February 2004
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.
At Fort Hood, the sprawling military post forty miles southwest of Waco, news of a casualty usually arrives with an unexpected knock on the door or a phone call that comes too early in the morning. On December 14, telephones across the post started ringing before dawn. The sudden sound erupting in the silence was enough to provoke fear—of a helicopter downed in Iraq or a convoy ambushed. Startled awake, Army wives reluctantly reached for the phone, but there was only jubilation on the other end of the line. “Turn on your TV!” cried voices still groggy from sleep. “Saddam’s been captured!”
For military families, the arrest of Saddam Hussein provided a much-needed dose of good news. It was Fort Hood’s own troops—the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division—who had discovered the former Iraqi dictator hiding in a hole in the ground. His capture was a deeply personal triumph here, since Fort Hood has become all too familiar with the cost of war; its troops have sustained one death per week since first entering Iraq in April. In the Sunni Triangle, the northern Iraqi region considered to be the most hostile to U.S. troops, its soldiers have become targets for rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, and improvised explosive devices. Around Fort Hood, patriotism and pride mix with worry, and the conversation often touches upon another guerilla war. “There haven’t been knocks on the door like this since Vietnam,” said the Killeen Daily Herald’s military reporter, Debbie Stevenson, herself a longtime Army wife. “There hasn’t been sustained combat like this since Vietnam. The stress level among families is very high. At the same time, we believe in this mission. We may be war weary, but we haven’t lost our resolve.”
The capture of Saddam Hussein eleven days before Christmas lifted the spirits of this Army town. “Our Guys Got Him” boasted a Dairy Queen sign. “The World Thanks You!” read another sign. “Job Well Done.” Civilians driving past Fort Hood that day honked their horns in appreciation, and at Sunday church services around Killeen, parishioners gave thanks to God. After the initial rejoicing, though, the mood on the post was subdued. “We’re happy that we caught Saddam, but it’s just one less thing on our to-do list,” explained Command Sergeant Major Stanley Small, with the 1st Brigade’s 1st Cavalry Division. “A lot of work still needs to be done. It’s business as usual for us.” There were no victory speeches that day, no rounds of toasts at the officers’ club; regardless of Hussein’s arrest, troops were still going off to war. Fort Hood’s 1st Cavalry Division—around 17,000 soldiers—was preparing to deploy to Iraq, where many would be stationed until the summer of 2005. “We can’t let our guard down just yet,” said Beth Blevins, the manager of the post’s Army Family Team Building program. “It’s still very dangerous there. Saddam’s capture is not going to prevent my husband from being deployed to Iraq, and it’s not going to bring our soldiers home.”
At a hastily arranged press event at Fort Hood the day after Hussein’s capture, a dozen women with husbands in the 4th Infantry Division talked to the media about their reactions to the story making headlines around the world. The arrest of the former Iraqi dictator marked a sudden reversal of fortune for the division, which had been sidelined at the start of the war. Turned back last spring, when Turkey refused its troops entry, the 4th Infantry had been unable to invade Iraq from the north. With its tanks stranded at sea, its troops could not join the march toward Baghdad; by the time they finally reached the capital, via Kuwait, the Iraqi military had already collapsed. After the indignity of being forced to sit out the first phase of the war, the arrest of Hussein had transformed the division’s soldiers into the heroes of the day. They provided an irresistible narrative for the media, who descended on the post en masse. At the last-minute press event that day, the group of Army wives stepped into the bright winter sunshine to talk about the gratification they found in their husbands’ successes. As they spoke, with toddlers in tow, the strain of the past nine months was apparent.
“You’ve got five more months until your husband comes home,” the Daily Herald’s Stevenson said to one young woman, a mother of three. “Does Saddam’s capture ease your mind a bit?”
“Knowing that my husband still has to go out there and do his patrols every day, I’m going to worry,” the woman said. She glanced down at her baby and laughed nervously. “Fear of the unknown.”
“Has your husband seen the little one?” Stevenson asked, gesturing toward the two-month-old.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just pictures.”
“You’ve had to go through a lot while he’s been gone,” Stevenson said. “Has Saddam’s capture given you a feeling that it’s been worth it?”
The young woman held her baby close as she searched for the right words. “My husband loves the Army, he loves this country, and he loves his job,” she said with a picture-perfect smile that wavered for only a moment. “Knowing that he’s happy makes it all worth it to me.”
Fort Hood is one of the largest military installations in the world, a place so vast that its size is roughly equivalent to the city of Dallas. Before the war, the post vibrated with the sound of American military might. Fleets of humvees and M1 tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers barreled down its roads, and Blackhawk helicopters hovered above the bleak expanse of prairie. Now, the post is quiet. Most of its 42,000 or so soldiers are either in Iraq or preparing to deploy there, and along Tank Destroyer Boulevard and Hell on Wheels Avenue, where combat vehicles once parked by the hundreds, only the empty blacktop remains. The landscape around the World War II-era military post is brown and barren, with a scattering of utilitarian buildings laid out along a grid. To the east, beyond its concertina-wire border, lies a tangle of pawn shops, tattoo parlors, topless bars, loan shark outfits, used-car lots, Korean and Vietnamese restaurants, cheap motels, and gun shops, all of which prominently display “We Support Our Troops” signs. Military families stick closer to the chain stores and fast-food joints along the main thoroughfare that runs through town, U.S. 190, where businesses managed to stay profitable during last year’s deployments. The working-class subdivisions south of the post are filled with men and women in fatigues and look as impermanent as a carnival.
At Shoemaker High School, just south of Fort Hood, more than three quarters of its 2,100 students have a parent who is stationed in Iraq or who is preparing to deploy there. This is a community visibly altered by war; at football games last fall, the stands were largely absent of fathers. In the guidance counselor’s office, where the TV is always tuned to CNN, Iraq is never far away. “I just found out my friend’s dad was almost killed,” one senior told a counselor after Hussein was found. “He was in a convoy, and an explosive device went off next to him.” Between talk of SAT scores and homework and the prom, reminders of the war are everywhere. Before the moment of silence that starts off the school day, the name of a parent or relative on active duty is read over the school loudspeakers. The latest attacks are whispered about in the halls. From the ceiling hang blue and silver cardboard stars, each one bearing the name of a parent or relative who is in Iraq or who is headed there. They now number more than one thousand. For students with parents at war, Hussein’s capture has stirred false hope. “Kids are saying, ‘This means my dad will be coming home!’ and, ‘It’s over!’” said Rodney Leary, who teaches U.S. government and economics. “But it’s not over.”
“The possibility of death is very real to these kids,” said principal Nelda Howton. “Almost half of our teachers have spouses in Iraq or deploying there, and they’re scared too.” Nothing at this high school is more dreaded than the unexpected knock on the front door. Within hours of a casualty, the Army dispatches one of its officers and a chaplain to the home of a soldier’s next of kin. Although the “notification team” has a suggested script to follow—“The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret …”—words are rarely needed; the sight of two soldiers in dress greens is sufficient. In October a notification team visited the family of one Shoemaker student after her father’s convoy came under attack. On the morning of the funeral, more than five hundred classmates lined up outside the high school in a show of solidarity, each one holding a miniature American flag. “When the family drove by us, you could have heard a pin drop,” said Howton. “Every kid out there saluted that family. For a lot of students, I think that’s when the reality of this really hit home.”
As the stress of war has spilled over into the classroom, discipline problems have risen sharply and grades have plunged. Some students have less time for homework because of greater responsibilities at home; they must look after younger siblings, cook and clean, and serve as the remaining parent’s emotional support. “You have a lot of one-parent households now where kids are acting out and Mom is falling apart,” said head counselor Barbara Critchfield. “Dad doesn’t want to be the disciplinarian; he’s busy fighting a war. One mother wanted her husband to write a letter telling their son that he needed to shape up, but her husband refused to do it. He said, ‘I don’t want that to be the last letter my kid gets from me.’” Mothers are not the only ones left at home during deployments that can stretch on for up to fifteen months. As more women go to war than ever before, men are picking up the slack, like teacher Rodney Leary. When his wife, Sharon, a battalion commander in the 1st Cavalry, deploys this spring, Leary will be the sole caretaker of their nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. “I can shop and cook and clean just fine,” said the fifty-year-old Leary with a good-natured grin. “But sometimes with kids, Dad just doesn’t cut it.”
