Part Fifteen

The last time I wrote in this journal it was the end of March. Dan has been back in the country for eight months now; he’s been actually home, and back to work for his civilian employer for five. Looking back over the twelve months he was out of country, the nineteen months he was on active duty, from the vantage point of now, that time is hazy and obscure—until I read over my journal entries from those months.

How quickly it comes flooding back: the religious fervor with which I checked the mail-box and my despondency when there were no letters; the little wave of fear that swept over me when a car turned around in the driveway during the communication blackouts after a soldier’s death; my dread of going home to an empty house at night; the way my life revolved around proximity to a telephone; the incredible disappointment of missing a phone call; my loneliness and sorrow and fear and anger. Little spots of light stand out in my mind, too: a fifty-five minute phone call from Dan—our first conversation of more than fifteen minutes—thanks to friends who bought us a gigantic phone card; my phone ringing off the hook all day on my birthday; the friend who took me out to dinner regularly, knowing my need to just get out of the house for a while; the evenings spent with other soldiers’ wives drinking tea and making care packages and just being with other people who really understood; the pleasure of hearing, after the just slightly longer than usual silence that followed my “hello” on a satellite phone call from Iraq, Dan’s voice saying “hey.”

Those first weeks and months after Dan got back, we were glad to just ignore the seething difficulty and emotion represented by the word Iraq, to rest after the sudden release of tension. Then the demands of the present and the future came pressing in and covered that life over, and we were glad to let them. Even now I am writing because this journal seems to need wrapping up, not because I want to think about that time. I am still too exhausted by the effort of living through the last two years to feel any desire to formulate coherent thoughts about my experiences. I am still too close to my own emotion to provide any kind of neat wrapping job.

Dan is back at work and back at school. His coworkers made him a huge card, bought ice cream cake for the whole department in honor of his return, and generally made much of him on his first day back; our local community college made it virtually impossible for him to see a counselor, refused to let him back into the same level of math he was taking when he was deployed, and was generally bureaucratic and difficult. He’ll be working full time and going to school two-thirds of the time until January, when he’s quitting work for a while to dive into education full time. We’re trying to get our house ready to put on the market in the spring, and we’re also expecting our first child in January.

People still occasionally ask if we’re getting back to normal yet, and I have to laugh. We’ve more or less gotten used to living as a couple again; we’ve fallen into a new routine. We certainly haven’t had the difficulties that so many of our friends have had post-deployment. But normal, if there ever was such a thing, is lost irrevocably. I’ve changed, he’s changed, life has changed. I can’t even remember what life was like before.

Underneath the busy-ness of the present is a layer of—I’m not quite sure what to call it, but something that wasn’t there before. Dan doesn’t sleep very well any more, and when he does sleep, he dreams. A headline about U. S. soldiers fighting Syrian troops on the Iraq border leaves us standing in the middle of the Saturday-morning Starbucks rush, staring off into space. The most unexpected things—a conversation about Halloween—trigger memories of things he’d rather not think about. Other people are still fighting and dying and living in that barely bearable tension. It isn’t over.

I was out walking by the community college the other day, when I tripped over a war protest. There were three men and maybe ten women, all but one of whom looked about of an age to have protested Vietnam, too. I stopped to talk to them, because I wanted to let them know, in case they didn’t already, that a war protest feels like being spit on to a lot of service members and military families, even when some of the signs say “Support Our Troops.” They smiled and nodded and told me they respected my opinion, and one woman turned to me and said that her daughter had spent almost twenty years in the Navy, and that her daughter worked in the medical field and saw all those poor wounded kids coming back from Iraq, and that her daughter thought the war was wrong. And that was the end of that. I hadn’t expected any more than that polite pat on the head, anyway. But I got to thinking as I walked on that that woman had brought up her daughter’s experience as though—because her daughter was associated with the military and saw the carnage—it somehow invalidated my support of the job our troops are doing.

I get that sense a lot from those who point out the mistakes made in conducting the war in Iraq, the terrible things that U. S. soldiers have done in the course of the war, and the suffering and death of insurgents, Iraqi civilians, and U. S. troops as support for their disapproval of an American military presence in Iraq. “Look,” they say, “war is horrible.” The first implication is that all war is wrong simply because it’s horrible. The second is that if you don’t think war is wrong it’s either because you haven’t yet realized how horrible war is, or it’s because you’re a heartless fiend who doesn’t care.

I wanted to walk back and tell that woman that my husband served as a medic in Iraq, that he’d seen the carnage straight off the battlefield. During one of the first phone calls he made home, after he’d been in Iraq for about a week, we were talking about the commonplace details of what was going on at home when he suddenly blurted out that he’d treated a guy today who’d had his face blown off. It didn’t get prettier.

So it’s not that I don’t know what war does, and it’s not that I don’t care. I’ve heard the stories of men and women who have been much closer to the mangled bodies from the front lines than a stateside Navy hospital. I’ve seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib and read about the soldiers who have crossed the line and committed murder, and it still makes me furiously angry, nauseous, and heartsick. I’ve gone to the funerals of the dead and wept with their families, and their anguish breaks my heart, over and over and over again. Yes, war is horrible. War, as Sherman said, is hell.

But somewhere in the background of the debate is the idea that pain, sorrow, and especially death are evils to be avoided at all costs, with its further implication that because war causes pain, sorrow, and death, war is also to be avoided at all costs. And that simply isn’t true. Some costs are too high to pay, even if the alternative is death.

To put it another way: If there’s anything in this world worth living for, then there are also things worth fighting for, worth suffering for—even things worth dying for.

Once you remember that, then it seems possible that the hell of war in Iraq could be worthwhile. Stopping a dictator who kills thousands of his own people and shows aggressive tendencies towards his neighbors was once—and not so long ago, either—considered a worthy and honorable task, worth dying for.

When they know I am an Army wife, like those war protestors did, people tend to keep their emotion politely reined in when we talk about the war. They smile and nod and keep their more heated opinions to themselves. “Oh, I support the troops,” they assure me. “I support them a hundred percent. I just don’t support the war.” But it’s the troops who conduct the war. It’s the troops who do, not only the dying in war, but the killing. I don’t think you can separate the troops from their mission.

So here I am, half a year later. I can give no coherent, rational summing up of “What Our Deployment Experience Means To Me.” It’s still too close, and anyway, it isn’t really over. All I can say is that I would slog through it all over again. And though I hope the need doesn’t arise, if Dan is called up again, I will slog through it all over again. As Dan’s unit patch says, “We Support The Mission.”