blocks of writers

I was doing so good with posting every week-ish, but I've gotten off track.

It's hard to write because I want everything to be meaningful, at least to me, but sometimes I have nothing meaningful to say. We got another denial letter on our VA appeal. My husband has gone to a civilian doctor and gotten 50 x-rays that showed nothing, but the civilian doc is sending him to physical therapy. With holidays here, we have been busy. We are mostly planning... waiting and planning for the holidays and for the eventual move.

I have nothing to say. I am grateful that our lives enable us to move without job searches. I'm grateful our lives enable us to take time to fix the little things within our house. I'm grateful that despite my husband's injuries we have a life together that we like.

Same old, same old.

Newsflash

My husband is happy, actually happy. I cannot remember the last time I saw him happy. He fears he will be miserable for the rest of his life. He also fears the rest of his life will not be very long. I feel like part of my job, as his wife and official caretaker, is to make whatever life he does have left as good as possible.

To that end, we've decided to move to Washington state... and my husband is happy.

My best friend is not happy. My mother is unhappy. My kids have mixed feelings. But my husband is happy.

It's such a remarkable thing to see him happy about something. My husband is not generally mean or angry like some of the veterans I've met. He just doesn't care about anything. There is an underlying anger in him, but it is covered with layers upon layers of apathy. He has been this way since his second tour. There are moments that have made him happy, of course, like the birth of our daughter. I had planned on listing more examples but I couldn't come up with any. I'm sure there are vacations or movies or dates that have made him happy, but nothing has brought real joy to his life in years.

I know he is scared he will be unhappy in Washington too, but I think our list of reasons is compelling enough that even if he is unhappy there, our quality of life will improve. His physical health will improve because he'll be able to breathe - there are virtually no allergens in the Seattle area. His joint pain should ease some too because the weather changes aren't so drastic there. His emotional health will improve because he will be near the base where he served and men he served with. He will, for the first time since we moved to Texas four years ago, have friends.

After considering what this would mean for Karl, we started considering what it would mean for the rest of our family. Washington has better schools than Texas and the social/political climate is much more in line with my personal values. It is a better place to raise our kids, I think. There are also really good opportunities for gifted kids in the Seattle area. In addition, my daughter has the same allergies my husband does and we take her to the ER about twice a year for respiratory events. Moving to Washington will probably put an end to those biannual ER visits.

My eldest, 7, is excited to move and wants to move sooner than this coming summer. My daughter, 4, doesn't want to leave her preschool, but she has to leave preschool this May anyway.

So it seems like the perfect time. Now I have to figure out how to do it....

I have been asked a few times what I am getting out of this move, especially as I have only one or two friends left in the area. I have been asked why I'm leaving my support system. My hope is that if my husband is happier and healthier, my need for support will be lessened. My hope is that my family will be happier and healthier and then I will be happier and healthier.

having a little faith

In January of this year, I took my kids on a two week road trip. We left Austin and meandered to Sacramento and back. On the way we saw the Grand Canyon, the London Bridge, and a hundred other amazing things.

Before I left those who know my husband and I best asked if he would be okay and if I needed anything from them. I smiled and thanked them.

"The worst he can do," I said, "is burn the house down."

I wasn't worried because we have insurance and the only one home at risk would be my husband.

He didn't burn the house down. He did char a pan because he was warming food when he realized we were out of milk and left to get some from the store, but we were lucky and nothing actually caught fire. These things happen.

Today I am leaving for 9 days. It is the longest I will have ever been away from my children and certainly the longest I have ever left my children with Karl.

Karl is an amazing father... with a brain injury.

Typically when I leave for a weekend, I call at least once a day. I set up plans for the kids in advance. I make sure Karl has his vitamins, we have groceries, his alarms are set. Then I go. I remind myself that when I come home the mountain of laundry will be untouched, the car will still be filthy, the kids' rooms will still look like someone threw all their toys all over the floor just for fun. I remind myself that this will be okay with me, because I am expecting it and because I know my husband has been working very hard.

Leaving for a week is only slightly different. We have a roommate right now, which lessens my stress somewhat, but I have still gone through my usual routine. I have also included reminding my eldest child to give Daddy their homework folder everyday and asking my roommate to be a safety net. I have lost some sleep. This week is also different because I will not be calling home every day.

I wonder, every time I leave, if I am putting my kids in danger. Now that they are 4 and 7, able to swim, able to use the phone, able to go next door for help, I do not think so. I think my children have a lot of responsibility to be their own safety nets if something happens to Daddy or if Daddy forgets something, but I think that is okay. They are exercising their self-sufficiency. They are lucky to have a daddy who wants to be the best possible daddy.

So, now that the kids are older, my anxiety is not over whether my child will be forgotten in the bathtub but over whether my child will be forgotten at school. I have spent this week going over worst case scenarios. If my child is forgotten at school, the school will call my husband. My worries this week are not whether my family will survive, which is what my worries used to be, but whether my husband and my family will inconvenience people.

To quote a Sesame Street song, "we are all Earthlings." It is okay for my family to inconvenience people if that is what gets them successfully through the week. It is okay for me to be replaced by a village for 9 days. It is okay for me to take a break from making sure everything and everyone is okay all the time.

Replacement parts

We are seven hundred miles or so from home. Tomorrow we will complete the last leg on our thousand mile journey to my husband's aunt's house for Thanksgiving. Today I asked my husband, again, about the time he drove the Stryker over a bomb. I like to hear the story because I don't remember the details or understand anything about the incident.

Our eldest child went through a phase when they were six of asking me about it.

"Why did daddy drive over a bomb? Why didn't daddy see the bomb in the road? Why are the streets there covered in trash?"

I would answer every question as succinctly and accurately as possible, knowing they would have a follow up. Eventually they ran out of questions, but not before my heart broke just a little. I still have no idea how to explain war to a child and I am required to very often. I do not understand war myself.

I am like my child, asking question after question, trying to understand the IED, the explosion, the aftermath, the person who planted it.

Today Karl told me the seals on the engine were all busted, explaining that the engine in a Stryker is where a passenger seat is in a car. He told me the wheel below him sheared off at the hub, but the tire was fine. This made him laugh. He told me the gear shift in front of him was broken, he thinks, and he thinks the instruments were busted. He told me things are jumbled up in his head. He couldn't find his weapon next to him. Another soldier was shaking him. He doesn't know if he lost consciousness. There is rarely anything new, but I ask anyway, marveling about how lucky he is to be alive when literally everything surrounding him was destroyed.

"Well," he said, "it was all repaired."

The insinuation is everything was fixable except his brain, but nothing was fixable. The engine, the hub, the instrument panel, the shifter were all beyond repair. Instead, they were replaced.

As I read him what I've written so far, he laughingly suggests I ask where I can find new parts for him. If I were to go to a parts store, I would give him new knees, new shoulders, the parts of him which hurt and grind together. I would not order him a new brain, because who knows what I might end up with. Even if he cannot remember where he is or why, he remembers me when I was 15. He remembers the prom when I mostly ignored him and the first time we slept together. He remembers me.

Maybe it is selfish of me that I would not make his life easier, but it is more important to me that he retain who he is. When we talk about the scary future we talk about when he does not know who I am or who he is. We do not talk about when he may burn down the house. Of course, he is already at the point when he may burn down the house and it really doesn't seem to matter that much.

Kenneth Iaciofano

“hey, do you know Yauch or O'Bryan?”

“Why?” my husband asks coming up behind me.

Shouldn't he know by now? Every time I ask if he knows someone, it is because they are dead. If someone had been shot, I merely say Barnes (or whomever) was shot in the leg (or wherever). Sometimes the guys are home after their injuries. Sometimes the bullet only grazed and they are back in combat. If I ask if he knew someone, I am doing so to gauge his relationship so I can tell him with the appropriate level of solemnity.

Because Karl does not check social media, I always hear before him about who drove over an IED or was shot in the face. One of my duties is to keep him informed. I did not know Yauch or O'Bryan so my concern is only for my husband. Those are the easy ones.

In 2009, I read the status RIP Ice and I immediately send a message to the guy who posted it. “You're kidding, right?” has been my standard response to anything too hard to hear since my dog Ellie died when I was 12. No one has ever been kidding.

Kenneth Iaciofano was, according to the internet, a fuck up. Earlier in 2009, he had drunkenly driven his car the wrong way down a highway. Unbeknownst to the internet, Ken (or Ice as the guys called him) was also the only guy my husband had served with who kept in touch. He would call just to chat about how his stupid Guard unit was or how much vodka he'd been drinking. I think he called because he wanted someone to recognize how hard he had tried to escape the crappy life ahead of him. Alcoholism was in his blood so before Ice even joined the army, he had been coping with life by drinking.

At 18, Ken went to war in Iraq. First he was an errand boy for some higher ups. His job was to fetch coffee for men in air conditioning who were not being shot at. After my husband's battalion started losing men – Chevy died within 48 hours of their arrival in Baqubah, where the men started attending a funeral a week on average – the higher ups asked their errand boys which of them were infantry. Ice, among others, raised his hand and was sent into the thick of battle. He went from being in air conditioning all the time to wearing over seventy-five pounds of gear in a sweltering Iraq summer.

Ken was a good soldier, maybe not an excellent one, but he hadn't gotten the practice everyone else had. Regardless, he was a good soldier, which is more than can be said for 99.5% of our population. Currently less than one half of one percent of our population serves in the military. So Ken was a good soldier in some of the heaviest fighting of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Almost 6 months into his war, Ken's kidneys failed.

I can only imagine how betrayed he must have felt. The enemy had not gotten to him but his own body was failing him. Ken was sent home.

I met him when we went to clean the barracks with the FRG (Family Readiness Group) for the single soldiers who were close to coming home. As a friend and I walked into a dusty room, we saw three soldiers sitting on beds without sheets.

“Hey,” said a baby-faced boy of 18, “you're Karl's old lady.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I recognize you from the picture in his wallet.”

It was a good first impression, recognizing me, being my husband's friend.

I was saddened months later when I learned Ken was in 5N, the designated mental health ward at our military hospital. He was drinking, a lot, not only liquor but also cough syrup. My husband visited him a few times. A few months later, Ken's contract was up with the army, but he wouldn't pack his things. So Karl helped him pack and brought him to our house. Then he spent a few days helping Ken tie up loose ends and sign out. During the evenings, he would pore over maps with Ken, plotting the best route back to Rhode Island. Without Karl, I'm not sure Ken would have ever left. When he was finally squared away, the date to report for Guard looming over his head, Ken left. I never saw him again.

He called every once in a while. He was the only one, once my husband left the army a few months after Ken. I liked Ken so when I read that he was dead, I was stricken. I sobbed. I sat down on our tile kitchen floor, bracing myself in a corner of cabinets and sobbed. Then I stopped. Not only was my daughter looking worried when I could not explain to her why I was crying so hard, but I knew the blow would be worse for my husband. If, as I have always believed, only one of us can fall apart at a time, then he certainly deserved this collapse more than me.

My husband and I had been planning a date that night. I called the babysitter and arranged for her to come early. I steadied my voice and called my husband, explaining that the kids were driving me crazy and we were going to leave as soon as he got home from school.

I made it around the corner before I pulled over to the curb.

“Ken's dead. Apparently he started drinking heavily a few days ago, around Veteran's Day, and he drowned last night in the bath tub.”

Instead of going to a movie, we spent the evening on our cell phones. Karl called Ken's mom for funeral details and I called the airlines to find him a plane ticket to Rhode Island to say goodbye to Ken.

At the funeral, Karl read a letter one of their other brothers in arms had sent from Iraq. When he said goodbye to Ken, Karl removed Ken's Guard unit pin from his dress uniform and replaced it with his unit pin from Iraq.

Ken's death has not been labeled a suicide. No one from my husband's unit calls now.

Thank you for your tax dollars.

I know I make people uncomfortable when I talk about their tax dollars paying for my groceries, my mortgage, or the cruise I'm going on next month. I want people to be bothered their tax money is supporting me and I want people to be bothered when I talk about my husband. I don't really give a damn if people are uncomfortable around him. He is uncomfortable around them, not least of all because he cannot remember who they are. I want people to be bothered that we are our sending young men off to a war we don't remember or understand and I want people to understand some of the costs, such as my mortgage and the cruise I'm going on next month.

Civilians may be grateful for the service of a soldier who lost a limb, but they may not want that gratitude to come from their hard-earned paycheck and an Iraq veteran, who had a career before joining the military and has come home to depend on disability payments, does not want anyone to think he is lazy and unwilling to work. Maybe civilians are okay with supporting veterans financially, but our culture has an idea anyone drawing SSDI (Social Security Disability Insurance) is lazy. It does not matter if they are on SSDI because they cannot remember what street they live on or because they are an above the knee double amputee. We would rather not hear those stories. We like the story of a morbidly obese man who has never worked hard and refuses to better himself, draining our hard earned money through a corrupt system of taxes, because that obese man allows us to feel self-righteous and indignant. I will not tell you that obese man does not exist. He probably does. So I want you to understand who else is claiming SSDI.

Veterans can double dip, receiving both VA (Veterans Affairs) disability and SSDI. The maximum amount you can receive from SSDI, assuming you are a disabled individual with a spouse and a child, is $1,892. The maximum VA disability amount, with a spouse and one child, is $3,037.

However, SSDI is an all-or-nothing game. SSDI either grants that an individual is disabled and then pays him/her based on their projected life time earnings or SSDI is denied and they receive nothing. The VA is a convoluted game of numbers where each portion of yourself you lost is worth a different amount. I wish I could find the simple page where it tells me what each piece of my husband is worth. How much is it worth each time he forgets what day or month it is? What percentage of our monthly income is that? Does a bigger allotment cover when he forgets to pick our child up from school? How much compensation is ear marked for when he almost hits me because he didn't hear me coming?

SSDI simply says “You can no longer reasonably be expected to work.”

The VA disability, though, tells a story.

If you have tinnitus, ringing in your ears, whether it be intermittent in a single ear or constant and unbearable in both ears, you will receive $127 a month. Ringing in your ears is worth one nice date a month: babysitter, dinner, a movie, a large popcorn, and two Icees.

If you have tinnitus and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), you will receive a rating for your PTSD and a rating for your tinnitus. PTSD could receive a rating of 10% if the symptoms are controlled by constant medication or a rating of 100% if a veteran cannot remember the names of his family members. Also available are 30%, 50%, or 70%. In general, almost punching your wife, your dog, or your child when they startle you, combined with an inability to feel safe ever and a general feeling of uselessness is worth one mortgage payment a month.

Headaches are also available in a variety of ratings. My husband's current rating for headaches is worth roughly the cost of swimming lessons for our children at an excellent (expensive) swim school and the ability to buy them Christmas presents without wondering how we will afford groceries.

Now the VA provides a care-giver stipend too, for post 9/11 combat veterans' care-takers, depending on how many hours a week a doctor believes your husband needs care. There are three tiers. The lowest tier agrees to pay your utility bills because you have to keep your husband on track. The middle tier agrees to keep your family safe, like you do. The top tier agrees that your marriage is a full time job.

Currently, between SSDI, the care-giver stipend, and my husband's VA rating, we are making more than my husband did when he was in Iraq. My husband is worth more broken than he was whole, financially. I often make jokes about this, about the perks of being married to a disabled veteran. I do not have to work. Of course, I'm not sure I can work because of the time involved making sure my husband is functioning, but I don't have to either. I can set aside money for a trip to Europe next summer. Of course, one of the reasons we're going to Europe next summer is because my husband's brain condition seems to be degenerative and I want him to have the best possible life he'll never remember, but still, a trip to Europe.

I love my husband and I love our life. I do not believe there is any amount of money that will ever cover what he personally lost in war. I do not believe that any of the men he served with will ever be adequately compensated for the cost of war. Every cent we receive is not only hard-earned tax money, it is also blood money and it is also a payment for our silence. We have told our service-members we needed to depend on them and then we have left many of them in a situation where they are dependent on us. We have taught them to be ashamed of being dependent, but we have left them no choice. I will not allow my husband to be ashamed of our reliance on government funds. I will not allow him to lose pride because I expect our country to take care of him as he promised to take care of our country. I will not be silent.

Gods of War

“I refuse to let Iraq take any more of my husband,” the woman with the false lashes told the crying one. I stopped paying attention to her impassioned speech so I could write the line down.

That's what we're doing. Each of us, not just in this room or at this retreat, but each caregiver of a disabled veteran anywhere. As we line up their vitamins, medications, appointments, calendars; as we call the VA, our congresspeople, social security, the TSA; as we provide a buffer between civilians both well-intentioned and ignorant; we are refusing to let war further erode the men we once knew. We insist on better medications, more medications, less medications, medicinal marijuana. We want competent neurologists, psychiatrists, and therapists. We demand prosthetics that look better, fit better, feel better, work better..

At one time our veterans were glorious marble statues. Everyone admired their beautiful lines. Over time their glorious facades started to show wear and tear. Some of them lost an arm, a leg, a nose. You can see some of them crumbling. We are their preservers. We know the pieces they've lost are gone but we protect them from further damage.

We can stop their pasts from taking any more of their futures. At least this is the prayer we offer the gods of war.

We know it is not right that these noble men and women are no longer on display but hidden and ignored, gathering dust. We know it is not fair we will never see the ones we sent to war again. Instead we will build lives with replacements who are both more and less than the ones we loved.

And we grieve. And we cry.

We cry not only for what parts of themselves they have lost in war but the parts that have taken over the empty spaces in their hearts, minds, phantom limbs. We cry because they have killed and both the innocent and the guilty ghosts haunt them. We cry because they have seen children not only dead and dying but killing. They have threatened to kill babies. They have killed babies and then come home to their own babies. We grieve when they cannot.

We also understand when they cannot. We understand that in war there is no such thing as justice or even fairness. We understand that even the soldier who could not wait to fight for his country came home wondering why we were fighting and exactly where God was in all of this.

No two soldiers are alike, of course, nor is soldier the right word for every marine, corpsman, or airman who has been to war. War is now much broader than it used to be. There are no safe zones in our modern wars. War now encompasses not only the infantrymen but the woman in Tucson, Arizona dropping radio controlled bombs into Iraq and the Air Force dental assistant identifying bodies by what is left of their teeth. Some of these people get through by reminding themselves continuously that they are the good guys. Some do. More often I meet people who have no idea whether good even exists, much less matters.

We, the people who love them, believe in good. We believe they are good regardless. We believe in their inherent goodness and it is our job to protect it and shine it and keep it safe and show it off. Look, we say, look at all they gave up because they believed in us. Now we will do the same for them.