To most of us, war is something we see on TV or scan in the daily paper or
flip past in a news magazine. It’s something we don’t have to fret about much,
unless we’re studying for a current-events quiz or trying to decide how to vote.
To some people, though, war is a much more intimate reality: It’s the last
thing they think about at night, the first thought that crosses their minds
in the morning, and the uneasy feeling that creeps into their dreams. They have
a loved one serving as a soldier — a cherished spouse or son or daughter living
in a danger zone half a world away.
We asked four local families to share with us stories of their beloved soldiers.
The soldiers we heard about range in age from a 39-year-old sergeant serving
in Afghanistan to a 20-year-old former cheerleader ducking mortar rounds in
Iraq. Some serve in the National Guard, some in the reserves. Some believe in
the righteousness of their cause; some just want to survive and come back home.
Despite these differences, their families have a lot in common.
For one thing, they don’t know when their loved ones will return — on the
date promised (which the families all preface with the word “supposedly”) or
sometime months later.
“I still think she’ll get an extension just like everybody else does,” says
Ellie Lee, whose daughter is in the midst of a 13-month Army National Guard
tour in Iraq. “Haven’t you noticed? A lot of people got extensions of three
months more.”
For another, their soldiers are pulling dangerous duty. All the families we
interviewed with soldiers in Iraq say their loved ones are “running convoys,”
a job vulnerable to the insurgents’ weapon of choice, the “improvised explosive
device.”
None of these families believes the situation in Iraq will be resolved anytime
soon.
“I think we’re going to be there for years. Years,” says Leslie Dickson,
who has a son and daughter in the service.
Meanwhile, these families share a bond the rest of us can’t possibly fathom.
In the words of expectant mother Jessica Stock, whose 20-year-old husband, Jeremy,
is in Iraq, the anguish of having someone you love serving in a war is plainly
incomprehensible, unless it’s happening to you.
“I don’t want people to feel bad for me, and I don’t want people to try to
understand it, because you don’t,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t understand, before
this. I didn’t care who was over there or what was going on. And now I do. I
care about all of them, not just Jeremy. I’m scared for all of them.”
CPL. MATTHEW DICKSON, 23
U. S. Marine Corps Reserve
Charlie Company, 6th Engineering Support Battalion, Peoria
Now on a seven-month tour in Al Anbar province, Iraq; due home March 2005
If talismans and trinkets hold any power, Matthew Dickson’s safe return is
guaranteed. His mother, Leslie Dickson, wears a tiny picture of him on a chain
around her neck. She has festooned the family’s Lake Springfield home with yellow
ribbons, an American flag, a U.S. Marine Corps flag, and the special banner
given to families with relatives in the military.
The Dicksons’ banner has two big blue stars — one for Matt and one for his
sister, Michelle, who will graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy in May. Leslie
wears two simple bracelets reminiscent of the Vietnam-era POW/MIA bangles —
one with Matt’s name, one with Michelle’s. A pair of candles in the window symbolizes
Matt and his fellow soldier Lee Curby, who is also Michelle’s longtime boyfriend.
“I have a lot of little charms, do a lot of praying, have a lot of faith,”
Leslie says. “I don’t watch a lot of news, I don’t read a lot . . . I just kind
of look at things and get a little sickish, and then I just kind of think about
something else and just count the weeks down.
“I’m looking forward to March,” she says. “Supposedly they’re going to be
back in March.”
The Dicksons are a military family. Both of Matt’s grandfathers served in
World War II, and his parents, Leslie and Mike, met while serving in the Navy.
Although they didn’t make the Navy their careers (Leslie teaches nursing and
Mike is a school principal), the family exudes the traditional trim, spit-and-polish
sensibility associated with the military.
So it seemed almost routine to the Dickson clan when Matt signed up for the
Naval ROTC program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They were
a little surprised when he announced that a Marine gunnery sergeant in the ROTC
program had inspired him to enlist in the Marine Corps Reserve.
“I think he wanted to challenge himself, go through boot camp, prove something
to himself,” Leslie says. “He wanted to be a Marine. And then 9/11 happened.”
Michelle, 21, also joined before 9/11, going through “plebe summer” in 2001,
at the same time Matt was in boot camp. But Mike and Leslie say they wouldn’t
have interfered with their children’s decisions even if they had decided to
enlist after 9/11.
“It’s totally their choice,” Leslie says.
Matt spent four months in Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, in the earliest days of
this conflict, and he witnessed the deaths of two fellow soldiers — Cpl. Evan
James, from La Harpe, and Sgt. Bradley Korthaus, originally from Iowa [see Pete
Sherman, “Remembering Evan James,” Sept. 11, 2003]. They drowned while setting
up a water-filtration system in the Saddam Canal, in southeastern Iraq.
At the memorial service, Matt held the Marine flag. A Detroit Free Press
artist, embedded with Charlie Company, drew a poignant illustration of Matt,
head bowed, flanked by two helmets poised on rifles stuck in the sand.
“As a parent, you feel so at a loss because you can’t be there to assist them
in dealing with that grief,” Mike says. “That was the first time for him to
have to deal with the loss of another person without support from his family.”
Yet despite this trauma, Matt again didn’t consult his parents before volunteering
for a second deployment this year.
“He said, ‘That’s my duty,’ ” Mike recalls. “His explanation was that some
of his other Marines have families and young kids, and he said, ‘Better for
me to go, when I don’t have that to deal with, than to have them go.’ But now
they all ended up going anyway.”
Michelle similarly stunned her parents by requesting to serve her five-year
postacademy obligation with the Marines instead of the Navy, thereby almost
guaranteeing that she, too, will go to Iraq.
“I’d feel better if she was stateside, but they didn’t ask for my input in
any of this,” Leslie says.
The Dicksons find themselves in the predicament that plagues many parents
who have worked hard to raise their kids to be independent, only to find they
have succeeded. Matt not only didn’t ask for their advice, he now doesn’t give
them many details about his wartime experience.
Since he landed in Iraq on Aug. 14, the Dicksons have heard from their son
only a half-dozen times, counting e-mails and telephone calls. They believe
his duty consists mainly of driving Humvees and semi-trucks, transporting equipment,
fuel, people, and products, but they realize that he may not be sharing the
whole truth.
“He and Lee are kind of coy and hedging, I think, on questions like ‘Are you
safe?’ They say that they are safe ‘for now.’ But I don’t know,” Leslie says.
“I know they do have mortar fire onto the base.”
What news they do get often comes from Michelle, who hears from Lee, or from
Matt’s girlfriend in Champaign. Through the girls, they learned that both Matt
and Lee recently earned promotions to the rank of corporal and that Matt has
been taking antibiotics to fight inflammation in his arm.
Leslie’s father, Kenneth Paul, chuckles. “I used to write your mother more
than I did my mother,” he says.
Paul, whom the kids call Pop, seems to have mixed feelings about his grandchildren’s
service in the war. “I wish Matt was home right now,” he says, “but he’s not
the only kid. Both his grandfathers had their lives interrupted. And now it’s
his generation’s turn, I guess. I don’t know.”
SPC. JENNIFER BUFFINGTON, 20
Illinois Army National Guard
1544th Transportation Company, Paris
Now on a 13-month tour near Falluja, Iraq; due home March 2005
Ellie Lee knew all about being in the National Guard. It meant putting out
forest fires, helping hurricane victims, maybe quelling a riot or stacking sandbags
to stem floodwaters. After all, that’s what Lee herself did during her eight
years in the Guard.
So when her daughter, Jennifer Buffington, asked her to sign forms allowing
her to enlist early, at age 17, Lee didn’t hesitate.
“She knew I couldn’t put her through college,” Lee says, “so she thought,
‘OK, I’ll go one weekend a month, two weeks a summer, and if something comes
up, I can help’ — because that’s the way Jennifer is. She’s a very caring person.
She gives her heart out to everybody.”
It’s not hard to picture Lee in the Guard. A self-described “tomboy,” she
wears no makeup, keeps her nails short, and doesn’t mince words. Her world revolves
around work and her two kids — Scott, 24, and Jennifer, now 20 — whom she has
reared with her own homespun wisdom.
“I’ve always told my kids that no matter what, as long as we have love, you
can succeed at anything in life,” Lee says.
That’s what she told Jennifer when she didn’t make the cheerleading squad
her freshman year at Lincoln High School. Jennifer thought that only girls with
certain family names and a certain household income got to be cheerleaders.
But Lee told her not to give up.
“I said, ‘Jennifer, no you don’t. Be yourself, and you’ll be somebody,’ “
Lee recalls. Jennifer went on to become a cheerleader, president of the student
council, pompom-squad dancer, and a Miss Illinois top-15 finalist two years
in a row. For a very brief time after she enrolled in college, she even tried
waitressing at Hooters.
“That didn’t work out,” Lee says. “It was very uncomfortable for her.”
But just the fact that she tried it says something about Jennifer’s spirit.
Whatever the job, she’ll give it her best shot. And that was her attitude heading
into Iraq. From the moment she got what Lee describes as “the call” in February
2003, Jennifer was gung-ho and ready to go.
Lee, on the other hand, had a meltdown. “I was a mess. I cried probably a
good half-hour straight,” she says.
Weeks later, after Jennifer withdrew from school and was guest of honor at
a going-away party, her unit was demobilized. She re-enrolled in school and
found a new job and was settling back into her routine when, suddenly, “the
call” came again.
This time, Lee didn’t let herself get carried away. She felt certain that
Jennifer’s unit would be demobilized again. “I never envisioned going to war,”
she says.
But next thing she knew, her daughter was in Iraq.
“It’s hard to deal with, but you sit there and, I don’t know, I clip newspaper
articles and I try not to watch TV,” Lee says.
Now there’s only so much she can do now to help Jennifer. Lee has her banner
with the single star hung in her window. She displays magnetic ribbons on her
truck. She sends care packages of microwave meals, vanilla Pop-Tarts, chocolate
Ho Ho’s, and Gatorade mix to disguise the “stinky” taste of the water. And every
day, when she goes to work, she wears a button with Jennifer’s picture on it.
“My main button I love says, ‘My daughter, my friend, my soldier, my hero.’
I would love to wear that,” Lee says. “But at work I can only wear one, so I
wear her picture. Otherwise I’d be wearing pins all the time.”
Despite these efforts, Lee finds herself feeling helpless on the rare occasions
when she gets an actual call from Jennifer. The telephone usually rings around
5 in the morning, and for about a half-hour, all Lee can do is listen to her
daughter cry.
The 1544th has suffered more casualties than any other Illinois unit — one
in March, one in May, two in September. Then, just two weeks ago, a close friend
of Jennifer’s, 21-year-old Jessica Cawvey, was killed by a roadside bomb. Two
other soldiers were seriously injured in the same explosion. Their names have
not been released, but Lee knows one of them is especially close to her daughter.
“When she called me, she was crying so hard, she was hyperventilating,” Lee
says.
In an Oct. 8 e-mail punctuated with sad-faced emoticons, Jennifer described
waking up with her face swollen and head throbbing from the physical strain
of sobbing.
“We are gonna be having another memorial ceremony here in a few days and once
again I will salute my farewell to a rifle that is supposed to symbolize one
of the most important people in my life,” Jennifer wrote. “It shouldn’t be like
this mom. We shouldn’t have to feel like this and [Cawvey’s] daughter should
have her mommy. I walk by her room every time I go to mine and EVERY TIME I
look in there. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just hoping she’ll be there, but
she never is. I miss her and it hurts so bad. And it sucks that it hurts this
bad for me, because she was one of my best friends . . . and it is going to
hurt so much more to the little girl, Sierra Cawvey, who just lost her EVERYTHING!”
Lee worries because Jennifer has had close calls herself. She has told her
mom about having to dive behind sandbags during a mortar attack, and about coming
under small-arms fire while driving a truck.
“They’re seeing things we will never, ever believe,” Lee says. “It’s stuff
you only see in a war movie or something. It’s just unbelievable. She should
be studying history, not making history.”
SGT. FIRST CLASS CHUCK KEAN, 39
United States Army Reserve
221st Ordnance Company
Now stationed in Bagram, Afghanistan Tour extended one year; due home in April
2005
Chuck Kean received a shipment of cookies from a California Girl Scout troop
that had adopted his platoon. The note they sent with the cookies showed the
scouts’ utter lack of understanding of the conflict in Afghanistan: “Thank you
for protecting the lions and the tigers and the bears,” it said.
Kean’s wife, Zoé Dartez-Kean, laughs a little when she tells this story, but
she does get frustrated with all the attention focused on Iraq.
“It’s very troublesome. Every day when I open the paper, there will be something
on the front page about Iraq. Then, if you open it up, in those little boxes
in the left-hand corner of the second page, there’s usually a little story on
Afghanistan,” she says.
She and her husband call it the “forgotten war.”
Chuck, who was on active duty for 13 years, spent several months in Kuwait
during Operation Desert Storm, and he told Zoé that if he had to go somewhere,
he preferred Afghanistan.
“It’s a more mature environment. It’s been there longer, they have more facilities,
they’ve got operations in place that make it safer for them,” she says. “For
instance, there was this guy that was there before him, and Chuck got the guy’s
leftover microwave. That kind of thing.”
All he’s asked for in his care packages are his magazines (Time,
Newsweek, Soldier, VFW, Ranger Joe), white bread, peanut
butter, and Clorox wipes. Now that another family has provided a bread machine,
Zoé doesn’t have to send bread.
Chuck calls every Saturday and talks for as long as he wants to Zoé and their
kids — 12-year-old Ashtyn and 10-year-old Taylor. Three or four times a week,
Zoé gets e-mail from him. Lately he’s been telling her about the Friday night
steak-and-seafood specials available in the chow hall and the newest restaurants
on the base (Burger King, Subway, Dairy Queen, Orange Julius, a pizza place,
and Chinese and Thai restaurants; rumor has it that a Korean restaurant will
open soon).
But just because there’s lobster, ribeye, and pad thai doesn’t mean
it’s not a real war.
“We got woke up at 5 this morning by the big PA system and told we had to
wear our helmets and body armor if we went outside of any building for any reason.
Nothing like brushing your teeth with all that crap on,” Chuck wrote in an e-mail
dated Oct. 4. “They let us get out of it at around noon, but I’m sure we will
be back in it by sunset.”
This order was issued in anticipation of unrest during the recent presidential
elections, and Chuck complained to Zoé about soldiers who couldn’t keep their
armor handy.
“Believe it or not, I have dumbasses coming up to me saying that they are
having problems keeping track of their go-to-war crap. They think it is overkill
to have to have body armor and helmets near them while they are in a war zone,”
he wrote.
Chuck’s job is overseeing 10 to 15 acres of ordnance on a base constructed
on top of an old minefield. “That can get a little hairy,” Zoé says. “They get
a lot of incoming rounds — like artillery, like mortars. Most of the time they’re
not hitting a whole lot, from what he’s telling me, but he doesn’t tell me everything.”
He has told her that the worst part is being on guard duty and seeing the
wounded arrive. “People come up with parts blown off,” Zoé says.
Her tone is unwaveringly calm. A pharmaceutical-sales rep, Zoé says she gave
up worrying about Chuck years ago. When he’s not deployed overseas, he’s a Springfield
Police Department patrol officer working the midnight shift on the East Side.
If Zoé let herself fret, she might go crazy.
“I don’t really worry that much. I probably should,” she says, “but I have
confidence in him and his leadership skills, and I know Chuck would never do
anything to put himself or anybody else in danger.”
Besides, she has enough on her mind just taking care of their kids and their
home. “I’m OK with not knowing everything,” she says. “I have too much to worry
about at this point in time. I have to limit the amount of stress I bring on
myself. I want to know if the stock market’s going to crash or if I’m going
to make any money this year or if my kids are safe. That’s the kind of things
I want to know. I like being in the dark.”
SPC. JEREMY STOCK, 20
Illinois Army National Guard
3625th Maintenance Company
Now on an 18-month tour, stationed at Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq; due home
July 2005
When people ask Jessica Stock how she could marry a soldier stationed in Iraq,
she thinks they have the question backward. It’s not how could she, it’s
how could she not?
“If something were to happen to him, at least I would know that we were married.
That’s all I can say. There’s nothing I can do if something happens to him,”
she says.
Jessica is 19; Jeremy is 20. They’ve known each other since the eighth grade
but dated only for five months during their senior year at Beardstown High School.
They broke up for reasons Jessica can’t recall. Then she went off to college,
and Jeremy went to military training.
When she came home for Christmas, Jeremy appeared at her house, and they went
for a drive. He told her he was going to be sent to Iraq, and she just shrugged
and said, “OK.” She simply didn’t believe him.
A month later, he called her from Wisconsin, where his unit was preparing
to be shipped out. He asked her to come visit him before he left. She responded
with a three-page letter telling him how much she loved him. She arrived in
Wisconsin on Valentine’s Day, and they got engaged.
But that’s not all. As it turns out, Jessica also got pregnant.
“It was just out of the blue,” she says. “I was not expecting any of this.
Him just leaving made me realize I don’t want to be without him.”
They married on July 27, five days into his two-week leave. Those two weeks
are the only time they’ve actually lived together, but Jessica says she can’t
get used to not having him home.
“Sometimes I just hate being here because this is his home, too, and he’s
not here,” she says, sitting in their Koke Mill apartment. “I was just getting
used to being by myself, and then he comes home for two weeks. And then I get
used to waking up next to him, and then he’s gone.
“It was the hardest thing in the world for me to get back into my routine
after he left. I’m just now doing that,” she says.
They stay in touch through instant messaging on the computer. Jeremy wants
to know everything going on at home but tells Jessica little about what he’s
doing in Iraq. She knows he drives convoys and does guard duty at the base,
and that’s scary enough for her.
“He says he won’t talk to me about it till he gets home — and that’s probably
good, because I probably wouldn’t ever want to get out of bed. I would just
be thinking about what’s going on over there,” she says. “I don’t think he tells
me the truth of what he’s doing anyway. The less I know, the better, I guess.
You just fall asleep praying, and you wake up praying.”
He does send her pictures and little digital movies starring a group of servicemen
Jessica has come to know well by sight, though not by name. She can pop in a
disc and let her computer run a slide show of these clowns dancing, sleeping,
mugging for the camera, drinking Captain Morgan and Jack Daniel’s, wearing nothing
but boots and boxers.
In bite-size documentaries, Jeremy captures his buddies jumping out of their
trucks, practicing the “ranger roll,” bluff-bartering with Iraqi peasants for
donkeys and bicycles, driving down the wrong side of the highway, and generally
behaving like a bunch of frat boys, albeit frat boys with guns.
“They’re his life right now. It’s so amazing. They are smartasses and perverts
— they’re guys!” Jessica says.
“You know, they’re going to be his friends for life. They all experienced
this together. There’s gonna be things that I have no clue about, but he shared
something with them, you know? He probably feels a lot closer to them than he
does to me.”
In her sweet little-girl voice, Jessica says this with no bitterness, as if
she’s almost relieved that her husband has someone to pal around with. She answers
with the same unconditional affection when asked whether Jeremy will be the
same boy she married by the time he comes home.
“No. He’s not. Already there’s a big difference, just in the way he’s more
aggressive,” she says. “Like just from being over there, his language is really
different. He cusses a lot, like, a lot! When he was home, he did it
all the time.”
Jessica has an almost childlike way of viewing the world through practical
reality rather than political abstraction. It doesn’t make sense to her that
soldiers are granted emergency leave to come home for funerals but don’t get
leave to come home for the birth of a child. It doesn’t seem fair to her that
Jeremy got “attached” to the 3625th and that because his regular unit, the 3637th,
hasn’t been deployed, he could get home and have to turn around and go right
back over to Iraq. In fact, to Jessica, the whole war seems illogical.
“Who are we to go in and tell another country how to live their lives? Everyone’s,
like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get Osama bin Laden.’ What does he have to do with Iraq?
I don’t know,” Jessica says.
Asked whether Jeremy shares her views, she says she has no clue how he feels.
“Jeremy’s big thing is, he just wants to come home. That’s all he wants to
do, is come home,” she says. “I just don’t see where this is ever gonna end.
I mean, when is it going to stop? It’s never gonna stop. We’re always going
to have people over there, and when Jeremy does come home, somebody else is
getting sent over. So this is never going to be over for me and him, because
I’m always going to feel bad for them.”
Volunteers of America
More than 173,000 soldiers with the National Guard and Reserve units have been
called to active duty because of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of that total, Guard and Reserve units in Illinois have
contributed nearly 4,800 men and women, according to the Pentagon.
The conflicts have been declared a “national emergency,”
triggering a clause in each volunteer soldier’s contract that allows the government
to “extend” their duty.
Since President Bush ordered the attack on Iraq in March
2003, more than 1,100 U.S. soldiers have died in the conflict.
Of that number, 48 are from Illinois. One in four Illinois
soldiers who died were with the Guard or Reserve.
Of the 10 Army National Guard soldiers who have died,
five served with the Paris, Ill.-based 1544th Transportation Company.
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2004.
