Army wife lives the war, day by day, for a year

HAMPTON

Five years at war. For most people, it’s measured in long strides. One. Two. Three. Four … Has it been five already? Oh, my.

It’s tracked in big, round, death-toll numbers: One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, and any day now, four. What a shame.

Then we move on. Have you seen the new iPod? Can you believe Britney?

But for some, each day must be endured, each hour, each minute.

How long is just one year, if it’s your husband, your wife, your son or daughter, your father or mother over there?

How much work needs doing if, say, you’re an Army wife with four kids and your husband’s in Iraq driving convoys through the desert?

Most of us can’t imagine; Susan Jones lived it.

Step into Jones’ living room in Hampton, and an understanding emerges of what it might have been like – just a tiny bit – during the 12 months her husband, Justin, was deployed to Kuwait and Iraq.

On this Tuesday morning in late February, 26-year-old Army Sgt. Justin Jones isn’t overseas, but just 25 minutes away at Fort Eustis. The living room is full: Kayla, 11, is home from school sick, and 4-year-old Caleb somersaults into the room, while 2-year-old Abigail and a 16-month-old whom Jones watches to earn extra money mulch the carpet with goldfish crackers. The school bus will bring home Ryan, 10, this afternoon.

Jones is explaining some of the things she pulled off, largely by herself, when her husband was deployed, from June 2006 to June 2007. Support the troops? Here’s how she did that: researched and found the house, moved out of base housing, loaded eight PODS units , moved into the new house, enrolled the kids in a new school and breast-fed Abigail the entire time.

She wouldn’t trade being a military spouse, she says. That year she went through made her better and strengthened their marriage.

“All right, Caleb,” she says, as he springs onto and off the couch. “Do you want to go play with Kayla, because the trampoline is out back.”

Jones is 29, with wispy blond bangs and a warm face and voice, and when she thinks back to June 25, 2006, the night that her “first deployment” began, she can’t sum up what it felt like.

She knew some of what would happen: If someone is gone for a year, he misses one of everything. All four of the kids’ birthdays, her birthday, his birthday, their anniversary, Christmas. Justin missed seeing Abigail, who was 3 months old when he left, learn to crawl, stand, walk and talk. The first time Abby pointed and said, “Daddy,” she was doing it at a photo on a computer screen.

But in a way, it’s not the big stuff that dings the armor of a marriage, or a father’s connection to his kids. “It’s all the little things that happen during a day, between spouses, a glance across the room, moods, events, conversations that you weren’t in on,” Jones says. “You can’t get that back.”

Caleb and Abigail have now scooted behind Jones’ chair in the living room, and Caleb pinballs his sister between the back of the chair and the wall until she cries out.

“Caleb, you’re hurting her!” Jones says. “Kayla, please take him out of here.”

Jones confesses that she’s not always a rock-solid, rah-rah military wife, that when her husband was notified of his deployment, she freaked out. But she has no self-pity and didn’t need the pity party when others in the grocery store line would see her with all those children and find out her husband was overseas.

“When you have four kids looking at you day in and day out, they’re looking at you as to how they should feel,” she says. “I figured, what was the point of being negative?”

One night, just five weeks into Justin’s tour, Jones’ philosophy was put to the test. She got a phone call. It was Justin.

Did you hear what happened? She flinched.

Since you’re telling me yourself, she remembers saying, I guess you’re OK.

He had been in a convoy, heading up through the gut of Iraq, when an IED blew up underneath the truck he was in. He was sitting on the vehicle’s gas tank at the time, but neither he nor the other two guys in the truck were badly injured. Jones was later awarded the Combat Action Badge.

When her husband was gone, for that whole year, Susan Jones didn’t watch one newscast. She would have worried too much. But the rest of the country marched on.

It’s been a war, some military families say, of unshared sacrifice. A question posted on a message board in the military community asked: “Do you think America is at war?”

“The military is at war,” someone responded. “America is at the mall.”

In late August 2006, around the time Susan Jones’ husband, Justin, ran over the IED in Iraq, the media and the nation focused on other things. The tabloids and cable news swarmed when a schoolteacher was arrested in Thailand and returned to the United States for questioning in the 10-year-old JonBenet Ramsey slaying.

Larry King had hardly laid out all of the ramifications of the JonBenet case when another surprising story shoved it aside: Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, was killed by a stingray while filming in Australia.

A month later, a panic spread throughout the United States, and dominated headlines and news programs: A deadly strain of E. coli bacteria was traced to prepackaged spinach and salad mixes. Suddenly, you couldn’t find a spinach salad anywhere.

At Christmastime that year, one of the hot gifts was a new Nintendo device with a two-handed controller called the Wii. It’s supposed to give gamers a greater feeling of reality and put them, virtually, in the center of the action.

“We had no Christmas, Christmastime 2006,” Jones says. “We didn’t actually move into the house until January, but stuff was in boxes. It was a long process, the most exhausting time of my life.”

On Dec. 16, Justin signed papers to re-enlist.

A short while after New Year’s, Susan Jones had the kids in school but was far from settled in the house.

“We slept on the floor,” Jones says, pointing at the living room carpet. “I made a pile on the floor and we all slept in here.”

Kids talk, and after a week or two, the janitors and some others at the new school heard about the sleeping setup, so they came over on a Saturday and unloaded four of the eight PODS units still sitting in the driveway.

As much as that gave Jones some physical help, she was still alone emotionally – and there wasn’t much anyone could do about that. She couldn’t burden her husband, during those precious phone conversations, because she didn’t want him to worry about it and there wasn’t much he could do, either.

How’s it going? he’d ask.

Oh, it’s going fine, she’d tell him.

But she couldn’t sleep. Her mind wouldn’t rest. She thought about him all the time. He didn’t have that luxury; much of the time he was tasked with driving around a lieutenant colonel and he “had to be focused on keeping the colonel alive and keeping me alive,” he remembers.

Susan Jones’ husband never knew, nor did her kids, but when she was the last one awake at night, she’d go into YouTube online and watch video tributes to the troops, or read an e-mail, or talk to a girlfriend on the phone at 3 a.m. And cry.

She never cried so much in her whole life. It helped her stay in control around the kids, or when she was on the phone with Justin, if she just let the tears flow.

But only when she was alone.

In February 2007, the country was abuzz with the bizarre story of space shuttle astronaut Lisa Nowak.

Nowak, involved in a love triangle with another astronaut, allegedly drove from Orlando, Fla., to Houston armed with a BB gun, a knife and pepper spray to confront her rival.

Susan Jones got a lovely surprise that month. Justin found a way to order flowers from the desert and send them to his wife at their home in Hampton.

“I didn’t know he could do that,” Jones says. “I think it was Valentine’s Day. I’m sure it cost way more than we had.”

Two months later, the world zoomed in on the Virginia Tech campus after a gunman killed 32 people in a rampage.

That was April, that’s right when – for about one week – time really dragged for Jones. The military was stretched, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that tours would be extended to 15 months. And not just new tours, but ones for soldiers already deployed. Like Justin.

Time crawled. Inched.

Rumors flew. For more than a week. Then the families of the 24th Transportation Battalion got great news on April 21: no tour extension.

What to most might seem like a race to the finish – only eight weeks left – dragged even more, once she let herself think she had made it. On May 10, she wrote in her blog: “I seriously cannot wait. I have never looked forward to anything so much in my life.”

But she was worried, too, about how things might be:

“As hard as it has been I think I have grown by leaps and bounds this year but I hope that they will be perceived as good changes. I know Justin is probably worried about me having achieved too much independence, but … if anything, I have realized what just having a man’s presence in the home does to keep things running smoothly, even if it doesn’t appear they’re doing anything … lol.”

Her blog, which had sat dormant for months, came alive as the end of Justin’s deployment neared.

On June 9, her 29th birthday, she posted: “I can honestly say I am the happiest I’ve ever been.”

June 11: “Less than two weeks!!! I know everyone will be happy to stop hearing all my mushy stuff.”

On June 20, she wrote that she was going to spend a few moments and “let this incredible love that I didn’t think existed sink in.”

On the day he would return, June 25, “I look at his picture and I can’t believe I will actually be seeing him tonight. My insides feel like they want to jump out of my skin.”

It’s been nine months since Justin returned, and on March 6 the couple celebrated their five-year wedding anniversary. In person and together.

In the time since he’s been home, Susan and Justin have concluded some things about each other. One of the most important, she says, is that they both do what they do well.

“I think,” Susan says, “that I couldn’t do the soldier role and he couldn’t do the spouse role.”

But they each have done something.

 News researchers Maureen Watts and Kim Kent contributed to this report.

Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, lon.wagner@pilotonline.com

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