. He would lead a squad of ANA soldiers in a search of the area that went on through the night.

Deghand and the squad didn’t find any evidence of the rocket launches, but they detained a pair of Afghan locals and seized several illegal AK-47 assault rifles, money and documents belonging to the detainees as part of the investigation into the rocket attack. The detainees were taken into custody in the early hours of April 28.

For his participation in the search for enemy combatants and artillery, he was recommended for the Combat Infantryman Badge.

The second account accompanied his superiors’ request that he be awarded the Bronze Star Medal. he was assisting in the planning and execution of a combat operation in support of Operation Mountain Fury, along with ANA soldiers and his fellow trainers against “anti-government elements.”

Deghand’s unit came under heavy fire, prompting the unit to return fire. He directed the ANA soldiers to “maneuver and close with the enemy” while he stayed in contact with higher headquarters, whom he called to report that a fellow trainer had been wounded by enemy fire.

It was in that instant that an enemy bullet pierced Deghand’s neck.

That was Sept. 15, 2006, the day Sergeant First Class Bernard Lee Deghand made the ultimate sacrifice.

Deghand was awarded his Bronze Star — along with his Purple Heart Medal and Combat Infantryman Badge — posthumously. He was also promoted in rank, from Sergeant First Class to Master Sergeant.

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There was a couple that was close friends with Bernie and Lisa Deghand. The husband, Lisa said, was in the military and was being sent to Iraq at the same time that Bernie was being deployed to Afghanistan through the rest of 2006.

“The guys thought it would be a great idea to have his wife and kids move in with me, in our newly-built home,” Lisa said. “We’d kind of help each other out while they were gone.”

Early one morning in late summer, Lisa looked out the window to see two military officers, in uniform, knocking on her door. She wasn’t sure if the two officers were there to deliver news about her husband or her friend’s husband.

She only knew the news would be bad.

“I woke her up and made her come upstairs,” Lisa said of her friend.

That was when she found out about Bernie.

“I don’t remember much after that,” she said. “I remember looking down at my feet a lot.”

Two different officers showed up at the Topeka home of Raymond and Barbara Deghand with similar news at about the same time, Lisa said.

The aftermath was a whirlwind of conflicting emotions for her.

“That whole time in my life was a complete fog,” she said. “A lot of what happened, I don’t remember.”

In situations like this, it is said there are more than just family members who would choose not to remember if they could. One of them, Lisa said, was a military officer named Jim who was appointed as a “casualty assistance officer” to guide her and the children through the grieving process.

“The Army does a great job in helping you deal with everything that comes along with this death,” she said. “But with Jim, we were his first case and his last case. After that, he was like, I’m outta here. That’s how horrible it was even for him to deal with.”

But Lisa Deghand was grateful to have her friends, her family and the community around to help her through those first foggy days after her husband died in the line of duty. More than 1,000 of them packed into Sacred Heart-St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in north Topeka on the day of Master Sergeant Deghand’s funeral and burial.

She was also grateful to have the support of the Patriot Guard, who stood along Topeka’s Seward Avenue to provide support for their fallen brother in arms. On the day of Bernie’s funeral, picketers from Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church — known for their attempts at disrupting military funerals — stood on the north side of Seward Avenue with their sloganeering.

The Patriot Guard retaliated by revving up their motorcycle engines, drowning out the picketers. The engines could be heard inside the church — nearly a city block away.

“I didn’t have to see them or hear them because of the Patriot Guard,” Lisa said. “We took a different route to the church.”

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Today, Lisa Deghand is still recovering from the loss of her husband. The level of difficulty in putting on a brave face, she said, differs from day to day.

“Sometimes it’s easy,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not. The grief process is different for everybody. I’ve been told that kids grieve like we grieve — about every 10 years. That’s held true for my children.”

Her youngest daughter, Emma, was only 18 months old at the time of Bernie’s death. And yet, Lisa said, Emma knows it’s hard to grow up without a father.

“Emma didn’t really know her dad,” Lisa said. “He’s got a really strong presence there at home today, but she still gets really sad at times. She knows she doesn’t have a dad.”

It’s also tough for Craig, as well as for Jami, even though Lisa said she and Jami don’t talk about it much.

One particularly tough part of it, she said, is knowing that Bernie — who was very active in his children’s activities — can’t be there to watch his children continue to participate in those activities.

“My kids are doing things that make me stop and think, you know, it’s sad that he’s not here to do them with us,” she said. “He built his dream home, and he’s not there to see how things have progressed there. But he is there. He’s watching over us. We’ve got pictures of him all over.”

One of those pictures, she said, is a photo of two families having fun together, Bernie’s family being one of them. It’s a photo, she added, that’s helping her to get on with her life.

“I’m dating a guy now whose older sister was best friends with one of Bernie’s older sisters growing up. There are pictures of their two families together, where Bernie is much younger, and they’re both in it. It’s strange, you know, but it’s almost like Bernie sent him to me. The families are accepting of him, because they know him, and he knew Bernie. Things just totally meshed,” she said.

Even so, Lisa Deghand knows that Bernie is still watching over her, still watching over their family and still watching over a community that continues to support them, 10 years later.

“I couldn’t have made it through all that without all the help we got,” she said.