The war at home
HOKES BLUFF — It was a clean house, with dusted tables and swept floors, and there was a heavy, sleepy warmth in its smell — apple, cinnamon and orange, each melded to become indistinguishable. Miniature American flags stood among family memorabilia and photographs. Kids ran to baseball practice. Marley the cat scratched at the door to be let out. Their home was always this way, Suzy Sexton recalled. Before and after Iraq. It is Sexton who has changed, who has learned to love a changed man. She’s learned to make muted sounds and speak careful words. She’s learned to live through her husband’s nightmares. Sexton, and other men and women, have come to know the living cost of National Guard service. Over the six years the United States has been engaged abroad, 13,000 Alabama National Guard soldiers have been separated from their families for more than one year.
Many find that time makes strangers of husbands, wives and children. During war, mothers become fathers. They teach themselves to fix a leaky faucet. Daddies learn to braid pigtails. They learn to sleep alone. Little girls become young women, and babies take their first steps. Some Alabama National Guard families attempt to prepare for the shifts and changes incurred by distance, but many do not. They are unaware that they may welcome home soldiers with new personalities, interests and beliefs. “No one knows what you’re going through unless their soldiers have gone through it, too,” said 23-year-old Sarah Hard, whose 25-year-old husband, Jonathan, is training for his first tour in Iraq. She’s already preparing for his return and the changes it will bring. The new duty of war The challenges of part-time military families facing deployment and, in some cases, a second deployment, are major concerns, said Sgt. Maj. Hubert Chance, director of the Alabama Family Readiness Program in Montgomery. Chance, who has served in the National Guard for 41 years, oversees five Family Assistance Centers throughout the state, in Athens, Homewood, Anniston, Daleville and Montgomery. These clearinghouses function as referral services. Soldiers, some of who have lost their jobs because of deployment, want to know where they can find work. Others call to ask about pay and medical insurance. In the last six months, Chance said the centers have handled 4,077 cases. The Guard’s program for Alabama has been an evolving organization, according to Chance, its director since 2001. Historically, Guard service has not involved general overseas deployment. Iraq changed that. “It was confusion,” he said, describing the reactions of Alabama Guard families with deployed soldiers early in the current Iraq war. Family Readiness Groups in each unit have become essential, he said. Eighty percent of spouses in an individual unit participate in once-a-month Family Readiness Group meetings, Chance said. Last year, as head of a Family Support Group in Decatur, Hard helped other families prepare for separation. Before the soldiers left, she said, she planned meetings to discuss family finances. They reviewed complex military paperwork and learned how to spot problems in pay, which she said were common. After the soldiers deployed, they met to fundraise for a welcome-homparty and create care packages. They shared ideas about how to stay romantic with their husbands while apart and talked about the difficulties of single parenting. Hard said the group helped prepare her for life without her own husband. “I wanted to have that connection,” Hard said about her involvement with the Family Readiness Group, which was only attended by a small number of families in the unit. Many families don’t understand the need for group involvement, said Jerry Gardner, director the Family Assistance Center at the Fort McClellan Army National Guard Training Center. Also, soldiers are often deployed with units 100 or more miles from their homes, making it difficult for their families to attend unit meetings. Suzy Sexton saw the effect of distance and disinterest on her support group. She was one of few women who attended family meetings. She said she often wonders if those meetings and connections could have prepared them for their soldiers’ homecoming. Family tradition When Suzy met Lacy Sexton, she was a nurse at a kidney clinic in Anniston where he had been hired as an equipment technician. At the time they were both married — she had three sons and he was a newlywed. After both of their marriages broke down, they became closer. “One day he just told me he loved me. I was excited, but I was terrified. I felt butterflies when we were together. I had never felt that,” she said. “He took me to Cancun, Gatlinburg. He would come in and say, ‘Get your stuff together we are going on an adventure.’ I got married at 17. I had never been nowhere.” Two years later, Sexton, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, was told to get ready for deployment to Iraq. The call came on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2003. He and Suzy had been making Valentine’s Day plans at work, and he snuck around the corner to take the call. Afterward, he said, he paced the halls with a nervous excitement. “OK. Here it is. I’m fired up. Ready to go. Here I go,” he recalled telling himself over and over again, before telling Suzy the news. They’d made plans for a wedding, but there was no time for a ceremony. Ten days later he was gone to Georgia, training for deployment. A month later, with a sobbing 4-year-old boy in her arms, she said goodbye for what she believed was a six-month tour of duty. Lacy Sexton, now 33, had joined the National Guard as a 17-year-old in December 1990. His father, a 25-year member of the Guard, drove him to the office. The weekend work, Sexton remembers his father saying, would provide extra money for Saturdays, give him the opportunity to travel and build character. Besides, it was a family tradition, he said. When defense turns to war His early years in the Guard were lined with opportunities. For several years he and his father trained side by side in the same unit. He was able to make valuable work connections and left the United States for the first time. “We went to Honduras for summer camp, and that was as far as I had been.” |
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He never expected his unit, the 1151st Engineering Detachment out of Fort McClellan, to be stationed at Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison, a place he described as dirty and nasty. There were thousands more prisoners than troops, he said. Within 24 hours he learned the sound of a mortar attack. “It was a mind game,” he said. “There were mortar attacks three and four times a day. You never knew when a mortar round would hit you on the way to the mess hall.” When he tried to sleep at night, he worried a mortar round would come through the roof or that the overwhelming number of prisoners would revolt and kill him and his friends during the night. Twenty-two prisoners were killed in one day from a mortar attack, and he watched some of them die, he said. It took thousands of gallons of water to wash away the blood. Sexton was told many times that his unit was going home. But like many soldiers, who watched the months roll into years, he stopped listening. Stories circulated, he said, about people walking on the plane in Kuwait to fly home but being turned back. He can remember the shock of gunfire and his friend of 16 year, Michael Richardson, bleeding from a bullet wound to the shoulder when a convoy was ambushed. After the attack, he helped carry the bodies of two dead soldiers. Looking at their faces, he said, he saw he had kept his life, just as they had lost theirs — by chance. “I have nightmares about that day. I have flashbacks about that day,” he said, staring ahead. “I had no control whether I was going to live or die.” A rough homecoming “He don’t sleep. He’s totally different,” Suzy Sexton said, frustrated, leaning on the arm of a couch in her dim living room. His grandmother, whose husband had fought and survived World War II, warned her about the effects of war. “She was right.” Yet, it was hard to notice a difference in her husband when he first came back to Alabama. The couple got married a month after his arrival and he returned to work at the kidney clinic. There was a slow shift in his behavior, like the crawl of sap on tree bark. He became edgy and quick-tempered. He was always tired but could never sleep. The sound of a soda can opening or the sudden grasp of a hand on his shoulder could make him fall to the ground in panic. “Anytime I walk in a building there is a fear of explosion,” he said. “I felt alone. No one knew what I had been through.” Worried that he had become one of the mentally unfit, he tried to help himself. He spent $40 a day on alcohol and lost $10,000 of their savings in four months. Money didn’t matter anymore, he said. Bills didn’t matter. “He taught me to save money,” Suzy Sexton said. “The man I knew had excellent credit. Now, he has $30,000 in medical bills because he didn’t file the right way with the VA. He wasn’t dependable anymore.” It was not long afterwards that he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed anti-anxiety, anti-depression and sleeping medication. He spent three months in a rehabilitation program at the Veteran’s Hospital in Tuscaloosa. And for the first time in 18 months he said he spoke with people who understood him. Even with his medication and therapy twice a month, he still fights a mental war. Having been fired from his 12-year job at the kidney clinic, he tries to accept himself as a father and a husband tainted by the sights and sounds of a war thousands of miles away. “It’s a new life,” Suzy Sexton said, looking at her husband, who held 6-year-old Logan in his arms. “We can’t go to loud places. There’s no beer on Saturday. There’s no sleeping through the night. It’s a hard life to live.” “There were times I didn’t want to do it anymore.” Families try to survive Chance, whose son served in Iraq for 13 months, said most families are working to survive the changes imposed by war. His son, a father of two children, had a smooth transition back into family life, but even he was not the same. Families facing post-traumatic stress disorder are a small percentage but face the most difficulty, he said. Out of 3,300 patients at the Oxford/Anniston VA Clinic, 387 have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, said Lee Pearce, manager of the clinic. Michael Richardson, and his wife, Allison, both 34, have had their own struggles readjusting. He was an assistant squad leader with Sexton’s unit at Abu Ghraib and a long time friend. He owns a construction company in Auburn and also was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder when he arrived home from Iraq. “I have a shorter temper than I had before, and I am more jumpy,” he said. “I have bad dreams. I think about the decisions I made, whether they were the right decisions.” Unlike many soldiers who return to bosses and schedules, Richardson said he has been able to find time for recovery by owning his own business. When he is having a bad day, he said, he just doesn’t work. Chance said counseling is the main solution to these problems. The family program refers soldiers to Guard chaplains and professional counselors, and in many cases, Chance said, he has seen counseling help families. However, many soldiers don’t feel comfortable pursuing that option. “It’s a man thing,” he said, laughing. Donna Nelson, 45, whose husband Richard also was deployed with the 1151st Engineer Team Detachment, said she believes communication is the biggest help. When her husband returned from Iraq, she said, he was quiet and withdrawn. “He was not open,” she said of her husband, now 48. “A small argument would shut him down for two or three days. He didn’t know how to react to anything.” But Nelson continues to question her husband about the experiences he had in Iraq – the good and bad. Over the years, she said, his stories have slowly unfolded. “I don’t think any of us realized that they would come back that changed,” she said. “We realized they could be hurt and killed, but we expected to get the same people back.” “We didn’t get that. A lot of us did not get that,” she said. |
