Lewis-McChord runners honor the fallen
March 3, 2011
By Laura M. Levering (Northwest Guardian)
Upon meeting Nancy Pardo, one might find it hard to believe that the noticeably fit woman used to hate running and struggled to jog short distances.
That changed a few months ago after one of Pardo's friends encouraged her to link up with the local running group, "wear blue: run to remember."
The DuPont resident frequently saw members of the group running through her neighborhood, and subsequently, her interest in the group grew. She began attending the group's weekend runs late last year, and within weeks noticed a change in her body and attitude towards running. "I went from not being able to run from the end of my driveway without nearly collapsing to being able to run 10 miles today," Pardo said.
She attended a kickoff dinner for the group in January, which Pardo said helped seal her commitment to the group. "I felt a little bit like an outsider at first - like these are all Army wives, and they've been through a lot, you know - like I'm not really going to fit in," Pardo said.
To her surprise, Pardo felt accepted almost immediately. "That feeling of uncertainty dissipated within 10 minutes of being there," she said. "I felt right at home. Everyone was so welcoming."
"Wear blue: run to remember" was formed by a group of Army wives whose husbands were deployed with a unit which suffered casualties of historic proportions. The group's founder, Lisa Hallett, lost her husband, Capt. John Hallett III, when he was killed Aug. 25, 2009. John was one of 40 assigned to 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, now 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, who gave the ultimate sacrifice during the brigade's yearlong deployment to Afghanistan.
The group began as a support group for wives dealing with the burdens of a stressful deployment. It has since grown to include runners, joggers and walkers reaching all demographics. "We're not a wives group anymore," Lisa said. "We're Soldiers, Airmen, spouses, Wounded Warriors, Gold Star families, community members - we're all coming together to honor the service and sacrifices of our fallen while building a bridge between the military and civilian communities."
Whether you are a beginning runner or walker, training for a marathon or simply want to show support for the military, everybody is welcome to join "wear blue: run to remember."
The group meets every Saturday morning at 9 a.m. in Powderworks Park, across from Pioneer Middle School, in DuPont. There are three different courses - all marked and with water stations - for runners and walkers of all abilities. Strollers and pets are also welcome. The only stipulation is that Lisa requests participants wear blue - the color her husband's unit often wore for PT. "Our hope is that someday every person who sees or wears that blue recognizes and appreciates the service and sacrifice of the American military," Lisa said.
After stretching and mingling prior to the 9 a.m. start, a wave of blue moves to the basketball court for welcoming remarks by Lisa or one of the group's cofounders. Going around the circle of people gathered, each person introduces themself by first name. Once introductions are completed, there is a moment of silence. The names of 5th Bde., 2nd Inf. Div.'s 41 fallen are read, followed by an opportunity for anyone to say the names of additional fallen heroes. These are moments that motivate runners like 2nd Lt. Ben Hunter to return each week. "It's really powerful when they start calling out names," said Hunter, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. "This group is all about the (servicemembers) who are fighting or who have fallen. Once I made that connection, it had a strong meaning for me."
Hunter found out about the group through his wife, who befriended some of the runners last year during Hunter's deployment. "It was great for my wife because immediately she made close friends who had a connection with military life," Hunter said. "She felt great about coming out and supporting Lisa, plus it was a way for her to cope with me being away."
Hunter is among dozens of runners who participate in "wear blue: run to remember" each week. He supports the group's mission, and has vowed not to forget his fellow servicemembers' sacrifices.
"We've been in this war for a good period of time, and it's almost like it's just become something that's going on," Hunter said. "It's easy to keep going on with your daily life and not realize that everyday there are still Soldiers sacrificing every minute of every day, allowing people to go on with their lives."
Forty-two flags mark the course - 41 of them bearing the fallen Soldiers from 5th Bde., 2nd Inf. Div., with the 42nd representing all other fallen servicemembers. They are symbolic reminders of the price Lisa's husband and thousands of others have paid. "'Run to Remember' is an incredibly tangible way for people - whether they're military or not - to come together and say, 'I really appreciate what the military does and the sacrifices the families are willing to make,'" Lisa said.
"It's two-fold," Hunter added. "One, you're getting a good workout, and then two, you're serving by doing something worthwhile."
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
My good friend's husband has a Purple Heart from an IED injury he sustained in Ramadi, Iraq, a few years ago. Thankfully, after surgery, his injury didn't leave him disfigured and he is 100% fine today.
On her SUV, my friend's license plate displays an image of a Purple Heart medal. In order to display this,one has to have earned a Purple Heart. Not that I was going to try to buy one, but I did ask her if just any random person could drive around with one of these on his/her license plate. She told me you have to have the documentation in order to get one. I promise...I wasn't going to try to get one... :)
Anyway, the other day, I asked her if anyone has ever noticed her license plate and said something to her about the Purple Heart. She replied saying, "not really," but that over the weekend, someone had written on her back windshield, "Thank you for your sacrifice."
She then told me it reminded her she needed to wash her car.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Photo by Jose Mandojana
The article below features the Run to Remember group that was started by Lisa Hallett and a couple other 1-17 Infantry wives last year. Lisa's husband, CPT John Hallett, was killed in Afghanistan in August 2009. The group runs to honor the fallen soldiers. They are working hard to expand beyond just military spouses. This morning, quite a few new people from the community joined the run. The following article on Lisa was published in Runner's World and was written by a former 1-17 wife and has given Run to Remember great nationwide exposure. If you are interested in purchasing a Run to Remember shirt, please comment on this posting and I'll happily arrange it. Lisa is a remarkable person (and an amazing runner!) and I greatly admire her Run to Remember vision.
MOVING COMFORT
Army wives and widows help each other cope one step at a time.
By Amy Bushatz
Runner's World
PUBLISHED 12/30/2010
It's her mantra: Run for John, run for me, just one more step. For Lisa Hallett, whether solo in a marathon or with her kids in their mammoth, triple-wide jogging stroller during training, running is how she deals with the pain, the loss, and the memory.
"It's really hard to do day-to-day things—taking my kids to preschool and taking care of the house," says Hallett, a 29-year-old full-time mom. "On most days, if nothing else, I can say I ran. On some days all I can do is get to the end of the block and cry. But on other days I hit the ground and I can say, 'I ran 20 miles this morning.'"
Her husband, Capt. John Hallett, and three fellow Army soldiers died in Afghanistan on August 25, 2009, when an improvised explosive device caused their vehicle to flip and burst into flames. With a 3-week-old baby girl, Heidi, and two toddler sons, Jackson and Bryce, suddenly relying on her alone, Hallett found solace in the pavement.
She had run her first marathon in 2002 while John was in one of the Army's most challenging courses, Ranger School. During his absences, runs were a time to daydream about his return. Now they've become a spiritual escape. "There's a lot of conversations with God, there's a lot of sorting," says Hallett, whose marathon PR is 4:05. "I think about being strong for John. I know that's cliche, but I feel like I'm John's physical representation now."
Soon after his death, she laced up and ran with two military wives from John's unit—the 1-17 Infantry Stryker Battalion based in Fort Lewis, Washington. Since then, their group has expanded; nearly two dozen wives and widows meet every Saturday morning. They call themselves Run to Remember, and they've done marathons, with plans to run the Rock 'n' Roll Seattle Marathon in June.
"When I run, it's the only time I let myself connect with my emotions," says Alice Pope, 36, an original member of the group who increased her mileage to deal with the fear that her husband may not make it home alive. "This is the closest I can come to relating to what he's going through. You have to take another step—it's boring, it hurts, it's also exciting."
"While my husband was deployed, the runs were time set aside for me to reflect and pray," says Charlene Lewis, 38, the wife of the chaplain who was serving with the battalion. "We keep each other moving on runs just like we do during deployment—we keep each other going."
Grieving experts say that people sometimes don't know how to relate to someone who has suffered a tragedy. "Running can be an outlet for working through loss, and shared running can bond people," says Joanne M. Steen, coauthor of Military Widow: A Survival Guide.
The women hope that by running and racing while wearing blue shirts with "Run to Remember" on the front and the names of the brigade's fallen soldiers on the back, they'll be a visual reminder of the fallen and those who are still serving.
On a recent damp and cool Pacific Northwest Saturday morning, 20 women gathered to start their weekly run. The ritual is steeped in tradition, like most things in the Army. At 10 a.m., the women formed a circle. Lewis glanced at Hallett before saying, "I'll read the names." She started down the list of men who died in combat or, in one case, committed suicide since August 2009.
"Sgt. Troy Tom, Spc. Jonathan Yanney, Capt. John Hallett," Lewis says. At her husband's name, Hallett fixed her gaze hard into empty space. She was focusing on thoughts of John, the same thing she thinks about when she runs, she says.
It took Lewis another full minute to finish the list of 41 names. Then after short prayer, the women ran off.
For more information, email: runtoremember@teamrwb.org
Monday, January 10, 2011
Not too long ago I was sitting at the colonel's wife's house for a monthly coffee. It was around dinner time and there was a handful of other army wives there. People had gone through the buffet line and were seated around the dining room table chatting with one another. During a lull in the various conversations, the colonel's wife welcomed everybody and began talking about upcoming important dates and events.
It's funny for me to think back 5 years to when I first began going to these FRG meetings. I was a total newbie and relatively low on the military wife spectrum in terms of my husband's rank and responsibilities. Now, 5 deployments and several years later, it's weird to know that I am the position that I once thought was so "formal." The funny part is: it's really not at all formal and somehow, while a lot has happened in 5 years, I still feel like that newbie 29 year-old. Too bad I don't look like her anymore...
I digress. Back to the coffee night.
The colonel's wife kept referring to "the greens," saying things like, "We'll talk to the greens about it and see if they agree." I sat there trying to figure out who these mysterious "greens" were and if I had met them before. Finally, when she paused for questions, I raised my hand, simultaneously asking aloud who the greens were to which she kept referring.
"The greens are our husbands; you know...uniforms...green."
We all started laughing. And there I sat: 5 years as an army wife, just as clueless as when it all began.
It's funny for me to think back 5 years to when I first began going to these FRG meetings. I was a total newbie and relatively low on the military wife spectrum in terms of my husband's rank and responsibilities. Now, 5 deployments and several years later, it's weird to know that I am the position that I once thought was so "formal." The funny part is: it's really not at all formal and somehow, while a lot has happened in 5 years, I still feel like that newbie 29 year-old. Too bad I don't look like her anymore...
I digress. Back to the coffee night.
The colonel's wife kept referring to "the greens," saying things like, "We'll talk to the greens about it and see if they agree." I sat there trying to figure out who these mysterious "greens" were and if I had met them before. Finally, when she paused for questions, I raised my hand, simultaneously asking aloud who the greens were to which she kept referring.
"The greens are our husbands; you know...uniforms...green."
We all started laughing. And there I sat: 5 years as an army wife, just as clueless as when it all began.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
A Year at War
Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains
By JAMES DAO and CATRIN EINHORN
Published: December 30, 2010
NYTimes
WAUTOMA, Wis. — Life changed for Shawn Eisch with a phone call last January. His youngest brother, Brian, a soldier and single father, had just received orders to deploy from Fort Drum, N.Y., to Afghanistan and was mulling who might take his two boys for a year. Shawn volunteered.
So began a season of adjustments as the boys came to live in their uncle’s home here. Joey, the 8-year-old, got into fistfights at his new school. His 12-year-old brother, Isaac, rebelled against their uncle’s rules. And Shawn’s three children quietly resented sharing a bedroom, the family computer and, most of all, their parents’ attention with their younger cousins.
The once comfortable Eisch farmhouse suddenly felt crowded.
“It was a lot more traumatic than I ever pictured it, for them,” Shawn, 44, said. “And it was for me, too.”
The work of war is very much a family affair. Nearly 6 in 10 of the troops deployed today are married, and just under half have children. Those families — more than a million of them since 2001 — have borne the brunt of the psychological and emotional strain of deployments.
Siblings and grandparents have become surrogate parents. Spouses have struggled with loneliness and the stress of single parenting. Children have felt confused and abandoned during the long separations. All have felt anxieties about the distant dangers of war.
Christina Narewski, 26, thought her husband’s second deployment might be easier for her than his first. But she awoke one night this summer feeling so anxious about his absence that she thought she was having a heart attack and called an ambulance. And she still jumps when the doorbell rings, fearing it will be officers bearing unwanted news.
“It sucks that you’re afraid to answer your door,” she said.
Social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families -- effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives. They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.
And a paper published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2009 found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in civilian families. The longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the researchers found, the more likely their children were to have had difficulties in school and at home.
But those studies do not describe the myriad ways, often imperceptible to outsiders, in which families cope with deployments every day.
For Ms. Narewski, a mother of three, it has meant taking a grocery store job to distract her from thinking about her husband, a staff sergeant with the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, now in northern Afghanistan.
For Tim Sullivan, it has meant learning how to potty train, braid hair and fix dinner for his two young children while his wife, a sergeant in a support battalion to the 1-87, is deployed.
For young Joey Eisch, it meant crying himself to sleep for days after his father, a platoon sergeant with the battalion, left last spring. His older brother, Isaac, calm on the outside, was nervous on the inside.
“It’s pretty hard worrying if he’ll come back safe,” Isaac said. “I think about it like 10 or more times a day.”
Joining the Army Life
Soon after Christina and Francisco Narewski married in 2004, he applied for a job with the local sheriff’s office in Salinas, Calif. But he got tired of waiting and, after talking things over with Christina, enlisted in the Army instead.
“We both signed up for it,” Ms. Narewski said. “We knew deployments were going to come.”
That day arrived in the fall of 2007, when their third child was just 5 months old. Ms. Narewski missed Francisco dearly and sometimes cried just hearing his voice when he called from Iraq. But when he returned home in October 2008, it took them weeks to feel comfortable together again, she recalled.
“It’s almost like you’ve forgotten how to be with each other,” she said. “He’s been living in his spot for 15 months. Me and the kids have our own routine. It’s hard to get back to, ‘Oh, you’re home.’ ”
Last April, he left again, this time to Afghanistan. Ms. Narewski, who lives in Watertown, N.Y., thought she was prepared. Her mother came to live with them. She signed up for exercise classes to fill the hours. She and Francisco bought BlackBerrys with instant messaging service so they could communicate daily. And yet.
“I’ve never missed him as much as I do right now,” she said recently. “It doesn’t feel like we’re moving. It’s like you’re in a dream and you’re trying to get something and you can’t get it.”
Not all the spouses back home are women. Tim Sullivan’s days have revolved almost entirely around his two children, Austin, 4, and Leah, 2, since his wife, Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, deployed to Afghanistan in March.
He rises each weekday at 5:30 a.m. to dress and feed them before shuttling them to day care. Evenings are the reverse, usually ending with him dozing off in front of the television at their rented ranch-style house in Fayetteville, N.C.
He has moved twice and changed jobs three times in recent years to accommodate his wife’s military career. But he does not mind being home with the children, he says, because his father was not, having left the family when Mr. Sullivan was young.
“I’m not going to put my kids through that,” said Mr. Sullivan, 35, who handles child support cases for the county. “I’m going to be there.”
He worries about lost intimacy with his wife, saying that they have had a number of arguments by phone, usually about bill paying or child rearing. “She tells me: ‘Tim, you can’t just be Daddy, the hard person. You have to be Mommy, too,’” he said. “I tell her it’s not that easy.”
Yet he says that if she stays in the Army — as she has said she wants to do — he is prepared to move again or even endure another deployment. “I love her,” he said. “I’m already signed up. I made a decision to join the life that goes with that.”
Young Nomads
Isaac and Joey Eisch have also had to adjust to their father’s nomadic life. “I don’t try to get too attached to my friends because I move around a lot,” said Isaac, who has lived in five states and Germany with his father. (Joey has lived in three states.) “When I leave, it’s like, hard.”
When Sergeant Eisch got divorced in 2004, he took Isaac to an Army post in Germany while Joey stayed with his mother in Wisconsin. Soon after returning to the States in 2007, the sergeant became worried that his ex-wife was neglecting Joey. He petitioned family court for full custody of both boys and won.
In 2009, he transferred to Fort Drum and took the boys with him. Within months, he received orders for Afghanistan.
After nearly 17 years in the Army with no combat deployments, Sergeant Eisch was determined to go to war. The boys, he felt, were old enough to handle his leaving. Little did he know how hard it would be.
When Shawn put the boys in his truck at Fort Drum to take them to Wautoma, a two-stoplight town in central Wisconsin, Isaac clawed at the rear window “like a caged animal,” Sergeant Eisch said. He still tears up at the recollection.
“I question myself every day if I’m doing the right thing for my kids,” he said. “I’m trying to do my duty to my country and deploy, and do what Uncle Sam asks me to do. But what’s everybody asking my boys to do?”
Within a few weeks of arriving at his uncle’s home, Joey beat up a boy so badly that the school summoned the police. It was not the last time Shawn and his wife, Lisa, would be summoned to the principal’s office.
The boys were in pain, Shawn realized. “There was a lot more emotion,” he said, “than Lisa and I ever expected.”
Shawn, a state water conservation officer, decided he needed to set strict rules for homework and good behavior. Violations led to chores, typically stacking wood. But there were carrots, too: for Joey, promises of going to Build-a-Bear if he obeyed his teachers; for Isaac, going hunting with his uncle was the prize. Gradually, the calls from the principal declined, though they have not ended.
In September, Sergeant Eisch returned for midtour leave and the homecoming was as joyful as his departure had been wrenching. Father and sons spent the first nights in hotels, visited an amusement park, went fishing and traveled to New York City, where they saw Times Square and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
But the two weeks were over in what seemed like hours. In his final days, Sergeant Eisch had prepped the boys for his departure, but that did not make it any easier.
“Why can’t we just, like, end the war?” Isaac asked at one point.
As they waited at the airport, father and sons clung to each other. “I’m going to have to drink like a gallon of water to replenish these tears,” the sergeant said. “Be safe,” Isaac implored him over and over.
Sergeant Eisch said he would, and then was gone.
Despite his worries, Isaac tried to reassure himself. “He’s halfway through, and he’s going to make it,” he said. “With all that training he’s probably not going to get shot. He knows if there’s a red dot on his chest, run. Not toward the enemy. Run, and shoot.”
But his father did not run.
‘Dad’ Comes Home
Just weeks after returning to Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch, the senior noncommissioned officer for a reconnaissance and sniper platoon, was involved with Afghan police officers in a major offensive into a Taliban stronghold south of Kunduz city.
While directing fire from his armored truck, Sergeant Eisch saw a rocket-propelled grenade explode among a group of police officers standing in a field. The Afghans scattered, leaving behind a man writhing in pain. Sergeant Eisch ordered his medic to move their truck alongside the officer to shield him from gunfire. Then Sergeant Eisch got out.
“I just reacted,” he recalled. “I seen a guy hurt and nobody was helping him, so I went out there.”
The police officer was bleeding from several gaping wounds and seemed to have lost an eye. Sergeant Eisch started applying tourniquets when he heard the snap of bullets and felt “a chainsaw ripping through my legs.” He had been hit by machine gun fire, twice in the left leg, once in the right.
He crawled back into his truck and helped tighten tourniquets on his own legs. He was evacuated by helicopter and taken to a military hospital where, in a morphine daze, he called Shawn.
“Are you sitting down?” Brian asked woozily. “I’ve been shot.”
Shawn hung up and went into a quiet panic. He could not tell how badly Brian had been wounded. Would he lose his leg? He called the school and asked them to shield the boys from the news until he could get there.
Outside school, Shawn told Isaac, Joey and his 12-year-old daughter, Anna, about Brian’s injury. Only Isaac stayed relatively calm.
But later, Shawn found Isaac in his bedroom weeping quietly while looking at a photograph showing his father outside his tent, holding a rifle. Shawn helped him turn the photograph into a PowerPoint presentation titled, “I Love You Dad!”
For Shawn, a gentle and reserved man, his brother’s injury brought six months of family turmoil to a new level. Sensing his distress, Lisa urged him to go hunting, a favorite pastime. So he grabbed his bow and went to a wooded ridge on his 40 acres of property.
To his amazement, an eight-point buck wandered by. Shawn hit the deer, the largest he had ever killed with a bow. It seemed a good omen.
A few days later, Shawn flew with the boys, his father and Brian’s twin sister, Brenda, to Washington to visit the sergeant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. At the entrance, they saw men in wheelchairs with no arms and no legs. Others were burned or missing eyes. Shawn feared what the boys would see inside Brian’s room.
But Brian, giddy from painkillers, was his cheerful self. His right leg seemed almost normal. His left leg, swollen and stapled together, looked terrible. But it was a real leg, and it was still attached to him. The boys felt relieved.
Within days, Brian was wheeling himself around the hospital and cracking jokes with nurses, a green-and-yellow Green Bay Packers cap on his head. While Joey lost himself in coloring books and television, Isaac attended to his father’s every need.
“I feel a little more grown up,” Isaac said. “I feel a lot more attached to him than I was when he left.”
One doctor told Brian that he would never be able to carry a rucksack or run again because of nerve damage in his left leg. Someone even asked him if he wanted the leg amputated, since he would certainly be able to run with a prosthetic. Brian refused, and vowed to prove the doctor wrong. By December, he was walking with a cane and driving again.
For Shawn, too, the future had become murkier. It might be many weeks before Brian could reclaim his sons. But he also knew how glad the boys were to have their father back in one piece.
“Brian came home,” Shawn said one evening after visiting his brother in the hospital. “He didn’t come home like we hoped he would come home, but he came home.”
“Every single day I think about all those families and all those kids that are not going to have a dad come home from Afghanistan,” he said. “That hurts more than watching my brother try to take a step because I know my brother will take a step and I know he’s going to walk down the dock and get in his bass boat someday.”
It was late, and he had to get the boys up the next morning to visit their father at the hospital again. The holidays were fast approaching and the snow would soon be arriving in Wisconsin. Shawn wondered whether he could get Isaac out hunting before the season ended.
Yeah, he thought. He probably could.
Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains
By JAMES DAO and CATRIN EINHORN
Published: December 30, 2010
NYTimes
WAUTOMA, Wis. — Life changed for Shawn Eisch with a phone call last January. His youngest brother, Brian, a soldier and single father, had just received orders to deploy from Fort Drum, N.Y., to Afghanistan and was mulling who might take his two boys for a year. Shawn volunteered.
So began a season of adjustments as the boys came to live in their uncle’s home here. Joey, the 8-year-old, got into fistfights at his new school. His 12-year-old brother, Isaac, rebelled against their uncle’s rules. And Shawn’s three children quietly resented sharing a bedroom, the family computer and, most of all, their parents’ attention with their younger cousins.
The once comfortable Eisch farmhouse suddenly felt crowded.
“It was a lot more traumatic than I ever pictured it, for them,” Shawn, 44, said. “And it was for me, too.”
The work of war is very much a family affair. Nearly 6 in 10 of the troops deployed today are married, and just under half have children. Those families — more than a million of them since 2001 — have borne the brunt of the psychological and emotional strain of deployments.
Siblings and grandparents have become surrogate parents. Spouses have struggled with loneliness and the stress of single parenting. Children have felt confused and abandoned during the long separations. All have felt anxieties about the distant dangers of war.
Christina Narewski, 26, thought her husband’s second deployment might be easier for her than his first. But she awoke one night this summer feeling so anxious about his absence that she thought she was having a heart attack and called an ambulance. And she still jumps when the doorbell rings, fearing it will be officers bearing unwanted news.
“It sucks that you’re afraid to answer your door,” she said.
Social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families -- effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives. They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.
And a paper published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2009 found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in civilian families. The longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the researchers found, the more likely their children were to have had difficulties in school and at home.
But those studies do not describe the myriad ways, often imperceptible to outsiders, in which families cope with deployments every day.
For Ms. Narewski, a mother of three, it has meant taking a grocery store job to distract her from thinking about her husband, a staff sergeant with the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, now in northern Afghanistan.
For Tim Sullivan, it has meant learning how to potty train, braid hair and fix dinner for his two young children while his wife, a sergeant in a support battalion to the 1-87, is deployed.
For young Joey Eisch, it meant crying himself to sleep for days after his father, a platoon sergeant with the battalion, left last spring. His older brother, Isaac, calm on the outside, was nervous on the inside.
“It’s pretty hard worrying if he’ll come back safe,” Isaac said. “I think about it like 10 or more times a day.”
Joining the Army Life
Soon after Christina and Francisco Narewski married in 2004, he applied for a job with the local sheriff’s office in Salinas, Calif. But he got tired of waiting and, after talking things over with Christina, enlisted in the Army instead.
“We both signed up for it,” Ms. Narewski said. “We knew deployments were going to come.”
That day arrived in the fall of 2007, when their third child was just 5 months old. Ms. Narewski missed Francisco dearly and sometimes cried just hearing his voice when he called from Iraq. But when he returned home in October 2008, it took them weeks to feel comfortable together again, she recalled.
“It’s almost like you’ve forgotten how to be with each other,” she said. “He’s been living in his spot for 15 months. Me and the kids have our own routine. It’s hard to get back to, ‘Oh, you’re home.’ ”
Last April, he left again, this time to Afghanistan. Ms. Narewski, who lives in Watertown, N.Y., thought she was prepared. Her mother came to live with them. She signed up for exercise classes to fill the hours. She and Francisco bought BlackBerrys with instant messaging service so they could communicate daily. And yet.
“I’ve never missed him as much as I do right now,” she said recently. “It doesn’t feel like we’re moving. It’s like you’re in a dream and you’re trying to get something and you can’t get it.”
Not all the spouses back home are women. Tim Sullivan’s days have revolved almost entirely around his two children, Austin, 4, and Leah, 2, since his wife, Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, deployed to Afghanistan in March.
He rises each weekday at 5:30 a.m. to dress and feed them before shuttling them to day care. Evenings are the reverse, usually ending with him dozing off in front of the television at their rented ranch-style house in Fayetteville, N.C.
He has moved twice and changed jobs three times in recent years to accommodate his wife’s military career. But he does not mind being home with the children, he says, because his father was not, having left the family when Mr. Sullivan was young.
“I’m not going to put my kids through that,” said Mr. Sullivan, 35, who handles child support cases for the county. “I’m going to be there.”
He worries about lost intimacy with his wife, saying that they have had a number of arguments by phone, usually about bill paying or child rearing. “She tells me: ‘Tim, you can’t just be Daddy, the hard person. You have to be Mommy, too,’” he said. “I tell her it’s not that easy.”
Yet he says that if she stays in the Army — as she has said she wants to do — he is prepared to move again or even endure another deployment. “I love her,” he said. “I’m already signed up. I made a decision to join the life that goes with that.”
Young Nomads
Isaac and Joey Eisch have also had to adjust to their father’s nomadic life. “I don’t try to get too attached to my friends because I move around a lot,” said Isaac, who has lived in five states and Germany with his father. (Joey has lived in three states.) “When I leave, it’s like, hard.”
When Sergeant Eisch got divorced in 2004, he took Isaac to an Army post in Germany while Joey stayed with his mother in Wisconsin. Soon after returning to the States in 2007, the sergeant became worried that his ex-wife was neglecting Joey. He petitioned family court for full custody of both boys and won.
In 2009, he transferred to Fort Drum and took the boys with him. Within months, he received orders for Afghanistan.
After nearly 17 years in the Army with no combat deployments, Sergeant Eisch was determined to go to war. The boys, he felt, were old enough to handle his leaving. Little did he know how hard it would be.
When Shawn put the boys in his truck at Fort Drum to take them to Wautoma, a two-stoplight town in central Wisconsin, Isaac clawed at the rear window “like a caged animal,” Sergeant Eisch said. He still tears up at the recollection.
“I question myself every day if I’m doing the right thing for my kids,” he said. “I’m trying to do my duty to my country and deploy, and do what Uncle Sam asks me to do. But what’s everybody asking my boys to do?”
Within a few weeks of arriving at his uncle’s home, Joey beat up a boy so badly that the school summoned the police. It was not the last time Shawn and his wife, Lisa, would be summoned to the principal’s office.
The boys were in pain, Shawn realized. “There was a lot more emotion,” he said, “than Lisa and I ever expected.”
Shawn, a state water conservation officer, decided he needed to set strict rules for homework and good behavior. Violations led to chores, typically stacking wood. But there were carrots, too: for Joey, promises of going to Build-a-Bear if he obeyed his teachers; for Isaac, going hunting with his uncle was the prize. Gradually, the calls from the principal declined, though they have not ended.
In September, Sergeant Eisch returned for midtour leave and the homecoming was as joyful as his departure had been wrenching. Father and sons spent the first nights in hotels, visited an amusement park, went fishing and traveled to New York City, where they saw Times Square and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
But the two weeks were over in what seemed like hours. In his final days, Sergeant Eisch had prepped the boys for his departure, but that did not make it any easier.
“Why can’t we just, like, end the war?” Isaac asked at one point.
As they waited at the airport, father and sons clung to each other. “I’m going to have to drink like a gallon of water to replenish these tears,” the sergeant said. “Be safe,” Isaac implored him over and over.
Sergeant Eisch said he would, and then was gone.
Despite his worries, Isaac tried to reassure himself. “He’s halfway through, and he’s going to make it,” he said. “With all that training he’s probably not going to get shot. He knows if there’s a red dot on his chest, run. Not toward the enemy. Run, and shoot.”
But his father did not run.
‘Dad’ Comes Home
Just weeks after returning to Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch, the senior noncommissioned officer for a reconnaissance and sniper platoon, was involved with Afghan police officers in a major offensive into a Taliban stronghold south of Kunduz city.
While directing fire from his armored truck, Sergeant Eisch saw a rocket-propelled grenade explode among a group of police officers standing in a field. The Afghans scattered, leaving behind a man writhing in pain. Sergeant Eisch ordered his medic to move their truck alongside the officer to shield him from gunfire. Then Sergeant Eisch got out.
“I just reacted,” he recalled. “I seen a guy hurt and nobody was helping him, so I went out there.”
The police officer was bleeding from several gaping wounds and seemed to have lost an eye. Sergeant Eisch started applying tourniquets when he heard the snap of bullets and felt “a chainsaw ripping through my legs.” He had been hit by machine gun fire, twice in the left leg, once in the right.
He crawled back into his truck and helped tighten tourniquets on his own legs. He was evacuated by helicopter and taken to a military hospital where, in a morphine daze, he called Shawn.
“Are you sitting down?” Brian asked woozily. “I’ve been shot.”
Shawn hung up and went into a quiet panic. He could not tell how badly Brian had been wounded. Would he lose his leg? He called the school and asked them to shield the boys from the news until he could get there.
Outside school, Shawn told Isaac, Joey and his 12-year-old daughter, Anna, about Brian’s injury. Only Isaac stayed relatively calm.
But later, Shawn found Isaac in his bedroom weeping quietly while looking at a photograph showing his father outside his tent, holding a rifle. Shawn helped him turn the photograph into a PowerPoint presentation titled, “I Love You Dad!”
For Shawn, a gentle and reserved man, his brother’s injury brought six months of family turmoil to a new level. Sensing his distress, Lisa urged him to go hunting, a favorite pastime. So he grabbed his bow and went to a wooded ridge on his 40 acres of property.
To his amazement, an eight-point buck wandered by. Shawn hit the deer, the largest he had ever killed with a bow. It seemed a good omen.
A few days later, Shawn flew with the boys, his father and Brian’s twin sister, Brenda, to Washington to visit the sergeant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. At the entrance, they saw men in wheelchairs with no arms and no legs. Others were burned or missing eyes. Shawn feared what the boys would see inside Brian’s room.
But Brian, giddy from painkillers, was his cheerful self. His right leg seemed almost normal. His left leg, swollen and stapled together, looked terrible. But it was a real leg, and it was still attached to him. The boys felt relieved.
Within days, Brian was wheeling himself around the hospital and cracking jokes with nurses, a green-and-yellow Green Bay Packers cap on his head. While Joey lost himself in coloring books and television, Isaac attended to his father’s every need.
“I feel a little more grown up,” Isaac said. “I feel a lot more attached to him than I was when he left.”
One doctor told Brian that he would never be able to carry a rucksack or run again because of nerve damage in his left leg. Someone even asked him if he wanted the leg amputated, since he would certainly be able to run with a prosthetic. Brian refused, and vowed to prove the doctor wrong. By December, he was walking with a cane and driving again.
For Shawn, too, the future had become murkier. It might be many weeks before Brian could reclaim his sons. But he also knew how glad the boys were to have their father back in one piece.
“Brian came home,” Shawn said one evening after visiting his brother in the hospital. “He didn’t come home like we hoped he would come home, but he came home.”
“Every single day I think about all those families and all those kids that are not going to have a dad come home from Afghanistan,” he said. “That hurts more than watching my brother try to take a step because I know my brother will take a step and I know he’s going to walk down the dock and get in his bass boat someday.”
It was late, and he had to get the boys up the next morning to visit their father at the hospital again. The holidays were fast approaching and the snow would soon be arriving in Wisconsin. Shawn wondered whether he could get Isaac out hunting before the season ended.
Yeah, he thought. He probably could.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
ARNORTH Change of Command
Photo by Sgt. Joshua R. Ford
January 07, 2009
Lt. Gen. Thomas R. Turner (center), commanding general, U.S. Army North (ARNORTH) presides over the ARNORTH Headquarters and Headquarters Company change of command ceremony Jan. 6, 2009, at Fort Sam Houston.
(Just a random picture I found online to show the formal passing of the flag from commanders)
This morning I attended a change of command ceremony for a friend. These are formal gatherings typically held outside. Guests sit under a tent while the company stands before its new and about-to-be former commander. The battalion commander speaks about both soldiers and then each commander addresses his soldiers in formation as well as the guests. Traditionally, the wife of the outgoing commander gets red roses as a farewell and the wife of the incoming commander gets yellow roses as a welcome.
After the commanders speak, all of the soldiers sing a couple of songs. I only recognized the Army Anthem. My son even asked me if they could sing that one again, he liked it so much. I think I remember liking it as a kid too (The Caissons Go Rolling Along).
The 1 year old daughter of my friend (whose husband the ceremony was for) even saluted the formation of soldiers on the field when the soldiers saluted their new commander.
Max was in Afghanistan when he took command of his company so I wasn't there (obviously) for his. But, it's kind of emotional to watch a ceremony like this because the outgoing commander has been through so much with his soldiers. The exiting commander today choked up while giving his speech. There's a lot about this job that we, on the home front, won't ever fully understand. When he gave his call sign and said "out" at the end, even I got teary eyed. Then, my friend, after his speech said his call sign followed by "in position, ready to fire." They switched standing positions and then then the new commander went in front of his soldiers and saluted the first sergeant.
Getting used to change is a must in the military world. I've noticed througout my nearly 5 years as an Army wife that some people take change better than others (this includes the Army wives too!).
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Run to Remember is a running group that meets every Saturday in DuPont, WA. They meet in a school parking lot at 10:00 AM. The runners wear blue shirts with all of the names of the fallen soldiers printed on it. As the runners form a circle, someone reads all of the names of the fallen soldiers from the battalions in the brigade. After the last name is read from the list, the founder of the group, a mother of 3 whose husband was killed in Afghanistan in August of '09, thanks those there for coming out to run. Everyone starts off together and finishes at his/her own pace. Some do the marked 3 mile loop, others 6 and those training for longer distances do longer runs.
Both soldiers and wives come out to run. Younger children ride in joggers and older children run the shortest loop.
I went this morning. It was about 43 degrees outside but that didn't stop around twenty runners from coming out to Run to Remember.
Next Sunday, many from Run to Remember will participate in the Seattle Marathon. Among them will be volunteers carrying a flag for each of the fallen soldiers.
Both soldiers and wives come out to run. Younger children ride in joggers and older children run the shortest loop.
I went this morning. It was about 43 degrees outside but that didn't stop around twenty runners from coming out to Run to Remember.
Next Sunday, many from Run to Remember will participate in the Seattle Marathon. Among them will be volunteers carrying a flag for each of the fallen soldiers.
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