Sergeant’s Emotional Surprise for Wife
Sergeant’s Emotional Surprise for Wife
When Iowa Army National Guard Sergeant John Vorrath left for his deployment in the Middle East five months ago, he knew he would miss the birth of his daughter. “My wife and I prepared ourselves for me not to be there, because where I was, we weren’t allowed any leave,” the 26-year-old dad tells Yahoo Parenting. But the day before his wife, Janae, was to have a scheduled C-section, Vorrath’s commander told him Army policies had recently changed, and he could put in a request for leave. “The next day, while I was FaceTiming with my wife during the surgery, I got a note that said ‘Your leave has been approved, buy a plane ticket as soon as possible.’ We were minutes away from our daughter being born, and I decided it would be awesome to surprise my wife. I knew she wouldn’t expect it.”
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Charlotte Vorrath was born at 7:51 a.m. CST on Friday, Oct. 24. It was 3:51 p.m. in the Middle East, where Vorrath was stationed. At 12:51 a.m. Saturday morning, he boarded an Iowa-bound plane and arrived at Mary Greeley Medical Center that afternoon. Vorrath told only a few friends about his plans, and Chris Reif, the one who picked him up at the airport, caught the entire surprise on video. It has been streamed more than 130,000 times since it was posted on YouTube on Sunday.
Charlotte is the second child for the Vorraths, who have a 2-and-a-half year old son, Jett. They’ve been married for five years, and this is Vorrath’s second deployment. While he says the family connects via Skype or FaceTime nearly every day while he’s overseas, the technology can’t entirely capture the changes everyone is going through, especially Jett. “It’s so hard. You think FaceTime and Skype will help, and it does — I can’t imagine previous years where the men and women who were deployed had to rely only on letters — so I know I’m lucky,” he says. “But being home, it’s like, ‘Holy cow, my son grew so much!’ His vocabulary has grown, his personality — I can see all those little things you can’t really see on FaceTime.”
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Watching Charlotte’s birth from afar was tougher than Vorrath expected, he says. “I was so nervous all day. I had the day off, but I was so fidgety that I ended up going into work to keep my mind occupied,” he says. “I was a lot more emotional than I thought I would be during the actual surgery. It was hard not to be there for my wife to support her and love her through that.”
Still, Vorrath is quick to point out that he feels blessed to have been allowed to come home, and that not all members of the armed forces get the opportunity. “There are only a select few of us,” he says. “Only people with new babies are allowed to take leave in my unit, so I want to be thoughtful of the people who don’t get to take two weeks midtour to come home. The strength that they and their families need in order to go a full year without seeing their husbands or without seeing fathers come home, I know that must be tough on them and my family is keeping them in our thoughts.”
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Vorrath will return for another six months of deployment later this week, but says he’s making the most of his time while he’s here. “I’m trying to give my wife as much rest as I can and serve her as much as I possibly can,” he says. “We’ve been trying to focus on her recovery, and on having family quality time together.”