25 APRIL 2012
Today I got pretty shaken up. A [local] kid was brought to our COP by his father. [He was probably four or five years old.] The kid had been shot in the head by a stray bullet during a firefight. I thought he was dead when I first saw him. He still may not live, but I know he is in good hands now. I respect my 1st Sergeant more now too because he flew the kid and his father to the hospital in Kandahar without hesitation.
[This child was actually placed in Josh’s arms, and those who were present tried to take him to a medical tent and do CPR on him. The child had lost too much brain mass out of the exit wound in the back of his head to be revived. The child was handed back to his father and the two were flown to Kandahar. Josh does not know what happened to him after that.]
26 APRIL 2012
Today was a long day. It started last night when I was told I would be carrying 800 rounds of ammo. That is a lot of rounds for a gunner to carry. Then this morning when we left for patrol, our third truck was hit by an IED. No serious injuries though… The chaplain came with us on patrol today too—good way to get broken in. I sucked the entire patrol; those rounds were so heavy. Just when I thought the day was over, we went to the chow hall and started taking indirect fire. A mortar round ripped through the tent ceiling and out the side wall while we were eating. No one knew what to do at first, then finally the interpreter screamed “INCOMING!!”
PAIGE
What even were these words? I only understood about half of what Josh had written. I kept my phone out while reading and was googling almost every other word it seemed. I had learned what an IED was prior to deployment, but what I was reading was straight out of a movie. Except it was real men, real IEDs, real gunfire, real war. Even though Josh didn’t use a lot of time to set the scene, I saw vivid images that scared me: the gunfire, the burning truck, the child. It was horrific. I realized these were the things he needed me to read and not hear. He was talking about the wins. The journal told of the devastating, nightmarish losses.
I was creating my own dictionary of military terms while I read and reread entry after entry. Ground lock meant controlling the Stryker area for seventy-two-hour shifts. SAW, 240, AT4, LAW, 320, and M-4 referred to the types of weapons they carried. The SAW and 240 were belt-fed machine guns, the AT4 and the LAW launched rockets, and the 320 was a grenade launcher. The M-4 was the standard rifle that everyone but the belt-fed machine gunners had at all times. ANA and ANP were the Afghan Army and Afghan Police groups that were set up with support from the United States to start to control their own country and fight the Taliban. HME stood for homemade explosive. The HME factories were being set up in people’s homes or abandoned buildings. HMEs are hard to detect because they look like regular stuff that could even be mistaken for trash, like scrap metal, glass, and wood. But when the scene also included explosive materials like fertilizer, large numbers of batteries, or the notorious two-gallon jugs the Taliban liked to use to hold all the scrap material for buried IEDs, it was time to arrest someone.
Reading Josh’s journal reminded me of when I had suggested a plan for how we would support each other during this deployment. We had made a promise that we would always be positive for each other. Knowing we would not have many opportunities to communicate, we decided that every conversation would be pleasant and reassuring. A “recharging of the batteries.” For the first time in our marriage, I was promising to put aside my list of complaints and put Josh’s needs first. That had been our sink-or-swim moment. Combining my self-centeredness with Josh’s military mindset and making this plan to stay positive during deployment had been the most vulnerable moment of our infant marriage.
As I thought about the weeks leading up to his deployment, I knew that we stood in different places spiritually, our spirituality probably being the most infantile aspect of either of us. God had mostly listened to my frustrated, self-absorbed side, and I believed He only heard from Josh during times like this. Even in our immaturity, we anchored ourselves in believing that God’s plan was for Josh to be a soldier and fulfill this mission. Looking down at Josh’s journal, I remembered the things I had written down before he left. Following that unpleasant FRG meeting we’d gone to together and Josh crying, I wrote in my journal before I went to sleep:
Since this is God’s plan, I told Josh that I just don’t believe that Afghanistan is his final resting place. He is trained and prepared and I feel he is going to be another typical soldier who deploys, fulfills a mission, and comes home. Lastly, I told Josh that if this is the end of the road for him, I am going to work to find what God wants for me. I know all this is much easier said than done. I decided that I would rather live in a positive (and maybe unrealistic) world believing in
