Families fear sacrifices forgotten
By David McLemore
The Dallas Morning News
(MCT)
FLOWER MOUND, Texas - Debby Schick remembers the day in September 2004 when her world collapsed.
Her son, Marine Cpl. Jacob Schick, called from a military hospital in Germany saying he'd been injured and was coming home. A nurse got on the phone to tell her his right foot had been amputated.
Then came the hurried flight to a military hospital in Bethesda, Md., the antiseptic smell in the hall outside his room as she overheard him tell a nurse to cover him: "I don't want my mom to see this."
For the next 18 months, mostly at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Schick held Jacob's hand as pain medication took effect. She heard his cries and curses in therapy and witnessed his struggle to fit a prosthetic limb. And she sat with him through 46 surgeries to cut away infection and repair damage in his left leg and arm from the blast of an improvised explosive device.
In the process, she became a surrogate mom to dozens of other wounded GIs, helping them with bandages, bringing them drinks or simply sitting with them.
"I'd never seen a burned human before, and suddenly I'm looking into the face of a kid with no lips or nose and telling him I love him," Schick said.
"You never think about your child coming home without a limb or spending every day watching him and many others suffer," Schick said. "And then it happens. And it doesn't seem to ever end."
In the turn of a minute, Schick found she'd joined a terrible club - one of families whose lives are shattered by war. They are united in the hope that the sacrifices their kids made and the good they did will be remembered: the Iraqi schools they built, the dictator they overthrew and their willingness to serve the nation.
Some families still believe in the value of the war as a monument to their children's sacrifice.
Jane Fleischer, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, said she wants her son's "life to account for something, and I don't regret what he did. I regret how it ended." But, she adds emphatically, "We can't think about leaving until the job is done."
Others have grown disillusioned with a war that seems to have no end. But all are united in the fear that as the war drags on, their loved ones will be forgotten. They know life moves on. They can't. Not yet.
Across the nation, polls show support is decreasing for a continued troop presence in Iraq.
Families watch with concern as the political fights drive the reports of more deaths of Marines and soldiers off the front page. They know that behind each military funeral, each maimed warrior, the pain and grief of war extends outward in ever-widening ripples, forever reshaping the lives of parents, spouses and children.
While the final bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has yet to come due, the toll continues to rise.
Since 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have claimed 3,492 American service men and women. That doesn't include the nearly 24,000 U.S. troops wounded, many of them severely.
"Three or four years ago, I was a staunch Republican and a gung-ho Marine mom, supporting the war," Schick said. "Now, all I can think about is how we can keep these kids home. How much is enough?"
The families see that the rest of America remains untouched by the war. And that the service their children gave to the nation tends to fade away as the stories out of Iraq and Afghanistan become simply a box score in the media on how many died that day.
There is some validity to their concerns, said Adrian Lewis, a historian at the University of North Texas. The burden of military life falls on 1 percent of the population, while 41 percent of the officer corps comes from eight southern states, he writes in his book, "The American Culture of War."
"Iraq is not a national war. We have as a society relegated national defense to a minority of Americans," he said. "The rest of the country can take comfort that volunteers will take care of the dirty work while we get on with our lives."
That's not news to Gloria Caldas, whose son, Army Capt. Ernesto M. Blanco, was killed Dec. 28, 2003, by a remote-controlled IED in Iraq.
"In World War II, everyone contributed in the war effort. Everyone was asked to sacrifice. But today, most people have blinders on about the war," she said. "It's like it doesn't exist for them."
Not that Caldas is interested in political debate.
"When we get together with other families ... we don't talk politics. We talk about our children," she said. "I hope history will make the sacrifice worth something. That's important."
Her daughter, Carmen Pendergraff, holds a picture of her brother in his uniform, standing with her on her wedding day, shortly before he went to Iraq.
"Mom lost a son, and I lost a best friend," she said. "He was there for me every time. And it really tears me up that I'm older than he'll ever be. Or that he'll never get to see my children."
Her voice breaks and she tries to smile.
After three years, Caldas acknowledges that while the loss of a child doesn't get easier, there is a future to live for.
She still cries every day - "in the shower so no one can hear," she said. "It's my time. I know I'm not alone. There are parents and siblings and grandparents across the nation that are crying every day, too."
For Kim Smith, there are good days and bad. More than three years after her son, Pvt. Robert Frantz, 19, was killed in the war, the San Antonio mother still occasionally carries a photo album that chronicles her son's brief life.
Baby pictures. Followed by birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese's and a trip to Disney World. Followed by photos of the man she calls Robbie in an Army uniform holding his infant daughter.
Turn a page and it's his funeral at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
The one thing she doesn't have is a picture of Robbie in his desert camouflage uniform.
"There wasn't time; he'd only been in Iraq a short time when he was killed," she said. Her only solid connection to her son's presence in Iraq is the sand she found in his wallet that the Army sent home.
After the initial grief passed, Smith found that other people not directly touched by the war expected her to move on.
"People who don't have a share in the loss don't want to hear about it. But we can't put it away that easily," she said. "We see it every day on TV. We see other families overwhelmed with the death of their child. I decided I could wallow in my own sorrow or I could reach out to these others."
Smith began by contacting Texas families of other soldiers killed in the war. She'd attend funerals - a dozen in 2006 alone - or visit at the house. She wears her Gold Star Mother pin proudly and is trying to form a San Antonio chapter.
"I keep hoping one day I won't have to go to another funeral," she said. "But I remember when Robbie died, I never felt so alone. As long as I feel I can comfort these families, I'll go. I think the biggest fear we have is that our children just become a statistic. We can't let that happen."
Former Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, 36, stepped on a land mine March 21, 2003, during the initial invasion. The blast shattered the marathon runner's right leg. Doctors eventually had to remove the leg above the knee.
One of the first things he did, Alva recalled, was apologize to his mother for not keeping his promise to return unhurt.
At first, Alva underwent a long and painful recovery, adapting to his prosthetic limb. He also found it difficult to adjust to being a symbol: the injured Marine. Increasingly, he was called upon to be an example of a war that he found more and more difficult to believe in.
"If you ask how the war changed me, I'd say it's that I am now so against the war," Alva said. "I was a Marine for 12 years and I still feel all Americans have a duty to defend the nation. I went to Iraq because I believed that's what we were doing. That turned out not to be the case."
Alva said he became disillusioned with the shifting reasons given for fighting in Iraq and the lack of any clear-cut end goals. He does not, however, believe in the peace movement's goals of bringing every troop home immediately.
"I support the troops; I don't support the cause," he said. "I'd pick up a rifle and go back if I could, but I know from conversations with friends still in the Marines that they've grown disillusioned, too. They'll do the mission given them but they also see that nothing has changed in Iraq. They feel like it's Groundhog Day. Every day is the same, over and over again."
Medically discharged from the Marines, Alva now studies social work in San Antonio, with a goal to use his experiences to help people with disabling injuries.
"When I came back, the support I received from total strangers was overwhelming. And I'm very grateful for the support," he said. "But I decided I was going to live my life. I don't want to be defined by my prosthesis. Much of who I am is yet to be decided."
Retired Army 1st Sgt. Perry Jefferies, a volunteer recruiter in Texas for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, finds that public support only goes so far. The public supports the soldiers, applauding them as they walk through airports. But once the soldiers are home and out of uniform, they disappear, he said.
"I live and work around Fort Hood (Texas). ... You can't go to Wal-Mart without seeing someone in desert fatigues or a kid with a prosthetic leg," he said. "But you get 100 miles away and it's like the war doesn't exist."
Returning combat veterans deserve the public support they receive once back home, Jefferies said. "But if people really want to support the troops, they should write their elected officials to make sure VA (Veterans Administration) gets funded for the physical and mental wounds suffered in these wars."
Fleischer frequently visits her son's grave at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, decorating the headstone with American flags and a Starbucks cup. That's her private memorial to the times she and Cpl. Jacob R. Fleischer spent lost in conversation and drinking coffee before he shipped out to Afghanistan.
A member of an infantry team aiding in the rebuilding of a rural school near Deh Rawod, Cpl. Fleischer died Nov. 24, 2004, in an IED blast.
"I don't want his death to become fodder for the debate in Washington, D.C.," she said. "What Jacob and others like him did is beyond debate."
Fleischer said the loss of a child leaves a raw, gaping hole in the heart - a wound that doesn't heal.
"What I miss most is that I can't witness this wonderful man become what he was becoming," she said. "I miss the hugs, the phone calls. And I miss the time he spent with his father. People talk about the future. I don't have a future."
It is this deep, searing hurt that most separates the families of those killed in the war from others, Fleischer said.
"People are kind and thoughtful, but some days, when they ask how you are, you wonder if they really want to know," she said. "Do they really want to hear me scream, `I want my child back'? Their lives have gone on and they don't even think about it. But we live with it 24 hours, seven days a week."
Back in Flower Mound, Debby Schick finds it odd not to have to journey to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Her son is officially out of the Marines, medically discharged, married and living in New Orleans. But his road to recovery is far from finished.
And she's far from finding normalcy. She hopes to get her interior design business back on track. And she's working with the mother of a severely injured Iraq veteran to form a support organization for families of wounded GIs.
"I remember sitting with a woman just minutes after she'd shut off her son's respirator. He'd asked her to do it," she said. "He had suffered terrible burns in his lungs and there was no more hope. Nothing in my life prepared me for that. Or to hold my strapping football player son's hand in the ICU as he screams against the pain.
"There are 24,000 moms like me in this country who never thought they'd have to go through this," Schick said. "Until your child is in the hospital or you're standing over his grave, you cannot understand what we're going through. But you'd better try."
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