I got my first phone call from Josh about thirty-six hours after they left. He called to say that they were in Alaska waiting on their next flight. Then, things were quiet for another thirty-six hours.
Quickly, my world revolved around getting to talk to Josh. He was eleven and a half hours ahead of me, so we were at almost perfectly opposite ends of each day. About a week following his deployment, these short messages became my lifeline.
March 31, 2012
From Josh Wetzel:
Hey baby. I’m sorry. I am getting them [referring to countless emails I had sent]. Everything is just so crazy because everyone isn’t here yet and I am pulling 6 on 6 off guard shifts. I’m not going to be able to call you tonight. Maybe after I get off guard tomorrow which will be about midnight your time. Things will get better, I hope, baby. I will call when I get off guard. Don’t stay up. I will call more than once and try to wake you up. I love you sooooooooo much.
I kept my phone close when I was getting close to the end of my shift. A strange six-digit number would call, and I would run out of the room to listen to his voice for just a few minutes as several other soldiers also needed to use the phone. I quickly learned that Josh tried to keep me up to date with what was happening to him in real life. He would call or message with updates about his first mission or what was happening on base. I learned that whether missions ranged from one day to a week, going “outside the wire” usually meant they were looking for IEDs or someone in particular that was affiliated with IEDs. Josh had explained what an IED was, but they didn’t seem to pose any imminent threat to him. It seemed that they knew the tactics used to create these explosives and they had the technology to find and dispose of them. The nature of their living conditions on post did not provide the means for modern communication. Once the base finally got internet, it was still very spotty and couldn’t withstand more than one or two people using it at a time. Josh and I discovered that we could text via Skype, so that became the best way I had to check in with him. I was texting him probably three times more than he was texting me, but I kept thinking about how he might react if he saw constant encouragement coming through from me. I would send him several messages a day, but the typical response was maybe a sentence or two that came in the middle of my night (his day). Because communicating was so difficult, I felt justified in stopping whatever I was doing to answer the phone. I also vowed to never end the conversation. I would let his schedule decide when we needed to hang up. I hated hanging up, but when we did, I would let him go and think, I can do this. Yes, this deployment is going to be long, but all I have to do is get from phone call to phone call. Two or three a week, and this will go by quickly. I’m feeling as good as I can about this. We are going to be proud of what we did when this is all over.
No matter what I thought was going on during the initial weeks of his deployment, as Josh started to unravel his deployment story as he lay in bed at Walter Reed, I quickly realized I had been greatly misinformed—by my own husband. While I was adjusting to military life and readjusted to deployed military life, my husband was adjusting to hell on earth. My daily routine of living the mundane was only a pinpoint on the larger picture of Josh’s story. His pleasantries and stories of the mundane were a ploy to not have me pick up on reality. And I was happily believing it.
Those cheery check-ins always had a trace of dishonesty. I just sidestepped my concerns and listened to the glossy version of what life on the front lines was like. Whether I totally believed it or not, it would become the narrative in my mind until the next phone call. That was way better than the places my imagination could go.
As Josh talked about his deployment, the mail cart arrived with a package. Josh had been in the intensive care for the first six days at Walter Reed Medical Center. Once his pain regimen had proved sufficient over consecutive days, he was finally stable enough to move onto the fourth floor: the Wounded Warrior Unit. This was an entire floor of approximately seventy beds for wounded soldiers. This floor wasn’t too different from the ICU other than it had a door instead of a curtain,
