Posted on: Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Many casualties arise far from war
| • | 3 Schofield soldiers die in Afghanistan plane crash |
By Elliot Blair Smith
USA Today
JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — In a Marine bar near Camp Lejeune, a blond woman handed a beer to the man drinking black coffee. She liked his Irish accent, which was phony, and his smile, which was genuine. It was the same big grin that blazed out of so many childhood photographs in which the crew-cut youth dressed like the Marine he had become.
The love affair of Deborah and Donald May began in September 1999 as a happy collision of two hearts. It ended March 25, 2003, during the first days of the Iraq war, when the tank commanded by Staff Sgt. May, 31, plunged into the Euphrates River and sank to the bottom. He and his three tankmates drowned, trapped inside.
In less than four years together, the Mays had married, moved to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms, Calif., had two sons and were raising Deborah's daughter by a first marriage. Their talk, their letters, were filled with life and love.
Today, however, Deborah belongs to a fast-growing sorority of war widows. As if by ricochet, each American serviceman and woman killed in combat leaves behind a trail of secondary casualties: spouses, children, parents. Through Nov. 20, 45 percent of the 1,374 U.S. service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 terrorist attacks were married, the Defense Department says.
Considered survivors, widows and widowers of the war dead are among the conflict's walking wounded. The toll is rising amid heavy fighting in recent weeks.
The Pentagon attempts to ease the trauma of death by notifying survivors with specially trained casualty officers. That is a far cry from the impersonal telegrams delivered to families' doorsteps until early in the Vietnam War. The Department of Veterans Affairs supports military widows with financial and medical benefits that can last a lifetime.
But the death of a loved one is only the first in a series of blunt rearrangements for the surviving spouse. Civilian wives and children methodically are separated from the tightly structured military hierarchy. Base housing, neighbors, nearby schools and the fabled band of brothers all disappear. In the ensuing void, grief and trauma loom large, say war widows, casualty officers and grief counselors.
Bonnie Carroll, founder of TAPS, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, explains: "The Defense Department's mission is war fighting. Once the paperwork is done and the late family member is out-processed, they no longer are part of the war machine."
TAPS and the VA help widows come to terms with the loss by counseling "four tasks" of mourning. Mere mileposts in recoveries that might unfold forever, they are:
Psychologists William Worden and Therese Rando developed the task-based approach because they believe the bereaved must be active, rather than passive, participants in navigating the loss.
When Deborah May, 40, overcame her numb disbelief at Don's death, she, like many widows, realized that the struggle had just begun. "I had made Don my world," she says. "His world was the Marines. When he was gone, my world was gone."
Task 1: Accept reality
After returning home from a checkup with her doctor, Deborah May, seven months pregnant, learned via the Internet on March 27, 2003, that a U.S. tank was missing.
She and a neighbor, Rachel Phillips, whose husband, Randy, also served in the Marines' 1st Tank Battalion, tried to calculate the odds that one of their husbands was in the lost tank. That was when Lt. Michael Jackson, 25, drove up.
Newly commissioned as a Marine, Jackson insisted on taking the casualty officer's call when he learned that the missing tank belonged to his own battalion.
Accompanied by another Marine and a chaplain when he arrived in the neighborhood, he says: "Everybody stopped and watched us get out. They knew what we were there for."
Phillips went to the door. The broken doorbell hardly made a sound. But in looking through the peephole, she gasped loud enough for Jackson to hear. May, behind her, collapsed.
"She was screaming and falling against the wall," Phillips says.
The realization that death stands at the doorstep is perceived in slow motion: freeze-frame moments that last a lifetime, several widows say. "Everything about that moment is captured in a snapshot," TAPS founder Carroll says.
May, hysterical, hardly realized that Jackson had come to tell her only that Don and three of his men were missing. She was taken to a hospital and sedated.
When the officer returned two days later to notify her that bodies had been recovered, he had to begin all over again. Jackson, who rehearsed his lines, says, "I just threw that out of the window at the last moment. You sound like you're not human when you say it: 'I'm sorry to inform you, on behalf of the United States Marine Corps, your husband was killed in Iraq.'"
Instead, Jackson said, "I'm very sorry, Mrs. May, but Don died in Iraq."
Phillips moved in for more than a month to help care for the new widow and her children, Mariah, 8, and Jack, 3. They slept crossways on the Mays' bed because Deborah no longer could bear to sleep in her old place and feel Don missing.
Task 2: Grieve
In July 2003, the Marines gave Deborah a mud-caked camera retrieved from Don's tank. Cracked and waterlogged, it held a roll of decomposing film. A handful of stark images were salvaged. Once again, she saw Don, looking out from a hand-dug bunker in Kuwait just before the war began.
When the time came to engage the enemy, Don and his men had served with distinction. Sweeping into Iraq, Don's tank foiled an ambush, destroyed five enemy tanks and two armored personnel carriers, and killed several enemy soldiers, according to the 1st Tank Battalion's war history, interviews and posthumous commendations.
But the wife and husband's struggle at being separated is apparent from the letters that trickled home even after Don's death. On March 7, for example, he had written from the Kuwaiti desert: "I believe this is my last tour. I don't want to ship over again if it is going to separate me from my family."
By the time Deborah received the letter, Don was dead. That is what made the broken camera and recovered photographs, though damaged by light and dirt, such an unexpected treasure.
More than the war medals and ribbons Don was awarded posthumously, she viewed the photographs as "the best gift" imaginable. "I was thrilled to have another piece of him," she says.
Recognizing that her children required her love and attention, May says she negotiated with herself over how helpless she would allow herself to feel.
"I could spend the rest of my life crying," she says. "I had to say to myself: How much time would have been enough? It never would have been enough. But what if I only knew him for five minutes? I knew I had to be happy with five minutes. So I had to be happy with — what was it? — 1,300 days."
Task 3: Adjust
Advertiser library photo • April 19, 2003 O'Day, 20, of Cameron Park, Calif., who gave birth to her husband's daughter, Kylee Marie Patrick O'Day, two months before the TV appearance, says: "I had to start focusing on my life, my daughter's life. I don't want to live the rest of my life alone."
She became engaged to her late husband's best friend, Marine Pfc. Ray Brown, who now serves in Iraq. And she is pregnant again.
Williams, 27, who has two daughters — one born after the death of her husband — moved in with her parents and works part time. "I kind of feel like the worst has passed, and I'm trying to move forward. I'm trying to be strong for my girls," she says.
For May, getting on with her life was more difficult. "The widows live in a world where we're torn between the past and moving forward."
The VA supports military widows with lifetime financial and medical benefits. Usually, within 48 hours, a $12,000 death "gratuity" is paid. Most dependents receive a $250,000 life insurance policy. A monthly widow's pension of $967 is provided, plus $241 for each dependent child up to age 18, combined with Social Security payments. And the VA pays up to $35,460 in educational assistance.
In addition, since August 2003, the VA has made grief counseling available at 206 medical centers across the United States.
May, who is used to pinching the pennies of an enlisted man's paycheck, says, "Don makes more money now than he ever made when he was alive." She adds, "That's not a consolation to me."
TAPS founder Carroll says, "It is very psychologically difficult to take money after a sudden traumatic death because it feels like you're getting paid for the death."
Task 4: Find identity
Just after New Year's, May and her three children said goodbye to Twentynine Palms. But not before Jackson helped her sort through Don's belongings.
Leaving meant giving up a safety blanket. But the military asks survivors to relinquish base housing within six months, and May had stayed three months longer.
"Everybody put their arms around me in a big circle. Who wants to leave that?" she asks. By moving to Jacksonville, her family would live within a four-hour drive of Don's mother, Brenda, and his grandparents. And she would be close enough to Camp Lejeune to shop on the base and receive military medical care for the children.
Yet the transition to the East Coast meant arriving alone and anonymous. There would be no more Rachel, no more Jackson.
Rachel Phillips, who now lives in Phoenix, frets: "Two, three, four years from now, she's still going to need people. You can't leave them. You can't have a funeral and say, 'That's it.' "
Widows and widowers confront many questions: Do I take off the ring? How long should I wear black? Each question triggers personal doubts and pain.
May still wears a wedding ring. Don's voice remains on her answering machine. Her 3-year-old son, Jack, has a Marine's horseshoe haircut and Don's smile.
In the new house, she filled a glass cabinet with Don's medals and ribbons, his boots, hat and photographs. May laughs when she thinks of how Don's mother memorialized Don Sr., a former Marine, after his death even though they were divorced.
"His uniforms are hanging in her closet," she says. "Now I'm her."
On Veterans Day last year, May appeared on "Good Morning America" with several war widows. One was Shauna O'Day, whose husband, Marine Lance Cpl. Patrick O'Day, 20, drowned with Don. Another was Brandy Williams of Hawai'i, whose husband, Army Sgt. Eugene Williams, 24, was killed by an Iraqi suicide bomber.
Brandy Williams was comforted by her father, Robert Dela Cruz, during the 21-gun salute at Mililani Memorial Park to honor her husband, Sgt. Eugene Williams, who died in Iraq last year.
