We suddenly were on a wave of making new friends. Another new friend, Sergeant Andrew Smith, had both seen and unseen injuries. His obvious issues were his two missing legs, but Andrew’s legs were actually the least of his problems. Andrew was blown up on his first patrol, which occurred two days into his deployment. I remember thinking, Two days in and this guy was medevaced home? I couldn’t imagine losing my legs on my first patrol! When the IED went off, the explosion ripped through him, severely damaging his insides. This resulted in Andrew undergoing dozens of surgeries to repair holes in his stomach—real holes on the inside of his stomach that opened to the outside world. Andrew had an x-fix that wrapped around his waist because the bomb practically ripped his pelvis out of frame. His condition caused several trips back to the ICU and food through an IV for almost a year.
So this was my new life. Sharing war stories, watching football, and resting was all I had time for around my recovery as an amputee. Paige and I barely talked about anything more than my care and to our new friends. She’d happily made friends with other wives in the amputee wing of the hospital, and we each did our best to cheer others on while also anticipating similar results for ourselves. Even though this was my new life, we had barely gotten the old one started before I got injured. We’d been married just over a year when I left for Afghanistan and had never really had a honeymoon period early in our marriage because my job caused us to move across the country to fulfill my duties.
When I got orders to report to Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) in Washington, we’d packed up everything we owned and started our cross-country journey. I remember feeling like we were teenagers on a road trip. Despite the time crunch, the road trip from North Carolina to Alabama to Washington state made for some of my favorite memories with Paige. We got to see so much of our great nation. Our tourism stops included the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, legendary Rosenblatt Stadium, Mount Rushmore, the Montana Rockies, and even the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. I showed my ignorance about the Pacific Northwest when we crossed the state line into Spokane, Washington, and saw that most of the terrain was dry and dead. I thought it rained every day in Washington. It was like the scene in Dumb and Dumber when Harry says, “I expected the Rocky Mountains to be a little rockier than this.” I soon learned that the great state of Washington supports four major ecosystems. I could tell Paige was feeling right at home. Rain forests, sand dunes, saltwater, fresh water, and city life were all within two or three hours from anywhere in the state. She could be at the beach one day and mountain climbing the next. She was loving Washington already. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what came next after reporting to JBLM. Were my deployment orders already being drafted?
We arrived in Tacoma after four days of driving across the country, which left us five days before I had to report to JBLM. We were going to need all of that time to look for our new home in Tacoma. After a good night’s sleep, we unhooked our U-Haul trailer and ventured through our new community. We decided to look for a place in the center of Tacoma, which would be a pretty brutal drive to JBLM during rush hour. However, after Fort Bragg, Paige knew we did not want to live anywhere near the base. The day I decided that I liked Tacoma and being at JBLM was the day we tested the commute by going to the base to take a tour. In Fayetteville it is very easy to tell proximity to Fort Bragg. The surroundings transform from schoolyards, dog parks, and antebellum homes to strip clubs, tattoo joints, and Ranger Joe’s Army supply stores. Paige explained that if she was going to have to live in this place by herself during a deployment, she did not want to be anywhere near the dodgy part of town. Yet, as we approached JBLM, all I could see out my window were evergreen trees, running paths, mountain ranges, and shopping centers. When we had reached the entrance to the base, we saw a huge log overhang that said WELCOME TO JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD. That rare clear August day, we had our
