“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 sports, 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
