Purple Heart for Son of One of IHS’s Own
 When Spc. Matthew Mobley of the 82nd Airborne Paratroopers returns from his deployment in Iraq, he will receive the Purple Heart. Matthew was wounded by an IED on February 5 as he manned the machine gun in the turret of a Humvee patrolling hear Balad. It was the fourth time the 20-year-old from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, was hit, but it was the first time he was injured. The explosion hurled him up and out of the turret of his vehicle. He underwent surgery to remove nine pieces of shrapnel from his back and legs; one fragment had penetrated four inches deep. The soldier recuperated for ten days and then returned to duty with his unit. A month later, seven members of his company were killed.
Matthew’s mother, Deana Mobley, IHS’s Customer Manager for the Navy and Marine Corps, is enormously proud of her son’s service. She also takes great pride in the service of her other son, for she has not one but two sons serving in Iraq. Ryan, Matthew’s identical twin, is a Marine corporal, serving his second tour of duty. His first tour was in Al Anbar province, one of the most hostile areas in Iraq. For his second, Ryan deployed as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit and headed to Iraq on board USS Denver. After four weeks, he arrived in the Persian Gulf to serve in Iraq.
The twins grew up, inseparable, leading the classic suburban life of boys, doing well in school and excelling in sports, especially baseball. After graduation from high school, they had the opportunity to go to the University of Colorado, but instead, they both chose to defer their college education to serve their country and enlisted in the military, Matthew in the Army and Ryan in the Marines. Theirs was not a military family in which service was expected or anticipated, and certainly not taken for granted. It was a decision the young men made out of a sense of duty. Separated for the first significant amount of time in their lives, Ryan’s home base is Camp Pendleton and Matthew’s is Fort Bragg.
Both boys are doing well, though they edit what they tell their mother and give instructions to their father, Mike, to keep some information to himself. The two parents have very different ways of handling the pressure of knowing that their sons are in harm’s way. Mike sits before a computer, gleaning every bit of information he can get from all possible sources to understand exactly what his boys are facing. Deana, on the other hand, limits her exposure to too many facts of the boys’ circumstances. There are some things she doesn’t want to know, because she can’t let herself become immobilized with worry. Instead, she takes action. She bakes cookies and packs them up and sends them off to the far reaches of the world so her boys can have a taste of home. When she learned that the other men in her sons’ units would have liked a delicious care package too, she called on her friends, and they baked a whole raft of goodies and sent them off.
Deana worked at IHS for years before her sons volunteered to serve. And now her work is a very powerful source of comfort. Most of the people she talks to about IHS products are either in the military or retired military. Many of them have become friends who understand more than the usual customer would what families go through when someone they love is at risk in war. For her, there is no boundary between the personal and the professional, because the work she does could be a factor in keeping warfighters safe and bringing them home unharmed, warfighters like her own Ryan and Matthew.
Ryan’s second tour of duty will end in December of 2007, and Matthew will be home in November of 2007 when he will be awarded his Purple Heart.
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