The Montgomery County Sentinel has published the following article on Rick Ulbright: Quote:http://www.thesentinel.com/282916508842946.php
Friends Say Civilian Killed in Iraq Led by Example
By Kaukab Jhumra Smith
Maryland Newsline
COLLEGE PARK — On April 15, Rick Ulbright's high school in Boise, Idaho, will dedicate an 8-foot-tall, metal and granite memorial to alumni who died serving their country.
Fourteen hundred students will file into the school quad for a short ceremony that will include a four-plane fly-over by the state National Guard and will end with the playing of taps.
Ulbright's family will be there: The 1973 graduate will be the oldest alumnus among the six names on the memorial. He was 49 when he was killed by rocket fire last August at Kirkuk Air Base in northern Iraq.
Ulbright left behind a wife in Southern Maryland, two grown daughters, a grandchild he had yet to meet and his parents, who live in Boise.
His wife, Karen, still lives in the Waldorf house they bought two-and-a-half years ago. She has declined interviews since her husband's death, directing reporters to his colleagues at Andrews Air Force Base.
Family and colleagues remember an upbeat, strong-minded man who cherished his family, planned to visit his new granddaughter in Australia and who drove himself to be a role model to people around him.
His sudden death left them stunned. It was particularly shocking because Ulbright, a civilian agent conducting lie detection tests for the military, was not involved in combat. He had put off a teaching job in South Carolina to volunteer for a six-month tour abroad helping counterintelligence efforts.
Nearly four months into his tour, Ulbright had finished a polygraph at Kirkuk and was walking toward a separate building when a rocket soared over the base's walls, wounding him. Military sources said he died on the operating table on Aug. 8, three days before his 20th wedding anniversary.
Seven months later, his wife's answering machine continues to play an message in Ulbright's deep voice. "You've reached Rick and Karen," it says.
They met and married in the early 1980s, when Ulbright was in helicopter maintenance at Grand Forks (N.D.) Air Force Base and taking evening classes for a bachelor's degree in criminal justice administration.
Ulbright paid his way through Boise State University for three years before joining the Air Force, partly because he needed help with tuition, said his mother, Wanda Ulbright.
He moved every few years, shuttling between Air Force bases here and abroad, first as an active-duty employee and then as a civilian polygraph examiner. He continued working toward his bachelor's degree, finally completing it in August 1986 while stationed in North Dakota.
When Ulbright volunteered to go to Iraq, his parents could not understand why. He had just lined up a faculty job with the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute in Fort Jackson, S.C. — the same institute where he had trained to be a polygraph examiner and had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average 13 years earlier.
"He was quite driven to be excellent in this profession," said Donald Weinstein, who taught Ulbright in 1992 at the institute, then located in Alabama.
But Ulbright put off the teaching job to go into a war zone. His mother describes her husband, Richard Ulbright, a Korean War veteran, asking his son why he would take such a risk.
"Dad, you would," Ulbright said. "Wouldn't you?"
"And my husband said, 'Well, what could I say?'" Wanda Ulbright recalled. "None of us wanted him to go over there, but he felt it was his duty."
Deep down, a colleague said, Ulbright was a son who wanted to make his parents proud. "Even though conditions were bad over there, he would downplay that so that they wouldn't worry," said David Fuller, his colleague in Iraq.
Although he was based in Baghdad, Ulbright traveled all over Iraq as a polygrapher. While most people only risked it once or twice, Fuller said, Ulbright traveled the dangerous road from the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport many times to get to other military bases.
His mother said much of his work was shrouded in secrecy, and Fuller agreed. "Lots of folks have trouble understanding what he was doing over there."
"I think when he was able to talk to his father about what he was doing over there, his father realized it really was an important mission, and he was very proud of him," Fuller said.
He said Ulbright was excited about his granddaughter's birth, and described how colleagues cheered when the phone call came from Werrington, Australia, where daughter, Misty, lives with her husband.
When Ulbright asked Misty to put the newborn on the phone, his exhausted daughter protested the baby was asleep, Wanda Ulbright said. But he demanded she rouse the baby so he could hear her.
"That was really something," Wanda Ulbright said. "I guess she did wake up and cry for him."
While the Iraq war has claimed more than 1,500 Americans so far, Ulbright is the only death from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He was just the fourth fatality in the close-knit agency's 56-year history, which added to the shock of his death, said Fuller, manager of the OSI polygraph program.
"The last person you'd think to get hurt was a polygrapher, because even though we're in a combat zone we're not out there on the front lines," said Fuller.
Fuller accompanied Ulbright's body back to the United States. They had known each other for 12 years, and living in the shadow of Saddam Hussein's palace in Baghdad made he and Ulbright as close as brothers, Fuller said.
They joked that they were two old men in a young man's war, Fuller said.
In Baghdad, Ulbright shared a trailer with another person and a bathroom with Fuller and two others. When they complained, Ulbright would remind them they were lucky to receive hot meals and to sleep in trailers instead of tents.
"That's the thing about Rick. I never heard the guy complain," Fuller said.
Ulbright would have turned 50 on March 8 — a birthday he shares with his father. He has been posthumously awarded the Bronze Star, the Outstanding Civilian Career Service Award and the Defense of Freedom medal.
The family has drawn strength from the letters that come from all over the world. Wanda Ulbright said it has helped "to know that he was thought of so highly."
Ulbright's name will be engraved on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., in May at an annual ceremony for fallen civilian officers.
His family will be there, too.
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