by Paige Wetzel
Proverbs 14:10 says, “Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.” I faked joy for Josh and growled at people under my breath. I threw my hands up at God and asked where He was, not realizing He was the only one there.
I reread our final messages to each other again and again. Trying not to let the tears swell or the fog to drift back in, I concentrated on what was coming next: seeing Josh again.
At some point, Cathi got out of the hospital room and called me. Her voice and spirit were tired. She was running on fumes. She assured me that she was just going to take a few minutes to recollect herself, and then she and Josh were doing breathing treatments for the rest of the night, no excuses. I thanked her immensely for the effort she was putting in to get Josh on the plane the next day, but after hearing his voice I wasn’t getting my hopes up. I woke up to my phone buzzing at 5:00 a.m. It was a text from Cathi: YOUR HUSBAND IS COMING HOME! This is why I didn’t have a passport. Never in a million years would I have been able to push my husband for fourteen hours of breathing treatments to get him on a plane back to the US. This was a mission that could only be done by a nurse who raised her patient to be a fighter. This is why it had to be Cathi instead of me. I was going to meet my husband stateside. A soldier’s return home to his wife.
Next stop: Reagan National Airport near Washington, DC, and then meeting Josh at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
CHAPTER THREE
SEEING HOPE
In every way and everywhere we accept this with all gratitude.
—Acts 24:3
PAIGE
Sitting on my fourth flight in five days, I was physically and mentally depleted. My body was taking inventory of what little water, food, and sleep I had gotten over the last couple of days. But I felt… good? Was that really the right word? I at least felt hope. In less than forty-eight hours, I went from believing my husband could be brain damaged to learning that not even a bomb could crush his spirits. I reflected on the dozens of others in Josh’s battalion who had been injured or killed and felt so blessed. How irreplaceable and precious is a person’s spirit, the unique part of us that is made in God’s image. The part of us that can push through anything. The part of us that asks for one more chance at life when death is knocking.
As I stepped off the plane at Reagan National Airport, an elderly woman asked where I was headed with such a big smile. I replied, “My husband is back from Afghanistan.”
A black SUV came and picked me up and took me to the Marriott on Pooks Hill Road in Bethesda, Maryland, where I waited for a call from Cathi to tell me the medevac flight had landed at the Air Force base with all the new patients. Cathi called about an hour after I got there and said that they were close to the hospital. I requested a ride to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and was dropped off at the largest emergency room entrance I had ever seen. Workers in the lobby said they had just taken about twelve amputees upstairs. An Army officer met me downstairs to escort me up to Josh’s room. I figured there would be some sort of necessary dialogue between us confirming my identity and which soldier I was there to see, but he kept trying to “warn me” about my soldier’s condition. I just wanted this guy to shut up and show me to Josh’s room! After I made it clear that I was not going to stand in the waiting room all day, he finally registered which soldier I was here to see and took me upstairs to Josh’s ICU room. As I was walking through the unfamiliar halls, I felt a painful lump in my throat that indicated I might either burst into tears or scream. I felt the slightest twinge of guilt for being so excited. I would have traded all his suffering for double the deployment time if I could, but the last five days had been the most horrible days of my entire life. Five days ago, I thought he might not make it. Four and a half days ago, I thought he might be brain dead. Three days ago, I thought he would be stranded in Germany alone. Two days ago, I thought he might die on the flight home from Germany if his lungs weren’t up to standard. I didn’t know what the next five days, five years, or five minutes held, but we would be together. In sickness and in health, I thought as I slivered through the slowly opening elevator doors. I’m in this for the sickness and the health, my mind murmured as I frantically peered through the ICU bay curtains, reading every sign desperately looking for the name Wetzel. Sweating now, I was almost tempted to call out his name. There were so many amputees, none of whom looked like their normal selves. In the confusion of the missing arms, missing legs, slings, splints, eye patches, tubes, and monitors, and the frustration of my slowly moving liaison officer, I rounded the desk and asked the charge nurse, “Do you know where Josh Wetzel is? He’s a double amputee,” using my husband’s injury as an identifier for the first time. Jogging, the officer caught up to my conversation and pointed at the bay just beyond the break room. When I read the name Wetzel on the door frame, I registered the painful sensation in my chest of a skipped heartbeat. “You have to put a gown and gloves on first!” someone said. Ugh! I pulled a disposable gown and gloves out of the supply station in front of the door. I caught myself smoothing my sanitary garb as if I was surprising Josh with a new outfit. Ugh! Just get in there! I looked up at the ceiling tiles of the ICU—In sickness and in health—and pushed back the barrier that stood between me and the love of my life. It was the most pitiful, precious sight I had ever seen. Josh saw me and immediately started crying.
“Babe, I’m so sorry,” Josh blurted out in uncontrollable distress.
I ran to his side and said, “For what? Coming home early??”
“No, I got hurt, and I said I wouldn’t. I lost my legs, and I’m sorry.”
“Well… you didn’t lose them. We know where they are. We’re just not going to go back and get them.”
Inappropriate? Probably. Needed? Absolutely. My comments would make the older ladies at my Southern Baptist Church clutch their pearls, but this was not a time to look at all that had gone wrong. I wasn’t being sarcastic or just trying to cheer Josh up. I was so thankful that I was talking to my conscious, breathing spouse. I shamelessly rejoiced over the bare minimum. I also knew that Josh wanted forgiveness. He didn’t need it from me, but he needed me to say that I wasn’t upset or disappointed in him. This is the military mentality. Extreme responsibility. The belief that death and injury occur because of a mistake. Even in a drug-induced narcosis, Josh still worried more about how he had failed me and the guys he left behind than his own well-being.
“Paige, I need to tell you something,” Josh said in a very wide-eyed, no-nonsense way. “God saved me. I could have very easily died out there, but God has given me a second chance at life. I just have to do better.”
All our married life, I never really knew where Josh stood with God. I knew he believed in God, but I didn’t know if Josh ever prayed. Josh is a glass-half-full kind of person, someone who doesn’t seem to have a lot weighing on his heart. However, his best quality created a life in which he never acknowledged conflict, trouble, or sadness. If Josh wouldn’t even acknowledge negative things, it was unlikely he was talking to God about them. This was what kept me praying even when my own prayers felt like they were just bouncing off the ceiling. I also knew that if Josh wouldn’t pray in private, there was no way he was talking to anyone while he was over there. A surprising number of believers serve in the military, but sitting around and praying during a deployment means recounting all the horrible events that happened that day. It is just easier to let each person deal with the situation as he sees fit and not ask any questions. The fact that Josh was not blaming God but instead crediting Him with a new life made me think, Hallelujah! We are going to get through this. I was so hopeful for our future and relieved that Josh had let his faith resurface during this tragedy.
I continued to stare at Josh, thinking of all the places we’d been between this hospital room and when we’d first married. How on earth were we sitting here? Our road had forked many times in the last six years. Between breaking up, making up, playing s
ports, college, and the hundreds of potential military assignments, the path we traveled led us to an unfamiliar city for an unimaginable reason for an indefinite amount of time. I worked really hard to disaster-proof my life, and of all the potential scenarios that formulated in the beginning, this one just didn’t make my list.
After our wedding, Josh and I went back to our separate homesteads to start 2011. For me, that was back with my college roommates in Jacksonville; for Josh that was back to the barracks at Fort Bragg. We had gotten married but hadn’t even figured out an essential component to married life—living together. We still needed to figure out life together in Fayetteville, North Carolina, after my second semester of grad school was over back in Alabama. They say the first year is the hardest, but the other newlyweds I knew weren’t trying to start a life seven hours apart between a house with roommates and an Army barracks at Fort Bragg. The year prior, I had graduated from college with my bachelor’s degree, and Josh had graduated from basic training and Airborne School. We were engaged in the spring and entered new jobs in the summer. I became the graduate assistant volleyball coach for my alma mater and began graduate school. Josh continued on with his military occupation: Special Forces Candidacy, which relocated him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When Josh passed the Special Forces Selection Course in the fall before our wedding, it meant Josh was in for the long haul to begin the Special Forces Qualification Course, also called the Q Course. It would take Josh eighteen to twenty-four months to complete every phase of the Q Course and become a Green Beret. Inevitably that would mean my relocation to Fort Bragg as well, which also meant I would not complete my graduate degree before I left Alabama. Before we got married, our time, money, and efforts revolved around visiting each other and planning our December wedding. Once the new year rolled around, planning how I would leave my job, free education, friends, and family became the weekly mission.
My weekends were spent driving back and forth from Alabama to North Carolina bringing carloads of stuff at a time. Josh had found a tiny apartment close to the base for us to start living in. Josh would not have the time or permission to start setting up our new place, so that became my task whenever I was in Fayetteville. The apartment consisted of a TV and Xbox on the floor, minimal kitchen utensils, and an air mattress in the middle of the living room. The heat was intensifying in North Carolina in late spring, and we couldn’t afford to pay for air-conditioning at my current place in Jacksonville and at our new apartment, so we put the air mattress in the living room under the only ceiling fan. A combination of the devastating heat and a low-quality mattress caused us to gradually roll toward the middle of the bed as the air leaked out during the night. By morning we would be face-to-face, breathing each other’s air and stuck in the middle of the mattress like hot dogs in a bun. While I always missed Josh when I had to go back to Jacksonville at the end of a weekend, I was thankful to sleep on a real mattress when I got back.
Over time, not only did the distance wear on me but so did my decision to not live with my husband after I married him. True, we were actively trying to get a home together in Fayetteville, but night after night in Jacksonville I would look at the ceiling and think What married person lives with roommates, neither of which is her husband? Matt McLaughlin and Brittney Whitten were my grad school roommates and my best friends. However, I was so bitterly jealous of Matt and Brittney getting to see each other every day. They were planning their own wedding and doing all parts of it together, while I sat in my room and wondered if Josh was getting beat up by someone at work as part of another training exercise. I just wanted to pout. I never saw Josh. When I did make it to Fayetteville, he was still pulling fourteen-hour days on the base and had little time left over for me. I was lonely and withdrawn. I could tell I was becoming a downer for Matt and Brittney, but if I put on a good face and tried to carry on, how would anyone know how unfair my life was? Regardless, they did their best to give me grace, space, and patience so our relationship wouldn’t have to be buried alongside all my hopes and dreams when I decided to marry a guy in the Army.
I was applying for jobs in the area with no luck, so I decided to work as many volleyball camps as I could in northeastern Alabama to save up money for my official move to Fayetteville. By the spring of 2011, Josh was immersed in language school and was becoming fluent in conversational Spanish. He sat in a classroom for almost ten hours a day where no one was allowed to speak English. It was a huge change of pace from the two or three nights a week in the woods for land navigation training that he was used to. I was working a volleyball camp near Birmingham and noticed that Josh was trying to call me a few hours after lunch time. I couldn’t answer because I was in the middle of a session, but I thought it was extremely odd timing. There’s no way he is on his lunch break or off work for the day, so how is he even on his phone? Am I needed at another courthouse wedding? I called him back and he told me he had bad news. The language school group was required to complete a five-mile run at lunch time that day. High noon is not a typical time to conduct physical training, but this was more or less a pop quiz for the guys in the Q Course. Josh and some of the other candidates were in language school, where they spent most of their days under the rule of a civilian native Spanish speaker. The design of the course was to learn conversational Spanish with regional dialects in eight weeks. Candidates were banned from speaking and writing in English and spent long hours doing vocabulary, perfecting their speech, and completing mounds of assignments. During the language phase, physical training became each soldier’s responsibility, and the expectations for running, marching, push-ups, and sit-ups would not slacken due to their heavy workload in the classroom. Each soldier was expected to be battle ready at all times, even if it meant running in the noonday heat in summer. Josh explained that there had been several dropouts from the heat, some resulting in serious injuries. Josh quickly assured me he was not one of them. In fact, if Josh had fallen out of this run, he probably would have been recycled through the same course or required to redo the run. Instead, he lasted. He kept on his feet, helped others when they were falling out, and kept moving, but he failed the test… by five seconds. Not the seasoned worrier that I am, Josh was having a hard time concealing his concern about what this failure meant for his future. However, when he said around seventy guys had fallen out, I was certain Josh had nothing to worry about because they would have to retest everyone, right? Seventy people fell out of the run. Failing that many guys is not a good look for the military, right? Surely, they will reschedule this for a regular PT time so everyone can actually have a shot at making it. I tried my best to reassure Josh and rationalize that everything would be fine.
Once my camp was over, I headed north to see Josh and to bring more stuff to our apartment. I got a text from Josh while he was at work saying that his cadre wanted to see him and that it probably wasn’t good. A cadre is a military term for someone who outranks you but is not your commanding officer. I literally had no idea what he meant when he said it probably wasn’t good. I waited for hours for Josh to come home. He finally got back, and as he walked in the door he glared and said, “Well, they dropped me from the course.”
“So what does that mean? You sit on hold until the next selection group?” I asked.
“No, I have to wait a year before I can even try the Q Course again,” he replied.
“A year!” I gasped at the insult. “We are supposed to just sit around here for a year?” For one failed test? Man, this is nothing like college, is it?
“Babe,” Josh said in a very serious tone, “they aren’t going to just let us stay here. I got orders. I’m being sent to a unit that’s getting ready to deploy in Fort Lewis, Washington.” Orders? What were orders? What does this mean?
My thoughts were not my friend as Josh tried his best to explain to me what our new reality was. Orders, meaning an assignment to a unit. Something that wasn’t supposed to happen until Josh completed all of his training at Fort Bragg a year from now. It’
s not that I was crazy about Fort Bragg, but staying in a long-term military course meant Josh was not deployable. It meant I knew where he was every day. It meant that, for a short stint, I could plan my life in North Carolina. It meant he wasn’t in grave danger. Forget the Spanish-speaking countries. Orders meant Afghanistan… soon.
Just like that, we were moving from the Southeast to the Pacific Northwest, and we had only fifteen days to get there.
My disbelief at Josh being dropped from the Q Course because of a failed run stayed very close to the surface during every step of our military journey. Rolling with the punches was Josh’s forte, not mine. I loved life in the Pacific Northwest, but there was a part of me that would not quiet about the injustice of our plan being ruined on a technicality. Over the course of the four-day trip from Fort Bragg to Joint Base Lewis-McChord and the duration of Josh’s deployment, I regularly revisited the what-ifs. What if he had never failed that run? What if he were still at Fort Bragg? If gratitude ever spoke up, I quickly reminded it that no one asked me if this turn of events was okay. If full commitment to gratitude meant the loss of my case, then it was too expensive.
Now, in that room at Walter Reed, all I could feel was gratitude. I realized that everything had been fine and I didn’t even know it. The what-ifs about the past didn’t matter. In fact, the future did not matter. Right now, I was so proud of him. I was so thankful we were finally in the same room. I rubbed his cheek and couldn’t believe I was actually looking at him face-to-face. I kept thinking about how precious he was to me, and I was so grateful his life was spared. I felt my eyes welling up as I looked at my beautifully broken soul mate. I loved him for a million more reasons. Then, the storm hit.