war consumes me

"Were you there?" I ask, leaning forward, "would you write me a letter for his purple heart?"

My husband does not have a Purple Heart. He never applied for one. His incident was in the midst of several other more devastating incidents and wasn't recorded well. When no one gave him a Purple Heart, he didn't ask for one. In the years since, we have talked about applying for a Purple Heart, especially as the military has expanded their requirements for Purple Hearts to include TBI. Karl will not ask his friends for letters corroborating the incident, but I will.

"Yeah," Dozer tells me, "I was there when he drove over that pressure plate."

"Or whatever it was... I never looked," Karl says.

"No, man, it was a pressure plate."

"You saw it?"

"Yeah, man, there was a square shaped hole. I remember we came around the corner and no one was hurt. The wheel blew off, right? No one was hurt and then I saw you."

For six years, I have referred to the incident as my husband driving over an IED or a bomb. Now I have a new phrase to add to my lexicon. My husband drove over a pressure plate. It sounds innocuous to me. A pressure plate. I have seen pressure plate explosions on tv shows. When I google "pressure plate," video game references come up. Pressure plates are completely outside my reality.... except they aren't. Pressure plates exist in my world. When I google "pressure plate IED," I find pictures, videos and references to Afghanistan. Apparently a pressure plate IED is a home-made bomb activated when enough weight (pressure) presses onto it. It is also a "victim-activated" device, which means it is set off by the person it hurts. The good thing about victim-activated devices is that they are less likely to be followed by an ambush than devices that require someone else to wait for the victim to be on top of the IED. Victim-activated devices don't need their creator to babysit them. They may not even have an intended target. They are just there for whomever is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I wonder occasionally about who created the bomb that changed my life. Was it a man or a child? Did he have children? Was he nice? That sounds like a silly question, but I mean it. Would he help a neighbor in trouble? Did he create a bomb to protect or to attack? Is he still alive? Does he have PTSD? Does he ever wonder if his bomb went off? How long was it there before my husband drove over it?

I could listen to the retelling of his war all day every day. More details eek out every time he tells me about Okada's foot being destroyed or Elliot being hit by friendly fire or flames engulfing him when he drove over the IED. I could write every word he says and rework the stories every time he retells them. There are paintings and drawings in our garage of men with their heads blown off or laying bloody on the ground after their car was decimated by Karl's Stryker. I never remember the details when I show these amazing pieces to our friends. I cannot absorb the full weight of Karl's 27 months in the desert.

I will never know the answers to my questions. If it is ever safe to travel to Iraq, I would like to go. I would like to walk the dusty streets my husband still wanders sometimes. I would like to go with other men he served with and listen to their stories. I want to know everything. I am selfish in this when we hang out with the guys. I want to consume their war as it has consumed them.