Chuck
NES Member
Moving story on CNN
Makes me realize I haven't done anything in while. Any drives for food or supplies going on?
-= chuck
(AP) -- Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq.
Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.
Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.
"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.
Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears -- though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.
Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.
It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck -- though some paid the ultimate price, as well.
Around military bases across America, vacations are planned around deployment schedules. Mini baby booms occur nine months after troops come home. Support groups for widows and injured soldiers have come together.
At small town National Guard armories, the focus has shifted from one weekend a month to filling out life insurance forms and packing a rucksack for war.
"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pennsylvania. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.
In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.
It's not a matter of whether you will have to deal with things like irritability and nightmares after you get home, he says: "It's how you deal with it when it does happen."
And how you deal with your fellow Americans who experience Iraq from a distance.
Amanda Jordan, whose Marine husband was killed three days into the war, says she doesn't know what bothers her more -- the days that go by when no one speaks of the war, or the punditry. At a local diner she frequents with her 11-year-old son near their home in Enfield, Connecticut, she's contemplated standing up and leaving so he doesn't hear when people say Iraq was unnecessarily invaded.
"This is like my life. You're saying my spouse, my child's father, is dead for no reason," says Jordan, a 39-year-old former paralegal who is studying to be a therapist specializing in grief. "That's a pretty harsh thing to hear all the time."
Veteran: 'All we need is a chance'
Some can tell you exactly when their lives changed.
For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.
"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Virginia.
Suzanne Stack, 48, was soaking in the bathtub in their house at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, when the doorbell rang. There were two officers at the door.
Afterward, still numb from the news of her husband's death, she walked her kids to the school bus. She sensed that people were looking at her fearfully, as if they were afraid they would be next. Even before the funeral, one spouse told her there was a waiting list for post housing. When would she be moving out?
"One day you're one thing. The next thing you're not. It's really quite a shock," says Stack, of Fredericksburg, Virginia, who now volunteers as an advocate for widows on Capitol Hill.
Walter Lajuane Williams, 33, of Fremont, California, was stoned when his turning point came. He was couch surfing, unemployed and in an abusive relationship after he left the Army, which took him to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even his service was criticized: "I had a person tell me, `How could you kill another person?"'
He went to the nonprofit Swords to Plowshares, looking for help finding work. A caseworker, wise to his drug use, took him aside. "I'm going to tell you candidly how I feel and what I smell," he said. "I'm going to work with you. Don't make me regret it."
Williams now helps other vets find jobs.
"All we need is a chance," Williams says.
<continued>
Makes me realize I haven't done anything in while. Any drives for food or supplies going on?
-= chuck
(AP) -- Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq.
Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.
Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.
"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.
Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears -- though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.
Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.
It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck -- though some paid the ultimate price, as well.
Around military bases across America, vacations are planned around deployment schedules. Mini baby booms occur nine months after troops come home. Support groups for widows and injured soldiers have come together.
At small town National Guard armories, the focus has shifted from one weekend a month to filling out life insurance forms and packing a rucksack for war.
"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pennsylvania. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.
In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.
It's not a matter of whether you will have to deal with things like irritability and nightmares after you get home, he says: "It's how you deal with it when it does happen."
And how you deal with your fellow Americans who experience Iraq from a distance.
Amanda Jordan, whose Marine husband was killed three days into the war, says she doesn't know what bothers her more -- the days that go by when no one speaks of the war, or the punditry. At a local diner she frequents with her 11-year-old son near their home in Enfield, Connecticut, she's contemplated standing up and leaving so he doesn't hear when people say Iraq was unnecessarily invaded.
"This is like my life. You're saying my spouse, my child's father, is dead for no reason," says Jordan, a 39-year-old former paralegal who is studying to be a therapist specializing in grief. "That's a pretty harsh thing to hear all the time."
Veteran: 'All we need is a chance'
Some can tell you exactly when their lives changed.
For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.
"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Virginia.
Suzanne Stack, 48, was soaking in the bathtub in their house at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, when the doorbell rang. There were two officers at the door.
Afterward, still numb from the news of her husband's death, she walked her kids to the school bus. She sensed that people were looking at her fearfully, as if they were afraid they would be next. Even before the funeral, one spouse told her there was a waiting list for post housing. When would she be moving out?
"One day you're one thing. The next thing you're not. It's really quite a shock," says Stack, of Fredericksburg, Virginia, who now volunteers as an advocate for widows on Capitol Hill.
Walter Lajuane Williams, 33, of Fremont, California, was stoned when his turning point came. He was couch surfing, unemployed and in an abusive relationship after he left the Army, which took him to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even his service was criticized: "I had a person tell me, `How could you kill another person?"'
He went to the nonprofit Swords to Plowshares, looking for help finding work. A caseworker, wise to his drug use, took him aside. "I'm going to tell you candidly how I feel and what I smell," he said. "I'm going to work with you. Don't make me regret it."
Williams now helps other vets find jobs.
"All we need is a chance," Williams says.
<continued>