Spec. Justin Williams packed a few things into his white Toyota Corolla on a warm August day and left Fort Carson for a much-needed vacation.
Only a week separated Williams from the war in Iraq. There, in the desert, everything in his life changed, everything except his love for his two girls, Aleeya, 3, and Jewels, 2, who didn’t even know him.
As he drove east across Colorado’s Eastern Plains, Williams knew he was beginning a new life. He hoped to put the past behind him – the snipers, the roadside bombs, the divorce. Life as a single father would have its challenges, he knew, though there was the promise of new love.
As his Toyota rolled along the two-lane road that led to his girls in Kansas, a large bird swooped in front of the windshield.
Williams flinched, jerked the steering wheel and woke up his Army buddy, Spec. Craig Rempel, who was dozing off in the passenger seat.
“I thought that was an RPG, man,” Williams said, referring to a rocket-propelled grenade.
Williams, 22, a high school dropout who joined the Army in August 2003, spent a year behind the wheel of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, patrolling a supply route between Ramadi and Fallujah. His job was to secure the route, looking for roadside bombs, suicide bombers, insurgents – people who were doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing. He fired his rifle a few times.
While away, he said, he found out that his wife had been taking drugs and cheating on him, claims she denied or declined to address.
Williams never spoke about it until after he got back to Fort Carson on Aug. 4. A few days later, he filled out a questionnaire about his mental health. He was ordered to talk to a counselor.
“They thought something might happen because I was so stressed out in my head and I didn’t talk to anyone,” he said of the 35-minute conversation. “I told them I was fine, I was OK. I wasn’t planning on hurting myself or anyone else.”
Distance, denials, dread
Williams had been in Iraq four months when he picked up a telephone a few days before Thanksgiving 2004 and called his wife, Iishshaa, in Clay Center, a town of about 4,500 in north-central Kansas.
“I heard some stories,” Wil liams said. “I want to know, what’s the truth?”
Iishshaa didn’t lie, Williams said.
“This is over,” Williams told her. “We’re getting a divorce.”
The next day, back on patrol, Williams said nothing about his troubles.
“What can I do from over here?” he asked himself. “I just can’t go and say, ‘I need to go home. I’ve got problems.’ Everybody’s got problems. The world doesn’t revolve around me.”
Back in Kansas, Iishshaa cried herself to sleep at night. She worried about the divorce and whether Justin would come home.
“I dreamed about his dying and I’d never see him again and having to take care of the kids by myself forever,” she said. “I hated him being away. I hated it, and I didn’t deal with it well.”
Iishshaa was exhausted. By the time her husband went to Iraq, she had been without him for nearly a year while he was in basic training and stationed in Korea. She said she worked as a certified nurse assistant and at a gas station and cared for the children at night, cooking, cleaning, bathing the girls.
“My brother lived with me to try to help me because my youngest daughter was born two weeks before he (Justin) left. Her first word was ‘Daddy,’ but she said it to my brother,” Iishshaa said. “That killed me.”
Williams left for basic training when Jewels was only 2 weeks old. He had been working 16-hour days, six days a week, as a carpenter.
“I was paycheck-to-paycheck, barely making it. I was sick of making nine bucks an hour. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was sick of not having anything,” he said. “I wanted the girls to have health care.”
In Iraq, nervousness and anxiety were a way of life.
He would often drive the Bradley the wrong way, in the wrong lane, with traffic coming toward him, to throw off insurgents who tracked the Americans’ every move.
“Whenever we did that, it was like splitting the Red Sea,” he said. “All the cars would split and get the hell off the road because they didn’t want to get hurt.”
One day, while Williams was driving the wrong way, an oncoming car didn’t see a group of women and children walking alongside the road.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in the movies. This girl flew 40 feet – I couldn’t believe it, just like a football. It was like ‘bam,’ a direct hit. She just laid there, you know?”
Complications of love
Williams worked 12 hours and had 12 hours off. The days were hard, but letters from Marti Rempel, the sister of his Army buddy, Craig, helped ease the anxiety. Williams met the slender blond when she came to visit her brother in Korea in June 2004. He was initially drawn to her as a friend, and their relationship grew.
She was the only person who wrote to Williams consistently and frequently. Justin loved the peanut-butter surprise cookies she sent.
On Christmas night 2004, the phone rang in Marti’s Nebraska home. Justin was on the line. He wanted to thank her for everything she had been doing.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” she answered, almost without thinking.
She hung up the phone and thought: “Oh, my God.”
His letter to Marti in January said he never thought he would have a chance with her. Craig Rempel had told him that his sister never wanted to marry a man who had “extra baggage.”
Leave – and leave-taking
Williams returned home last Feb. 2 for the two-week leave given to soldiers serving year-long tours in Iraq.
When he arrived in Topeka, Kan., where Iishshaa and the girls were living, he checked into the Quality Inn. Iishshaa joined him for an intimate evening.
“I don’t want to stay here if we’re not going to try and work it out,” Iishshaa told him.
“He told me, ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ and I thought we were going to try to work it out,” she said.
While still on two-week leave, he took the girls to Nebraska to see Marti. Williams said it was while he was on leave, after he met her family and spent a day with her, that his love for Marti deepened.
On Feb. 14, Williams handed Iishshaa divorce papers.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Wil liams said.
On June 9, the judge ended the 26-month marriage and awarded residential custody of the girls to Williams. It was another divorce among active-duty enlisted soldiers, who saw divorce rates rise 53 percent from 2000 to 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
That night, Williams called from Iraq to tell Iishshaa the divorce was final and that the girls would live with him.
“What are you talking about?” Iishshaa asked. “I thought we agreed that they would live with me.”
Williams said his intentions to gain custody of the girls never changed and were on the record in court as early as May.
After Iishshaa hung up the phone, she said, she started to cry.
Elopement in the Springs
Williams put Aleeya and Jewels in their car seats and headed from Kansas to Kearney, Neb., in mid-August to Marti’s house.
“Close your eyes,” Aleeya told Marti.
Williams sat in a chair across from Marti, and Jewels jumped in his lap. He took the diamond ring that Aleeya had been hiding in her shirt.
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” Marti said.
Williams set Jewels aside, stood up and hugged and kissed his bride-to-be. The proposal, Marti said, would have been better if Williams had gotten down on one knee.
“It wasn’t perfect,” she said. “But it meant a lot.”
Marti got on the Internet and did a search for “elope” in Colorado Springs. Neither one wanted to spend a lot of money on a big, expensive wedding.
She found a $495 package at the Cheyenne Canyon Inn that included a minister, a video of the ceremony, candlelight dinner for two, champagne, two glasses and a couple’s massage.
He wore his Army dress uniform; she wore a white dress she bought in Nebraska. Two of Williams’ Army buddies attended. Thirty-three days after returning from Iraq, Williams was married again.
Not easy being dad or GI
Williams picked up his girls for good at Iishshaa’s home Sept. 12.
Iishshaa knew nothing of the recent wedding.
“He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring,” she said.
Williams said he took it off.
“I didn’t have it on,” he said. “I didn’t want her to start something and say this and that or whatever. I didn’t want to get into it, so I took it off and left it in the car.”
Iishshaa hugged the girls.
“I love you,” she said. “Be good.”
The girls were so excited to see their father that they didn’t realize they were leaving their mother.
Williams said he didn’t tell the girls they were coming to live with him.
Two weeks later, Iishshaa took a knife to her wrists. She checked herself into a psychiatric facility in Manhattan, Kan., for three days.
After Williams picked up the girls, the family drove to Colorado and moved into a two-bedroom, two-story apartment with a small backyard at Fort Carson, where they’ll live until Williams gets out of the Army in August.
They spent much of the $5,000 he had saved from Iraq on things for the girls: new beds with pink ribbons, bell-bottom jeans and colorful tops, toys, books, movies and tricycles.
Marti, 24, hung the military photographs of her husband and her brother in their Army uniforms, and decorated with red, white and blue Americana crafts.
Each morning, Williams gets up at about 5:30 to make it to physical fitness training from 6 to 7 a.m.
One afternoon, he dragged his Army gear out of a closet and dumped it on the floor of their home, checked a list and stuffed it back in.
“This is crap,” he said, spewing his dislike for the Army.
Sometimes he is overwhelmed by the sadness that comes from remembering friends who died in Iraq.
On a warm October day, Wil liams stood a few feet away from the names engraved on a flagstone memorial that honors more than 140 Fort Carson soldiers killed in Iraq.
It took him only a few minutes before he rubbed his fingers across the name Staff Sgt. Juan Garcia, who Williams said was the best noncommissioned officer he knew. In Iraq, Garcia bought soccer balls and packed little bags filled with candy, toothbrushes or soap – anything left in the camp – for desperate Iraqi kids, who swarmed him.
Garcia never saw the sniper who killed him.
Williams sat down on a bench and thought about his fallen buddy and about Garcia’s son who will never know his father.
Williams felt lucky to have survived, to be able to hug Aleeya and Jewels.
At home, Justin and Marti are intent on bringing structure to the girls’ lives. Marti cooks them a hot breakfast as well as lunch and dinner. She puts the girls down for naps at 1 p.m. At night, Williams and Marti read them Garfield, Winnie-the-Pooh and princess books.
Williams said the transition from warrior to father hasn’t been easy.
“Sometimes, I get irritable with them. It’s a new-dad thing,” he said. “I walk away from them because I get irritable. … I don’t want to scream at them, and I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want them to get that impression of me right when I get back.”
The night before, Jewels got out of bed when it was time to go to sleep. He spanked her the first time and told her to lie down and go to sleep, but she got up again. He spanked her again, and again when she got up a third time.
Living like a bachelor for the last two years, with mostly men around, made it hard to adjust, he said.
“I don’t really have a problem picking up after myself,” he said, “but the whole two years I was in the Army … I never really had dishes to do.”
He is still adjusting to being a full-time father.
“I’m not used to it. I’m still not used to it,” he said. “And there are things that I literally cannot do for them, Marti has to do, like their hair. I can’t do their hair. I just can’t do it.
“I could, but it wouldn’t be appropriate or presentable.”
The day before, he said, Aleeya was upstairs going potty and she yelled downstairs that she loved him.
“Well, what about me?” Marti asked.
“Well, I love you, too, but you’re not a very good mom,” she said.
Marti told Aleeya to sit on the steps and think about what she said.
Justin told her to apologize when she was ready.
Thirty minutes later, Aleeya yelled: “I’m sorry.”
“Marti still made her sit on the steps,” Williams said, bringing Aleeya’s time on the stairs to 3 1/2 hours.
The standoff reminded him of his own father. Williams said he won’t forget the day he made his father so mad that he took Justin’s two-week allowance – a $50 bill – and set it on a table and lit it on fire.
“I would never do that to one of my kids, ever,” he said.
Time to leave the house
The television was tuned to “The Price is Right” on the morning of Veterans Day.
Marti flipped through the classifieds, looking for a job. She worked as a certified nurse assistant in Nebraska and wanted to make money and get out of the house where the washing machine never stopped and the dishwasher ran every day. An ad caught her eye.
“Where’s Briargate at?” Marti said. “They’re having some kind of a tree lighting.”
“Is that today?” Williams asked. “A tree lighting?”
“I don’t know. I thought it’d be fun just to get out,” she said.
The couple had been on one date in the nine weeks since they were married; he had spent his days at work while she looked after the girls. At night, they stayed home and watched TV.
“She wants to go to ‘The Nutcracker,’ and to ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘Wallace & Gromit’; I don’t want to do that,” Williams said.
Williams stepped outside for a smoke and talked to a friend on the cellphone. The screen door banged when he returned.
He told Marti that he wanted to go to Mr. Biggs, an indoor amusement center, with an Army buddy.
“I’m going out,” she said. “Christmas tree lighting.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you want to do that?”
She walked into the kitchen while he sat in a rocker in the family room with his head down. His leg bounced nervously.
Not a word was spoken for 30 minutes. Marti put lunch in the oven for the girls, then wheeled around the corner carrying a basket of freshly folded laundry.
The silence broke when the Army buddy called back and Williams asked Marti: “What’s my curfew?”
“If it closes at 9, then 10,” she said.
Williams hung up the phone.
The tension eased when Williams puts his thumb up to Jewels’ nose and said: “I got your nose.”
Aleeya joined the fun, and the two girls dove into their father’s lap. He tickled them, and they giggled.
He left for Mr. Biggs later that afternoon.
Trapped in Topeka
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, it was Iishshaa’s turn to have the girls. She had to drive from Kansas to Colorado Springs to pick them up, but she didn’t show.
Iishshaa lives in Topeka with a roommate and has two jobs, one at a restaurant and one at a home for the mentally ill. She said she’s trying to save to buy a car so she can get to Colorado to visit the girls, whom she hasn’t seen since Sept. 12.
She has met with legal services and wants to get her girls back or to revise the visitation schedule.
A week before Thanksgiving, she learned through Williams’ sister that he had remarried. She said she still loved him, especially the part of him she sees in the girls.
“I made some mistakes, but I wasn’t the only one making mistakes,” Iishshaa said. “I’m not going to incriminate myself. I kissed one guy, but I didn’t have an affair.”
The doctors told her after her suicide attempt that she should be on medication for depression, but she cannot afford the $3-per- pill cost.
On Thanksgiving Day, Wil liams and Marti loaded the Toyota Corolla with the girls and headed east on U.S. 24, over the grassy plains of Colorado, to spend the holiday with their families in Clay Center and Kearney.
He gazed out over the road and could hear the girls giggling in the back seat as they watched a Garfield movie on a portable DVD player.
Williams stopped at McDonald’s in Colby, Kan., and bought the girls Happy Meals.
As he drove the last leg of the trip, he looked out over the dashboard. There were no birds swooping in front of the car. For the moment, the horizon seemed clear.
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
