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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
At an emotional Fort Dix support group, families of soldiers wonder why the country isn't unified behind them.
Apr 1, 2003 | Army Sgt. Heather Marie Wright has always had a fierce patriotism for her country, from the American flag T-shirts, purse and belt buckle hanging in her closet right down to her insistence on sleeping only on made-in-the-USA sheets. Earlier this month, dressed in her Army battle dress uniform, Wright, 25, served as her niece's kindergarten show-and-tell project. Last week, for good luck wearing the same dog tags her grandfather wore in Korea, she shipped out to Kuwait.
"'Re's probably crapping a brick right now, but she's got her game face on and she's ready to go," her sister, Debra Husted, says proudly. "She's tough as nails and this is what she was meant to do."
Husted, whose ponytail, jean jacket and sneakers make her look more like a high school student than a 28-year-old mother of two, says her daughters are acutely aware their aunt is gone. Whenever Shawnna, her 3-year-old who's hard of hearing, spots a yellow ribbon on a house or business near their home in Warminster, Pa., she pounds her chest with both fists -- sign language for "soldier."
"It upsets both Shawnna and Kayla terribly, not to know where their Aunt 'Re is," Hulsted says. "It kills me, too, to see my baby sister going off to war. But 'Re told me before she left, 'Don't worry. I'm making the world a better place for you.'"
She only wishes the world -- or at least America -- felt the same way.
Heather Marie's mother, Sandra Wright, says her daughter is astonished by the antiwar protests taking place across the country. In fact, members of her unit were so troubled by recent media coverage that their commander began restricting how much television they could watch. "Why is my country turning against me?" Heather Marie recently asked her mother over the phone.
I tell her there's rallies for the military, too," Sandra says. "She says, 'That's not what they're showing on TV.'"
"It messes with their heads," says Husted. "'Re thinks, I signed my life away to defend these people, and this is how they feel?"
Husted and the Wrights' reactions to the war -- pride, fear and a confused anger at what they perceive as a dearth of national support -- are par for the course for soldiers' family members, if the Hearts Apart support group at Fort Dix, N.J., is any indication. The largest training and mobilization center in the Northeastern U.S., Fort Dix has deployed 17,000 troops for the "global war on terrorism" since the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. That's twice as many soldiers as were deployed for Desert Storm, and it's not over yet; 6,000 more troops are on the ground now, awaiting their orders.
Hearts Apart is a chance for troops' loved ones to come together and share practical advice -- Do e-mails or snail mail have a better chance of getting through? How do you explain the concept of war to young children? -- as well as the intense emotions they feel about being left behind in what some feel is an unsupportive, sometimes even antagonistic, climate.
Although Fort Dix's group has met on alternate Tuesday mornings for over two years, the meeting on March 25 was the first one since the war in Iraq officially started. Nearly 20 family members -- twice as many as usual, and hailing from as far away as Philadelphia and the Bronx -- gather around a table in a nondescript conference room in the base's Community Service building.
Coffee brews on a countertop, next to a stack of shiny Deployment Guide magazines, but people are more interested in the box of tissues being passed around. Nearly everyone is tearing up, or looking down into their laps, trying not to cry. Several people clutch photos of their loved ones, proudly dressed in military uniforms. The circumference of the room is swarming with newspaper and television reporters, cameramen and photographers, waiting to record their grief. In fact, the gaggle of media is so dense that when several family members arrive late, they're unable to get through the door.
The meeting starts with one mother offering to talk about how scared she is about her son, stationed somewhere in the Iraqi desert. As she begins to sob uncontrollably, a television news reporter maneuvers quickly to her side and grips her shoulder in sympathy -- then leans forward to put his microphone a bit closer to her mouth.
Hearts Apart outreach supervisor Amanda Espinoza, a petite woman with curly black hair and watchful, worried eyes, encourages members to talk about what they're going through. She moves quickly around the hexagon-shaped table, squeezing shoulders in empathy, patting hands, speaking rapid-fire Spanish to one man who has driven all the way from New York to spend time with fellow parents, but cannot speak English.
Linda Johnson, a 40-something woman in faded jeans and Birkenstocks, admits she thought her son, Troy, would be relatively safe since he was driving fueling trucks behind the front lines and not engaging in combat. Then, on March 23, she saw TV footage of the Fort Bliss, Texas-based maintenance company who'd taken a wrong turn into an Iraqi ambush and ended up prisoners of war. "My fear for any of the soldiers, not just my son ... is that they will be captured and treated horribly," Johnson says, in between sobs. "I can't fathom that happening to my son. It's more than I can bear."
