The impact of another soldier's death

(Note: Due to some traveling in the short-term, I'll be reaching deep into the "duffel bag" for my next few posts. This one is a re-print of an article I wrote for the "At War" blog of the New York Times. It ran May 24, 2010.)

By Adam Wojack

I

 always believed the wounds of war, whether physical or emotional, belonged only to those who suffered serious injury or unforgettable trauma. I had always been lucky. It seemed I was always just far enough ahead of or behind the bad stuff, and too heavy a sleeper to remember my own dreams. I never thought someone else’s wounds could impact my life, or that of my family, until it happened.

After coming home from the longest of three consecutive deployments from 2002 to 2007, the last two to Iraq, I was told by my wife that she no longer wished to live with me, and that she and the kids would not accompany me to my next assignment, an hour and a half away to another post in Germany. Needless to say, this was not the homecoming I wanted or even expected. Sure, we had problems, but they weren’t anything I thought required a separation as a fix—if that was a fix at all.

I had just completed a 15-month tour in Baghdad, which had begun before the “surge” and had ended after the reconciliation movement had taken root. It was an especially hard deployment, and even though I spent it in a staff job within the expansive sprawl of Baghdad Airport, I lost many friends at other locations to large explosions or well-aimed small arms fire.

My wife and I began having problems at the beginning of the deployment, and in moments of clarity, I knew they weren’t because of Iraq or because of the Army. They had been building for years. We pushed and pulled at each other by phone for those long months, sometimes yelling, sometimes ignoring, sometimes threatening, but always trying to connect and somehow get better. As fate would have it, the effects of the war would touch her before I could. Her best friend’s husband, a soldier in my brigade, was killed in a brief but violent skirmish in Anbar province in the summer of 2007, mere months before we were scheduled to redeploy. When I heard the news, instinctively, I knew my life was about to change.

It did, almost immediately. Communication with my wife became more distant. The passion, angry or not, disappeared from our phone conversations. This soldier’s widow now became her focus, the center of her world. Days would pass without emails. Sometimes I would call home on evening nights and my teenage daughter would answer, embarrassed to tell me she wasn’t sure where her mom had gone or with whom.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when, three days after dropping my bags for good inside my home, she informed me of her decision. But it was. I seethed and raged when she closed doors behind herself to have private phone conversations with this soldier’s widow. Roughly two months after arriving home, I left again, alone, not understanding how another soldier’s death could have such an impact upon my family and upon my life.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.