Originally posted on 05/25/2015:

‘Daddy is a hero and an angel’
BY CHRISTINE ARMARIO
Courtesy of Newsday
October 27, 2005
In Hunter Youngblood's world, there are good guys and bad guys, heroes and angels. His father is one of the good guys who went to fight the bad guys in Iraq. And when he died in July after being hit by an explosive device, he became both a hero and an angel.
"Daddy never gave up," the 4-year-old tells his mother, Laura Youngblood, of South Hempstead.
Maybe it was the news report he overheard about the suicide bombings at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel. Or the announcement yesterday that military deaths had now climbed to 2,001 in Iraq. But slowly, his simple understanding of the world is starting to change.
"Why did Daddy die?" Laura Youngblood said her son asked her a couple of days ago. "Why couldn't he fly away? Like Batman?"
Batman is who his father, Travis Youngblood, a 26-year-old medic with the Marines, was supposed to dress up as and go trick-or-treating with his son for Halloween when he got home after eight months in Iraq. Hunter was going to be Robin. When he and his mother went shopping for costumes a month ago, though, Hunter changed his mind. "Can I be Batman now?" he asked.
Laura Youngblood said yes. Hunter had, after all, experienced enough to earn himself the title. "Little by little he understands more and more," she said tearfully. "I can't shield him from the world."
In August, Hunter attended his father's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. It was little Hunter who accepted his father's Purple Heart.
"Daddy's present" is what he calls the gold and purple medallion. "He doesn't like anyone else touching it," she said, "because it's his and Daddy gave it to him."
It was likewise Hunter who took pictures of his new baby sister, Emma, at the hospital a month ago. "She looks like me," Hunter told his mother then. "And who else?" she asked him. "My Daddy."
And when he catches his mother crying in a moment of grief, Hunter comforts her. "Do you miss Daddy?" he asks her then. "Sometimes he says he misses Daddy, too," Laura Youngblood said. "And sometimes he says, 'We'll be OK.'"
What Travis Youngblood would have wished for his children usually seems clear to her. He sat his son down before going to Iraq and, in good-guy and bad-guy terms, explained why he was going to war.
And when her husband died, it was in simple words that Laura explained his death. Daddy was now an angel.
The future, though, and the grieving process don't fit any vocabulary. She still writes to her husband through e-mail and letters, and calls his phone, just to hear his voice. She always gets the same message.
"You've reached Travis," he says, "I'm not here."
She tells her son and daughter that Daddy is watching over them every day. It's a daunting thing for a child to understand, but somehow, Hunter almost does, she said.
"Daddy is a hero and an angel," Hunter tells her. And sometimes, maybe when no one else is around, he says he talks to his daddy. And Daddy says, "We're going to be OK."