* * *
Kristin’s constant companions during my many long absences were those two cats she adopted, Max and Casey. She loved them just as much as you boys love your pets. Back then, this was another source of friction in our marriage. Even with a cat box, I thought they smelled, and I was determined not to have our first home smell like a farm.
What happened next may sound cruel—and Kristin never actually agreed to it—but we kept them outside on our back deck, placed a child safety gate at the steps, bought a small doghouse, put leashes on them, and called it all good. We have an army saying about such ideas: “It briefed well.”
It did cross both our minds that our new neighbors—whom we hadn’t met yet—might find us odd for treating our cats like dogs. So it wasn’t a total surprise the next day when I arrived home ahead of Kristin and found a note taped to the door from our neighbors: “Please come see us when you get this note.”
I walked the long driveway to their front door and rang the bell. Three or four kids suddenly appeared in the living room window adjacent to the door and stared at me wide-eyed.
Great, I thought, spectators for the finger-wagging lecture about the proper care of cats.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” my neighbor started, “but I came home from work today and found your cat hanging from your deck. Kind of freaked the kids out, so I took it down.” He handed me a covered shoebox. “Here she is. Sorry, man. I’m really sorry.”
As I walked the long driveway back to our home, I wondered how I was going to explain this to a pregnant Kristin.
“Honey, I’m sorry, but Casey hung herself off the deck on the leash.”
She immediately burst into tears and blurted out, “You idiot, I knew this would happen. You killed my cat!” She beat her fists on my chest but let me hug and hold her as I apologized over and over again for being such a moron. And though my fellow officers still rib me about it seventeen years later, she never gave me grief about it again.
(Until she read the story again in a draft of this book; into the Word document she typed a single colorful expletive meant just for me.)
* * *
Deployments were never far from our minds, because we knew at any moment, long days of field training in the woods could turn into a yearlong absence abroad. We saw our neighbors going through it while raising their newborn, and we both wondered how we would be able to get through such a trial, considering our difficulty just getting across the country together.
My first deployment came when you were only six months old, Matthew. You and I seemed to get along pretty well before I left, but when I returned several months later, it seemed a purple dinosaur named Barney had effectively replaced me as your male role model.
I don’t remember a more painful feeling in my life than the one I felt when I reached out to you and you recoiled as if you didn’t know who I was. I thought it would get better with the passage of time, but you seemed distant for years after that.
With Kristin, the time apart was difficult, but it was also apparent that separation gave us a greater appreciation of each other.
Although we still bickered about everyday things as most married couples do—how and what we spent our money on, how we spent our free time, our clashing likes and dislikes—the only issue that seemed to truly plague our relationship was how to manage life in the army.
* * *
Packing up and moving a house is one of the most stressful experiences a married couple can go through. It’s even more stressful when you’re a Minnesota couple with army orders to Alabama—a place where “yah” and “you betcha” draw some attention.
Three years earlier, I had to pry Kristin free of Minnesota to go to Virginia. Now the idea of leaving Virginia was just as traumatic and undesirable.
When I got to Alabama in the winter of 1997, I started my job and fell in with a group of soldiers that shared the same values, work expectations, and organizational culture as the ones I had just left.
When Kristin got to Alabama, she got, “Ya ain’t from ’round here, are ya?” One woman approached Kristin after a CPA review course in Birmingham and said in a deep Southern drawl, “Ah just love yo British accent.”
There was no job waiting for Kristin, and no business interested in hiring someone who was going to leave in two or three years. Fort McClellan’s housing was full, so we rented a house in the Alabama countryside. And unlike in Virginia, our neighbors were anything but pleasant.
We found out part of the frustration came from the Pentagon’s plan to close Fort McClellan. For the local community, which faced a $600-million-per-year economic loss, the news was devastating.
Even so, after a few months with no welcome to speak of, Kristin decided to walk to our neighbors and introduce herself. When she rang the doorbell, she saw a quiver of movement in the curtains of a nearby window and awkwardly waited for someone to answer the door. Just as she turned to leave, an angry barking dog came bounding around the corner of the house.
There were no more attempts to reach out to the neighbors.
A year later, our landlords decided to sell their home while they could, forcing us to move. Fortunately, by that point Fort McClellan had plenty of empty housing, and we moved into a modest duplex. Unfortunately, because of my job, we’d be one of the last families to leave the post.
When departure time arrived eighteen months later, most of the homes, stores, and buildings were boarded up with plywood. We felt as if we lived in an abandoned city.
* * *
In 1999, when orders arrived sending us to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, we were ready to leave our three years in Alabama in the rearview mirror. The move was our fifth in six years, but this one was particularly stressful—emotionally and physically—due to the lack of neighborhood social interaction.
As usual, we chose to move most of our own belongings to take advantage of the financial incentive the army offered. I drove the moving truck, and Kristin drove ahead of me with Matthew in our new Toyota Tacoma pickup truck.
As we crossed into Tennessee after three hours on the road, we both felt ready to stop for the day, but we opted to press on after a quick rest stop.
A half mile down the road, Kristin pulled onto the shoulder, as if she needed to stop. I wondered what she wanted.
Just then, her pickup truck veered straight off the road into a long, deep ditch. We were traveling seventy miles per hour. The truck bounced wildly, as if it were about to tip end over end, until it finally plowed into a group of trees. Oh, dear God, I thought, let them be okay, let them be okay, let them be okay.
When I reached the bottom of the ravine, thirty yards from the road, the scene inside the cab was surreal. Kristin had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, Matthew was whimpering with his blanket over his face, and music—Disney music—blared from the radio as smoke streamed out of the air vents.
“Kristin!” I yelled. “Are you okay?!”
She had a look of sheer terror on her face. Without waiting for a response, I pulled her out of the truck.
“I fell asleep, and I wrecked your new truck,” she finally sobbed while frantically waving her arms. I grabbed her head and held her firmly so that our eyes were about two inches from each other and quietly told her, “Forget the truck.”
I pulled her into a hug and held her tight, rubbing her back and trying to get her to calm down. “It’s going to be okay … you’re okay … Matthew is okay … now we gotta get focused here.” Within minutes, passersby and a state trooper offered assistance.
As we all pulled away from the scene, I couldn’t help but notice the wide cement bridge abutment just a couple hundred feet from where Kristin crashed. Things could have been a lot worse.
With the loss of the Tacoma, and with a moving truck filled to capacity, we were forced to leave behind all of our houseplants, one of which was a spider plant that had been on the wedding altar with us five years earlier. The body shop owner placed everything in a large st
orage shed.
A month later, we drove back to Tennessee for the repaired truck. When the owner opened the shed, we were stunned at what we saw. All of our plants were brown and dead, except one—that spider plant. It was in rough shape, but it had survived. And it’s still alive today.
* * *
Next to moving, having kids is a close second for marital stress, and life had given us a leather belt called “infertility” to chew on for a good four years while we were in Alabama and Missouri.
A visit to the doctors in 1998 revealed I was clinically sterile. This diagnosis was our first exposure to the inexact science of medicine we would experience so many years later with the cancer.
“What does ‘clinically sterile’ mean, Doc?” I asked. He told me that typically it takes about fifty million sperm to conceive a child, and at least thirty million of them need to be healthy. In my case, there were fewer than one million sperm, and more than 99 percent were either deformed, had no tail, or couldn’t swim straight—a metaphor for my life, my friends and I jokingly agreed.
“But,” the doc said, smiling, “it does only take one.”
At those odds, “trying” unavoidably turned intimacy into a chore.
There was also a miscarriage, which felt like a punch in the teeth. It had been a “blighted ovum,” which is an unfertilized egg that mimics a pregnancy. I later joked with Kristin that she was so eager to conceive, she tried to do so without me.
One of the options presented to us was in vitro fertilization. The only thing I remember about that conversation was the ten-thousand-dollar price tag—per attempt. And it would likely require three attempts. We didn’t have that kind of money, and the discussion only added to the stress.
In January 2000, we gritted our teeth, signed the paperwork, and began the scheduling process for the procedure. About a week or so later, Kristin commented she was “late.” We both half joked about the irony and the possibilities, but I wasted no time running off to fetch a pregnancy test.
Even after the test showed positive, and a blood test confirmed it, we both reflected on our blighted ovum experience.
Nine weeks later, I came home for a quick visit from an army school at Fort Leavenworth and found Kristin lying on the couch crying. She had just come from her first ultrasound. My heart sank. Not again.
“Look at the picture,” she said with despair dripping from her voice. As I did, my brain truly could not process what I was looking at. There was a hand-drawn circle with a line that led to the words “baby #1,” and then a second circle and line leading to the words “baby #2.”
“Twins?” I asked with tears welling up in my eyes. “My God, we’re having twins?!” Even more miraculous, we had fertilized two separate eggs—fraternal twins, just like my twin brother and me. “Why on earth are you crying?” I pleaded.
“Two babies in this little body?” she moaned. “They’re going to destroy me. How am I going to be able to handle twins?”
Kristin had and still has a five-foot-six, 116-pound frame, and she remembered that you, Matthew, were nearly nine pounds at birth. (And she was right to be concerned: Joshua and Noah, you ended up weighing a total of thirteen pounds.)
There was no consoling her. And worse, two days later, I had to return to Fort Leavenworth, five hours away, to complete three more weeks of school.
* * *
The deadliest and most significant battle of the American Civil War—widely believed to be a pivotal turning point of the American experience—began as a light skirmish between cavalry scouts at a crossroads in a sleepy little town called Gettysburg. Eighty years of unity as a nation somehow failed to prevent 176,000 Americans from converging on that place and killing or wounding more than 50,000 of each other in just three days.
For four months in the spring of 2000, Kristin and I arrived at a similar crossroads, despite our own history of unity. For us, the stakes felt just as high.
Our initial “skirmish” occurred over the issue of obtaining a larger vehicle for our growing family. Kristin felt life was going to be hard enough with Matthew, twins, and the army; she refused to struggle with the vehicles we had. For my part, I had no intention of putting us in thirty-five thousand dollars of debt for a vehicle we wanted but didn’t need.
The discussion about vehicles naturally shifted to our overall financial stability, which was directly linked to the mother of all stressors in our marriage—the issue of my leaving the army.
The occasion for the looming battle was straightforward: my six-year obligation to the army would end in just a few weeks. Our discussions in years prior had usually been intense, but never decisive.
In short, leaving the army was going to require finding a new job, looking for a new place to live, and moving—in that order. The pending arrival of newborns meant Kristin wasn’t going to work anytime soon, and in all likelihood I could expect an extensive pay cut when I found a job.
I thought Kristin played down these concerns. She thought I exaggerated them.
“I’ve seen you at work,” she said. “This will all be much easier than you’re making it seem.” Plus, she believed she had held up her end of our unofficial “bargain” regarding length of service. The time had come for me to honor and reciprocate her sacrifice with options closer to her ideal.
We threw ourselves into an all-out debate, despite the fact that a six-week army school kept us physically separated. I think we both knew we couldn’t kick that can down the road anymore.
Perhaps partly because of the safety of distance, push quickly turned to shove, and punch followed close behind. We knew each other’s hot buttons, and we each pressed all of them in an attempt to sway the other.
All Kristin heard from that point forward was an insincere, controlling husband who wanted to stay in the army no matter what.
All I heard was an irrational and ungrateful wife who wanted to leave the army no matter what.
The word divorce was never uttered, but the language and tone were unmistakable.
For the first time in our lives together, the true meaning of love and commitment was being tested for both of us, and it seemed strangely clear there really wasn’t a right answer.
For years, I’d been told that finding a job I truly loved was as critical to a happy life as marrying someone I truly loved. The army wasn’t just our stable and sole source of income; it had become an incredibly fulfilling life choice for me. And to my pleasant surprise, I was good at it.
Leaving the army would mean starting all over in a new culture with no network of coworkers or former bosses. In short, precisely what Kristin had endured for six years, an irony that was somewhat lost on me at the time.
What if Kristin chose not to work after the twins came along? What if leaving the army didn’t produce her ideal, but instead replaced one set of sacrifices and uncertainties with another? I knew she might resent me if we stayed in the army, but I also knew enough about myself to realize I would resent her if my resignation didn’t lead to happiness on her part.
In a matter of days, our fight turned into a dangerous game of chicken. I was cold, mean, and rough—and I meant to be. I told her if her life was so horrible and unfair, she should pack up and move home. Then I refused her calls and didn’t return letters. That was the wrong thing to do to a pregnant woman. She did just what I had told her to do.
The months that followed were emotionally brutal. Kristin turned cold, distant, and unresponsive. In a real game of chicken, you can both see each other’s car. What we were doing was playing the same deadly game, but with blindfolds on.
Within weeks, I began to seriously question both my judgment and her response to it all. How could I treat a pregnant woman this way? And why would she risk losing a decent husband and father with three kids in tow? I also noticed that the answers mattered less and less to me. Instead of looking backward at what had happened or looking for her to change, I started looking at what I was gambling with.
I saw a woman who was ti
reless as a mother, with volunteer work, and with her pursuit to improve herself professionally despite the lack of a career. In all my days, weeks, and months away from her and our home, her eyes, her heart, and her attentions were always upon me. She was one of the fiercest fighters I’d ever met when she got upset, and in light of her consistency of character, I realized she was a fighter I wanted on my team—even if I got in the line of fire every once in a while.
So, were Kristin’s hang-ups with the army something to split up over? What was it that I found unreasonable about her resistance to life in the army? That she didn’t like moving her home and losing touch with all her friends every two or three years? That her dignity was shredded every time she had to quit a good job and try to find another in a community that didn’t like hiring army wives? That she didn’t like the idea that her husband and the father of her kids could be taken away from home for months or a year at a time with little warning—and maybe not return? Those who have learned to embrace such turmoil and change should be commended, but was it such a crime for her to be so opposed to these things?
My answer to each of these questions was that Kristin’s reasoning may not have been fully considered, but it wasn’t irrational. I didn’t suddenly abandon what I believed were fundamental factors in the equation. I just decided that if our little war might cost me Kristin, the army and my ego would have to be casualties instead.
If I was decided on the matter, Kristin certainly was not. My pledge to ditch the army fell on deaf ears. As if to meet my comment about packing her stuff with equally dramatic flair, she remarked, “Well, I think I need some time.”
The truth is, she didn’t believe me. She thought I was telling her what she wanted to hear, which wasn’t such a stretch, considering my passion and devotion to the uniform. Maybe she wanted me to stew in the juices of my convictions for a bit. How bad do you really want it?
Our meetings in public places made it feel as if we were legally separated and already sharing child custody. The whole experience was so cold that the memory still fills my eyes with tears.
Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters Page 11