Young War Widow Grieves
Over Love Cut Short by War

By MIKE SANTA RITA

Maryland Newsline

LEONARDTOWN - Seven months after her husband's death in Iraq, Crystal Faulstich shops, she cleans the apartment she shares with a friend, she watches TV. She does not have a job. She is not in school.

"I stay at home most of the time," the 20-year-old widow said.

Her doctor suggests she go for counseling, but she refuses.

"I don't like counselors. I just don't see how they know what I'm going through," said Crystal, who said she has put on a lot of weight since August.

The Army said Pfc. Raymond J. Faulstich Jr. was killed at 2:05 p.m. Aug. 5, when his convoy of trucks came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades and small arms in Najaf. Officials said Faulstich, 24, was shot through the side while delivering supplies and repair parts to the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit and that he returned fire, trying to protect the other soldiers in his convoy.

Crystal wears his dog tags around her neck.

She gets death benefits of a little under $1,000 a month, and Anheuser-Busch sent her $11,000 as part of a program to support the spouses of fallen soldiers.

But Crystal has not gotten over Raymond -- just as he never got over her.

Before he met Crystal Wathen, Faulstich had dropped out of high school, worked a series of jobs that went nowhere, and hung out with a crowd that wasn't taking him anywhere.

He was into marijuana and cocaine, said Raymond Faulstich Sr. During a four-month stretch in 2000, Raymond Jr. was convicted of marijuana possession, theft less than $300 and malicious destruction of property of less than $300, district court records show. He was given probation in all cases.

Then he met Crystal and all that changed, his family said.

They met in 2001 at her parents' house, where he was hanging out with one of her foster brothers, she recalled.

"I went downstairs, and I seen him there, and we just started talking," she said. "At first I was attracted to his looks, because he was really sexy."

A boyhood friend, Curtis Cook, remembered Faulstich talking about Crystal. Cook did not know much about her "but Ray seemed to really be interested and kind of hinted that he was going to let her influence him, and I thought that would be a good thing if she could get him on the right track," he wrote in an e-mail.

She did. She told him it was drugs and his old crowd, or her.

"I told him he had to choose, and he chose me," she said.

Inspired by her brothers, four of whom were in the military, and encouraged by Crystal, Faulstich began seriously contemplating an Army career.

"I think that radical change was the only way he saw to get him away from the rut he was in," Faulstich Sr. said. "Crystal was the influence that motivated him."

At first, Faulstich was rejected by the military because he lacked a high school diploma. He dropped out of Leonardtown High School a month before graduation in 1999.

But the young man who had not shown interest in much of anything got his General Equivalency Diploma and took some community college classes, and the Army took him.

Then Crystal married him.

He proposed on Valentine's Day 2003, a little more than a month before he enlisted. They were married at the St. Mary's County Courthouse on Aug. 29, 2003, two months after Crystal graduated from Leonardtown High School. He was 23, she was 18. She brought two friends with her.

"Nobody else knew. We kept it from everybody," she said.

They got an apartment near Fort Eustis, Va., where he was stationed. They lived on a private's salary and spent what free time they had on road trips.

"In Virginia that's mainly all we did, because we didn't have much money," she said.

On June 9, 2004, he was called up to Iraq on seven days' notice. "We had seven days to pack up our apartment and everything," Crystal said.

Linda Faulstich said that her son wanted to drive trucks -- trash trucks, fire trucks, any kind of truck -- when he was a boy. In Iraq he got to do it, driving trucks by day and conversing with Crystal by e-mail and Web-cam at night.

"Whenever he would go on missions and stuff he'd say, 'I love you. This might be the last time I talk to you,'" Crystal said.

Cook, who got periodic updates, was happy his friend was driving trucks.

"I thought he did the smart thing by staying in the transportation corp(s)," he wrote. "Little did I know that the convoys were the things that were getting attacked."

On Aug. 6, Faulstich Sr. was fixing rain damage to the dirt road outside his Leonardtown house when a car pulled up in his driveway.

"Two guys in full dress uniform got out. By that time, I knew what it was," he said.

He called Crystal, who was with friends at the Kings Dominion amusement park in Virginia. He told her to come over.

At first, she thought her husband was home early. When they told her he was dead, "I didn't believe it," she said.

When reality seeped in, she collapsed.

"She just sat down in the driveway and cried and cried," Faulstich Sr. said.

On Aug. 16, Faulstich was buried at St. John Francis Regis Roman Catholic Church in Hollywood, where the Rev. Ronald Potts, who taught him religion in the sixth grade, remembered him as a quiet student and attentive altar boy.

The rosary he carried in his pocket in Iraq went with him into the grave, his father said.

The family is left with a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars, one with a 'V' for valor for brave conduct under fire.

His magazine subscriptions still come to his family's house.

Crystal has no regrets about her husband enlisting. "If he didn't join, he would probably be down here and hanging with the wrong people," she said.

She wants to look to the future, but is finding it tough.

She applied for admission to St. Mary's College and is looking for jobs there. But she said it is way too early to begin dating again.

She keeps constant reminders of her husband in her apartment.

"There's pictures everywhere. Like on every wall," she said.

-- Distributed by Capital News Service.