I wanted to take this opportunity to share my story about how I became a caregiver for a disabled veteran, and the path that brought me to where I am today. This story is probably very familiar to some, so I hope that it gives you some peace of mind to know that you are not alone. To others who may not have had similar experiences, I understand that every soldier is different, and my hope is that this story will give you some new perspectives.
Just a quick back-story; my husband and I met in the summer of 1991 and married in the summer of 1993. At the time of writing this, over 30 years have passed, and we are still together and still very much in love.
Fast-forward three years to 1996. Our first daughter was almost three years old, and I was pregnant with our second child. The factory that my husband worked at closed its doors, and we didn’t know what we were going to do. I can’t remember what made me even mention it, but I suggested that maybe he should look into enlisting in the armed forces. My husband went to the recruiting station that day and joined the Army. A few weeks later he was on his way to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma for basic training. This began the first of many times that I found myself alone, taking care of the home front. I was young, pregnant, and raising our daughter by myself. I was scared to be alone most of the time, but I was so proud of my husband.
His first duty station was Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. We arrived there in the early summer of ’96. It wasn’t long after arriving that I began to learn what the term “field problem” meant. To my husband, it meant training in the back forty with his unit. To me, it meant I was going to be alone again. Sure, there was the unit’s Family Readiness Group (FRG), but sometimes that is not enough. When you’re tucking your kids into bed at night, and they are asking where their daddy is and when is he coming home, it hurts.
Eventually, we got to move into on-base housing, where I was surrounded by other military spouses. I made a lot of close friends, and being able to spend time with them definitely helped to ease the pain of missing my husband while he was in the field, sometimes for up to thirty days at a time. I would like to think that I was able to help them as well when their respective spouses were not at home for weeks or months at a time. Hindsight being what it is, I would have relished those times when my husband was gone for only weeks instead of the years that were coming, where he would spend more time deployed than he was at home.
After my husband’s second duty station in Germany, where I am so blessed to have been able to visit so many different countries while we were over there, we came back to Ft. Campbell in January of 2003. My husband had barely in-processed into his new unit when they were deployed to Iraq in February. At the time, my biggest fear was that he was going to get hurt over there… or worse. I already had enough experience taking care of the home front while he was away that I knew I could handle a year-long deployment on my own; I was just more worried for my husband than anything else. Back then, it was hard to talk to your deployed spouse. I remember writing so many letters to send to him, but receiving letters back from him was few and far between. I understood. Whenever he was able to get away, he would stand in line for hours in the hot sun, just so we could talk on a satellite phone for five minutes. I looked forward to those phone calls like a child looks forward to opening presents on Christmas morning. I took what I could get.
In October of 2003, my husband injured his back while deployed to northern Iraq. What took place that day is not my story to tell, but what happened when he got back home is. He was put on convalescent leave for six months upon the unit’s return home from their year-long deployment. During that time, he could barely walk. I remember getting him out of the bed each day and putting him into his computer chair so that I could wheel him into the kitchen or bathroom. He was in so much pain that it hurt my heart to see him suffering. The good news is that there was improvement with his condition after many physical therapy sessions and pain management appointments. The bad news was that the medical board deemed that he was too injured to continue his career in the Army, so after only nine years, my husband was medically chaptered out of the military.
At that time, I wasn’t really sure what PTSD was. I just knew that my husband was not the same person that he was before he was deployed. He had an extremely difficult time dealing with his injury and his transition back into civilian life. He didn’t like it one bit, and it put a heavy strain on our marriage. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time, and I still have trouble completely wrapping my head around it, but it seemed like he wanted to go back to Iraq. So much so that by 2009 he took a job as a contractor with the Department of Defense and deployed to Afghanistan for almost all of the next three years. We had three children by that time, and all four of us missed him terribly. We only got to see him once a year when he came home on leave. I remember the children opening Christmas presents on Skype one year as my husband watched from a bunker in Afghanistan. We all started crying when he had to go. It was a very difficult day, to say the least.
I am going to have to wrap this up because I have rambled on long enough, I think. I cannot cover everything that happened from 1996 to 2012, but I think I hit the major milestones. During those three years in Afghanistan, which ended in February of 2012 when he came home for good, he further aggravated his back injury. Not only that, he sustained more injuries; one of the most detrimental to his health at the present time is his Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) caused by multiple mortar explosion concussions. He also suffers from PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares, insomnia, depression, nerve damage in both legs, and hearing loss. This looks like a lot typing it out, but I know that it is a short list compared to some others. Regardless, this brings us to the present day, and I find myself living the life of a veteran caregiver. Thank you for taking the time to read how I got here.
~ Kristine C. (Veteran Caregiver)
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