I am tired.
I have been on the road for 27 hours, and I haven’t felt my right cheek in at least 20. I left my wife and children in Fort Bragg, N.C., less than two days ago. I am bone-weary, coffee-
high and wild-eyed. I dozed off, standing up, at a gas station in Missouri, but I cannot stop.
I am going home.
These past 18 months have been something that I cannot even begin to describe to the world. My wife went back on active duty on March 30, 2004. Sixty days later she was a 33-year-
old medic in Iraq, and I was a 36-year-old single father of three.
Four months later, I received the phone call informing me she had suffered multiple severe head injuries and had been taken to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Germany. As a result of her injuries, she has brain and central nervous system damage, and none of us has been the same.
This beautiful girl I married is not gone. She is just different. She is damaged, and the sleep I was sure would come to me when she returned has not. I drift to sleep each night, knowing her nightmares will come. They always do.
I cannot let them be hers alone.
So here I am, driving to get to our future – my past – as fast as I can.
When Juliet first left for Iraq I didn’t do as well as I thought I might. Apparently our wives do more than sit around watching HGTV and doing yoga all day long. The list of things that keep a house in running order doesn’t just get done by itself, and that was pretty apparent in our home within days of her departure.
The house was a mess, the laundry pile grew daily and the kids were becoming rather unimpressed by the menu selection. I was laying on the couch watching Oprah interview “cool dads” Billy Crystal and Kurt Russell on TiVo one evening after work when they gathered around me. The eldest cleared her throat; “Dad.” She paused for a moment gathering her thoughts. “Dad, we don’t
really like pizza that much anymore.”
I looked at the younger two, and they were nodding rather emphatically. Being a good father, I realized we needed to make a change.
Two weeks later, they came back.
This time Joshua, my middle child, spoke. “Dad, we don’t like Chinese either.”
Over time, I learned how to be a father and a mother. I managed to keep the house pretty clean, the dishes done, and the laundry a little less pink. My children stopped their biweekly interventions, and I waited every day hoping my wife would call.
Sometimes she did and often she didn’t, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t ready just in case. The only blessing of this war is e-mail. I got one of those almost every day.
Our story should have ended when my wife came home. At least, I thought it would. It hasn’t. We lived through more than a year of doctors and drugs and all of the other unpleasant things that the families of the wounded and injured go through. In August 2005 the Army finally decided to medically retire her, and then the panic really set in.
I had to quit my job last year to help care for her and the children. She certainly wasn’t in a position to take care of three kids and a house, and despite my claims to the contrary, I barely made it through my single- daddy phase. Suddenly we were faced with the prospect of no job, no house and nowhere to go.
I guessed we could move to Calgary to live with my folks. Pension free, thanks to the United Airlines bankruptcy, they had left Denver and gone home to Alberta to be near family and free health care. I realized they weren’t planning on extra mouths to feed, but that’s what families are for – right?
I spent my days working the phones and Monster.com, looking for work. The Department of Defense has created the Military Severely Injured Joint Operations Center to help severely injured and wounded service members and their families get back on their feet. They act as ombudsman in a bureaucracy that wasn’t designed to deal with this many casualties. Trying to help me find work, they spread my résumé around to every government agency they could find. There is no worse fear as a father than knowing you are going to be out on your butt with no way of feeding your children.
As I was beginning to lose hope I received a call from a company in Colorado. After a whirlwind of interviews and a quick trip to Denver I had a job and we had a future.
Given the difficulties my wife was still struggling with, I was terrified of leaving her and the kids alone for a month while I went out and found a house to rent and got settled into my new job. But sometimes you do what you have to.
I yawn as I drive across the prairie. My eyes are sticky with sleep, but I can see the mountains standing guard over Denver below. This is where I grew up, learned to ski, had my first kiss, and buried my pets over the years. My heart begins to race and through the exhaustion; the tears have started to come.
I am home.
I have no idea how we are going to make it through this year and the years that are coming. We have physical therapy and late-night ER visits and myriad issues to deal with.
I don’t care anymore.
As soon as they get here, I’m going to ski with my kids.
Peter Madsen is a former Army officer and Blackhawk pilot. His wife, Juliet, and three children (daughter Tyler, 13, son Joshua, 11, and daughter Erin, 8) joined him in Parker this past December. They ski often.
