Life During Wartime
By this spring, nearly 40,000 troops will have been deployed to Iraq from Fort Hood. For the military spouses left behind, time passes. They raise their kids, wait for breaking news, and pray whenever they hear a knock on the door.
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Around Fort Hood, reevaluating the pluses and minuses of Army life is a constant topic of conversation. Because of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers are facing significantly longer rotations overseas, with less time home between deployments. Fort Hood is making a concerted effort to reach out to spouses, offering them everything from marriage counseling and anger management classes to a vast support network called Family Readiness Groups. “When she feels better, he feels better,” said Peggy Stamper, the director of the post’s volunteer center. “If things aren’t going well at home, that soldier isn’t mission-focused. We want women to feel a part of the team. This is a sisterhood. They’re all living the same anxieties.” The week before Christmas, a support group for women with husbands deployed in Iraq met at a chapel on the post. Three young mothers—Lily, Nina, and Teresa—sat and talked as their children played tag in the background. The conversation shifted from the upcoming holidays to the power of prayer to the day that their husbands left for Iraq.
“I cried uncontrollably when my husband left,” said Lily. “It was just me and the baby in this great big world. Then the sewer backed up, and the truck broke down. My husband stopped calling for a while so he could distance himself and do what he needed to do.”
“I miscarried while my husband was away,” said Nina. “It was hard, but I got through it.”
“You get used to being alone,” said Teresa. “When your husband’s back, you don’t know what to do with him.”
The women laughed and then fell into silence.
“You think about getting that knock on the door,” Lily said.
Teresa nodded. “Every day.”
This spring, the 4th infantry will return home after a year’s rotation in Iraq. How long its soldiers will remain in Texas is unclear right now, as is the level of difficulty they will face reintegrating after months of sustained combat. “People are permanently changed by war, and when there are daily patrols and raids where the enemy can strike without warning, the changes can be much more dramatic,” said Army chaplain Brad West. “How post-traumatic stress disorder is going to play out in this community is an unknown quantity right now.” Not all homecomings for returning soldiers will be easy ones. Spouses may feel estranged from each other. Children who are under the age of three may not recognize the parent who has been absent. To the soldier, American culture may seem foreign. “It’s disorienting to come back to the U.S. and see TV commercials for things like cleaning products when all you’ve seen for months is people sleeping on dirt floors,” said West. “That disparity—between reality at home and reality over there—can make soldiers feel isolated. Some will tell their spouses, ‘You’ll never be able to understand what I’ve been through.’”
“When I first came back to Fort Hood, I would scan the overpasses on highway 190 for snipers,” said first lieutenant Chris Sauceda, a platoon leader with the 4th Infantry Division, who sustained shrapnel wounds to his legs and face when his convoy was ambushed in September outside Tikrit. “I’d study the occupants of other vehicles as they drove by. I’d reach for my M16 and realize it wasn’t there. Little things would startle me, like driving over potholes or hearing a car screech its tires up the block. For the first few weeks I was back, I couldn’t sit still long enough to watch TV. I ran a few red lights because I was used to being in a convoy, and a convoy doesn’t stop for anything.” Sauceda, who is 24, is currently in rehabilitation at Fort Hood for his injuries. His hypervigilance has faded with time. “I’ve lost my edge,” he said with a grin. “I’m not looking around the room to make sure the doors are manned anymore.” Sauceda survived the attack on his convoy only because his platoon had acquired an armored humvee four days before, which shielded him from the full force of the bomb that detonated about ten feet away from him. “I’m lucky to be alive,” he said. “There’s no reason why I should still be in one piece.”
Sauceda has grown frustrated with what he believes is undeservedly negative news coverage of the war. “There is so much good that happens in Iraq that is never reported,” he said. “When I was there, we put sonogram machines and medicine and syringes into hospitals. We got paper and pencils for kids, and we painted their schools. I can’t even count how many lives we saved. We got medicine for sick children, and IVs for people who were dying of dehydration. But you never hear about those stories on the news.” Before he was injured, Sauceda visited one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Tikrit. Inside the spectacular entrance hall—adorned in gold, marble, and mahogany—Sauceda turned to say something to his two translators, only to find them in tears. “They saw how Saddam had lived while their country had been so poor,” Sauceda said. “That day made everything we were doing worth it to me.” But when he returned home, he was surprised to find just how oblivious civilians were to the war. When he went to Dallas to attend the Texas-OU game, he ran into acquaintances from college at a noisy bar who asked him why he was walking with a cane. “I’d explain, ‘I was injured in Iraq,’ and they’d say, ‘You were in a wreck?’” he recalled. “I’d have to say, ‘No, Iraq. I was in the war.’”
Like Sauceda, most soldiers and their families at Fort Hood believe that the great personal sacrifice they make each day is unquestionably worth it. But privately, some grumble about the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Shannon Sharrock, whose husband flies Blackhawk helicopters in Iraq for the 4th Infantry, is careful to preface her opinions by explaining that she does not speak for her husband and that she unconditionally supports U.S. troops. She is a former soldier herself; a West Point graduate, she was on active duty for four and a half years as a Chinook helicopter pilot. “We should never send one single American soldier into a foreign country to risk his or her life with anything less than infallible intelligence, because it is not worth that sacrifice,” she said. “Weapons of mass destruction have not been found, and that was the justification for this war. I don’t want one more soldier to get so much as a paper cut in Iraq without us first getting some answers. Soldiers are doing beneficial things for the people of Iraq, but a soldier’s job is not to rebuild schools. It’s to defend the United States and to win wars. And we have won this war. It’s time to relinquish control to the United Nations and bring our soldiers home.”
But five days after the capture of Saddam Hussein, there were no family reunions, only good-byes. A brisk wind blew across the parade grounds outside the 1st Cavalry’s headquarters, where a farewell ceremony for its first deployment of soldiers to Iraq was under way. The roughly 17,000 troops who make up the division would be deploying through March to the Sunni Triangle, as the 4th Infantry returns. On this winter day, 3,000 soldiers in desert fatigues stood at attention, silently, for as far as the eye could see. In the stands, wives clutched camcorders and toddlers, who tried to wrestle out of their arms; a large American flag billowed above them. There were speeches and an inspection of the troops by the major general and an old-fashioned cavalry charge, after which a bugler played with great flourish. “We say farewell and Godspeed,” the announcer told the troops. The children grew restless, chasing one another around the bleachers, while a few women wiped away tears. Some looked on stoically, lips pinched together. Others slid on sunglasses even though they sat in the shade. The troops marched by, their young faces flushed from the cold. Their expressions were solemn, their chins held high. They would have two weeks of leave. Then they would go off to war.
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