thedrifter
03-17-07, 04:33 PM
Military reservists and their families face jarring change
Mark Fainaru-Wada, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 17, 2007
(03-17) 12:54 PDT -- The weight of the war is visible on Sophia Raday's face.
The 42-year-old mother sits in a Berkeley coffee shop, head buried in her hands, searching for words that will convey what it means that her husband is on his way to Iraq.
It's hard to think clearly. Her 5-year-old son is at home with the sitter, just a block away, but he's calling Raday's cell phone every few minutes. ("He's very clingy lately.") Her 18-month-old girl, recently adopted, is also home -- tearing the place apart, she's sure. And when Raday returns, she will face a bottomless list of chores: The gardening, the bills, the dog, the kids, the groceries, the home renovation project. She has to talk to the locksmith and the telecom guy, return some stuff to Ikea, buy a light for the kitchen, book flights to San Diego.
More than that, there's the worrying, the incessant and pervasive worrying.
But then, she wonders, how can she complain? What right does she have to whine when her 48-year-old husband, Blair, has recently departed for Kansas, where he is training to go to war? Soon, Col. Blair Alexander will be somewhere in Iraq, commanding a unit of about 300 soldiers, and then what will life be like? For both of them? And their kids?
"This is not what I signed up for," says Sophia Raday.
As the Iraq war reaches its four-year anniversary, Raday's sentiments mirror those of many of nearly 400,000 U.S. families whose soldiers belong to the Reserve or Guard - the citizen soldiers who, until the War on Terror changed everything, were men and women walking and working among us, donning their uniforms one weekend a month and two weeks a year. Even when the weekend warriors were deployed, it was mainly within the United States, to respond to natural disasters or assist with homeland security.
Now, though, for the first time since World War II, Reserve and Guard soldiers are fighting - and dying and getting wounded and returning home - just like their active duty counterparts. Except that they aren't like active duty soldiers in many ways; from deployment to the transition back into society, the Iraq experience of the citizen soldier presents a very different and, in some cases, more difficult set of challenges.
There is no military base for the families to call home, no walking next door to borrow a cup of sugar and benefit from a dose of shared angst. There are civilian jobs to leave and return to. There are sometimes severe pay cuts or, worse still, businesses left unattended. The soldiers typically are older -- 58 percent of Reserve and Guard soldiers deployed to Iraq are at least 30, compared with 32 percent in active duty -- meaning many are leaving established, entrenched lives.
"Since 9/11, everything has changed," said retired Col. Jerrold Jurin of the state's Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve program, which, among other things, assists in resolving conflicts between citizen soldiers and their employers. "I seriously doubt the reserve component will ever be the same again."
For Sophia Raday and Blair Alexander, an Oakland policeman, their Iraq experience is just beginning, and it seems likely to provide an unusual test.
Theirs is a red state-blue state marriage. Alexander is a West Point graduate who served seven years active duty, two as an airborne ranger, before they met. He saw combat in Grenada - a conflict Sophia protested.
The two met 11 years ago, and it was four-and-a-half years before they were married. "It took a while to be sure," says Sophia, who is writing a book about her bi-partisan marriage.
Blair had joined the Reserves after leaving active duty but planned to retire in spring 2002. Sophia was preparing for a more balanced life. Instead, the Sept. 11 attacks happened; Blair told her he had to stay in, but it wouldn't take long.
"That caused a tremendous amount of tension in our marriage because Blair's response was, 'If they ask, I will go,'" she says. "I thought it should be, 'Excuse me, I'll talk to my wife and get back to you.'"
Says Blair: "When the country asks you to do what you've been trained to do and you skirt away from it, you're just delaying the day when your son or daughter will have to do the same thing you ran away from. That might seem simplistic, but it's basically what I believe."
Alexander will be in Iraq for what could be more than a year. The couple, their kids, their families will navigate through a period unlike anything they could prepare for. And then, when Alexander returns, they will face an entirely new set of issues -- issues known in military parlance as reintegration.
"I hear that's the hardest part," Raday says.
Strains on a marriage
In early 2000, Lorin Bannerman was called by a recruiter with the Washington National Guard. Bannerman was 40, recently engaged and working as a food salesman in the restaurant industry. Back in the mid-80s, a few years after high school, he had enlisted in the Guard, and he had mostly enjoyed it for 15 years.
At the time he met his future wife Stacy in 1999, Lorin was taking "a little break from service." But the recruiter reminded Lorin that he had just five years to reach retirement and full benefits.
Stacy was 34, a peace activist and then-executive director at a Spokane non-profit, worried about Lorin getting dragged into a war, but he assured her, "What's going to happen? The world is a pretty peaceful place."
The Bannermans say they had a stable marriage, buoyed by coming to love late in life. Stacy was "unbelievably happy," living on a "sweet little cul de sac. It was fantastic."
In late October 2003, two years after the Sept. 11 attacks had shattered the country's peace, Lorin walked into Stacy's office. He wore a grim look. "I got the call," he said. Stacy began crying.
"That," she said, "was the moment our marriage started to end."
Within a week, Lorin was filling out paperwork - for his funeral, for his will, for power of attorney. Within a month, he was stationed at nearby Fort Lewis. Stacy tried to talk him out of going to Iraq, but she never had a chance.
"He would never, ever desert his men," she says.
Truth be told, part of Lorin wanted to go. "You train, and being an infantry solider, you train to fight, so part of you is hoping that you can put that skill set that you've learned into actual combat," he says.
By mid-March, 2004, Sgt. First Class Lorin Bannerman was stationed in Iraq at Camp Anaconda on Balad Airbase, as part of a task force patrolling the area. Nothing could have readied him for the next year. Not for the randomness of the mortar attacks, which occasionally came as many as 20 a day; nor for the countless roadside bombs the task force encountered. Lorin said the unit lost five men and many others were injured.
Lorin returned home in March 2005. The Guard, he said, did little to prepare him for reintegration. He went through several days of processing, but basically it was, "You're done, bye, see you, have a nice life, these are the benefits available to you."
The Guard and Reserve provide several services to ease the transition for returning soldiers like Lorin, from emotional counseling to employment help, but there are persistent challenges. According to a 2005 Department of Defense study, citizen soldiers are typically dispersed throughout the country, making it more difficult to obtain benefits information.
"You have a service member in the Guard or the Reserve, and they're coming back to their hometown in say, Oakdale, Calif., which is this small cowboy town in the middle of Central Valley. The families are not surrounded by the same resources as someone on active duty," said Nathan Johnson, who, as Global War on Terrorism outreach director for the Concord Vet Center, meets with Guard and Reserve soldiers and explains services available to them.
Stacy Bannerman knew to go slow, lower her expectations and not pressure her husband. But she found a different person in her house. Lorin was more self-contained, less tolerant. His language was saltier, he was prone to giving orders, he was distant. "His heart was in a deep freeze," she says.
Lorin noticed some changes but didn't think he was all that different. Maybe a little less focused, bored at times, perhaps somewhat more shut down, slightly edgy. He also was missing something. Part of him wanted to go back.
"I definitely noticed the need for the adrenaline rush," he says. "I just had this feeling of, 'OK, I need something.'"
Lorin will reach his retirement mark within the next few months, but he said he hasn't decided whether he will leave the Guard.
Last December, Stacy decided she had to leave Lorin and their Kent, Wash., home. She packed up most of her stuff and moved to Washington, D.C., to continue her anti-war activities. She also is part of a Bay Area organization called the Coming Home Project, which holds workshops to help veterans and their families with the reintegration process.
She had a book published last year: "When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists and the Families They Leave Behind."
Of her husband, Stacy says, "Some essential part of him did not come back."
21st century war story
My job is the toughest of all ...
It's a daily battle of emotions, tears and sweat.
It's a job that few women can do.
It's an intense and passionate job.
It's sacrifice and pride.
Those are the beginning lines of a poem written by Norma Muhlenbruch to her husband, David, while he was serving a one-year stint in Iraq. The poem ends, I am a soldier's wife, and it encapsulates a year of fear and growth, pain and love for the Bay Point family.
David comes from a family whose military service dates back three generations, while Norma was born and raised in Mexico, where her allegiance to country was muted by what she viewed as a corrupt Army.
David, a former Marine who had never seen combat, had been in and out of the reserves a few times when he met Norma. His first marriage produced two children but had ended in divorce in 2002, partly because of the strain brought on by a 10-month deployment to Washington state to do fill in for soldiers sent to Afghanistan.
In February 2005, itching to get into the fight, David, then 37, told Norma he had joined the California National Guard's 49th Military Police Battalion. By July, he was training in Texas. Three months later he was a sergeant in Iraq.
"At first, I went through all kinds of emotions, from being really, really sad to being really angry to being really sad again, then angry again," Norma said recently. "After I went through all those emotions, then I was just very proud after that."
David left behind the 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter from his first marriage and the 6-year-old boy Norma brought from a previous marriage.
It was all surreal to Norma. She was newly married, and now she was having conversations with her husband about insurance, combat pay and what would happen if he died at war.
But the Muhlenbruch's Iraq experience is a 21st-century war story, one of almost constant connectedness despite 7,400 miles, an ocean and a combat zone between them. Stationed in Ashraf, David and about 120members of his unit bought a computer system that provided a high-speed Internet connection. Norma had sent David a Web cam; between that and the phone, they were able to communicate almost daily.
"I think that helped me a lot," said David, who was part of a 12-person security detail responsible for driving field-grade officers around the country -- a nerve-wracking responsibility given the prevalence of roadside bombs. "I had no macho-ism. I could say, 'I'm missing the crap out of you.' I would tell her whatever was on my chest."
Norma would keep David updated on life in the East Bay. The connection minimized the dance steps of so many couples separated by war - the solider downplays the dangers, the spouse at home avoids burdening the soldier with the issues of everyday life.
It didn't eliminate the anxiety, but it created a bond that seemed to grow daily. David's frankness appeared to make Norma stronger, strength she, in turn, passed back to her husband. Prior to leaving for Iraq, David had Norma sit with him and watch the video of kidnapped U.S. contractor Nick Berg being decapitated. After David left, Norma watched it again, alone. Then she gave her husband a message.
"She was telling me, 'You better die like a f---ing solider, you better die like a man. If you have to kill yourself, kill yourself. Don't let those guys touch you with that blade,' because she didn't want to see my head resting on my back," he said. "And that gave me strength."
Said Norma: "That was my worst worry. I didn't want them to make him suffer."
David returned home in October, 2006. Reintegration has gone pretty smoothly, though both admit to smothering each other sometimes. David says he won't volunteer to return to Iraq, but that doesn't mean he's not missing it.
"If I could wake up at 9, go over there and take care of a little business and be back by dinner, you know, I would enjoy something like that," he says. "Not to say I'm a war monger. I do miss the adrenaline, I do miss not mixing it up a little bit, or at least not having that fear. Maybe that's what it is, tasting that fear."
Leaving the job
When Sam Gazzo left the Marine Corps in 2002, he decided to join the Reserves. He had enjoyed his military experience and wanted to maintain some of his connections. He was happily married, with a 2-year-old son and a newborn boy, and embarking on a career as a lawyer.
Gazzo had joined a medium-sized law firm in the San Diego area, and although the drumbeat to war was building, the last thing Sam or his wife Jennifer believed was that he would end up in Iraq. "My thinking was, it's got to be a big deal for Marine Reserves to get called up," he says.
But on the night of Nov. 1, 2003, Capt.Gazzo, then 32, received an e-mail from his commanding officer. His unit would be activated by the New Year and on route to Iraq soon after. Sam went to bed, numbed by the news. Jennifer woke up, Sam told her he was going to war, and they both lay there, scared awake the rest of the night.
Shortly thereafter, Sam informed his law firm. By law, he knew his position would have to be held, but he still felt uneasy.
The law protects civilian jobs of civilian soldiers while they are deployed, preventing employers from firing or demoting the soldiers. Still, the extended and multiple deployments during the Iraq war have created a heightened tension for some employees and employers.
"Employers are shying away from hiring Guard and Reserve personnel because they cannot run a company when someone is subject to being called away a year at a time," said Ted Daywalt, chief executive of VetJobs, which helps place veterans in the work force. Daywalt said the Defense Department reported more than 8,000 complaints in 2006 by returning members of the Guard and Reserve, nearly double the previous year.
Col. Jurin of the employee support group said 6 percent of businesses nationwide employ citizen soldiers, placing a heavy burden on a small group of employers. The biggest burden, though, falls upon those soldiers who themselves are small-business owners -- men and women forced to leave the company behind for as long as 18 months.
Sam Gazzo took an $1,800 a month pay cut when called to war.
In March 2004, Sam left for Iraq. He wound up at a Marine air base between Fallujah and Ramadi, working as the intelligence officer for aircraft flying from that base. It was a dreadful situation. There was no infrastructure: no phones, no mail, no Internet, no desks to speak of. They even got low on food because insurgents were blowing up convoys. It was a month before Sam got in touch with Jennifer.
Eventually, communication became consistent, although that spawned more fear. Sam tried to minimize the dangers, but he couldn't shelter his wife or his parents from the sound of mortars raining down on the base as he spoke to them on the phone. "I was thinking, 'Is this it? Is this the last time I'm going to speak with him?' " Jennifer says.
Jennifer, meanwhile, painted the 1950s picture of a house in perfect working order - despite being a mess, struggling to balance her career as a lawyer at Camp Pendleton with being an instant single mother of two.
"From my point of view, I never wanted to tell him how hard it was," Jennifer says. "I just told him how everything was wonderful, how sexy he is. In reality, I wasn't telling him how I was f---ing sick of changing diapers, the dog was crapping on the floor, his mom was promising to take the kids but then pulling out."
Even so, Sam and Jennifer survived it.
And then they survived worse. Just weeks before Sam returned from Iraq in September 2004, he learned he would remain on active duty in San Diego, then face a second deployment to Iraq the following February.
"It felt kind of like playing Russian Roulette," Jennifer says. "You can only spin the barrel around so many times before the chamber comes up. "
When he told his law firm that he wouldn't be coming back to work for another year, Sam could sense discomfort.
After another seven months at war, Sam returned home in September 2005 but remained on active duty until the first week of January. Finally, he was deactivated on a Friday -- and back at work the next Monday. He had been gone two years from the firm. Excellent support from the Marines made reintegration at home manageable.
However, Sam found his long absence from work had created many issues. He had risen up the firm's letterhead, but he believed his salary wasn't what it should be. He felt he was being penalized for serving his country. And now that he was finally back, he felt compelled to throw himself into work, both for himself and for the firm.
A couple senior partners took Sam to lunch the first day and insisted they would ease him back in slowly. Soon, though, he felt too many cases were being heaped on him. It didn't help that he was having trouble focusing.
"You don't want to be a whiner or a complainer, and the last thing I wanted to do was say, 'Hey, look, I've been gone from my family for two years, I want to be home for dinner,'" Sam says. "There was certainly not much empathy or understanding about my situation, nor do I think there was any interest in it, and that was disappointing."
Sam's obligation to the Reserves is over. Now a major, he could walk away if he wanted. But he hasn't. He said he has no plans to resign. Would he go back to Iraq?
"I do not," he said, "have an interest in going back soon."
E-mail the writer at mfainaru-wada@sfchronicle.com
Ellie
Mark Fainaru-Wada, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 17, 2007
(03-17) 12:54 PDT -- The weight of the war is visible on Sophia Raday's face.
The 42-year-old mother sits in a Berkeley coffee shop, head buried in her hands, searching for words that will convey what it means that her husband is on his way to Iraq.
It's hard to think clearly. Her 5-year-old son is at home with the sitter, just a block away, but he's calling Raday's cell phone every few minutes. ("He's very clingy lately.") Her 18-month-old girl, recently adopted, is also home -- tearing the place apart, she's sure. And when Raday returns, she will face a bottomless list of chores: The gardening, the bills, the dog, the kids, the groceries, the home renovation project. She has to talk to the locksmith and the telecom guy, return some stuff to Ikea, buy a light for the kitchen, book flights to San Diego.
More than that, there's the worrying, the incessant and pervasive worrying.
But then, she wonders, how can she complain? What right does she have to whine when her 48-year-old husband, Blair, has recently departed for Kansas, where he is training to go to war? Soon, Col. Blair Alexander will be somewhere in Iraq, commanding a unit of about 300 soldiers, and then what will life be like? For both of them? And their kids?
"This is not what I signed up for," says Sophia Raday.
As the Iraq war reaches its four-year anniversary, Raday's sentiments mirror those of many of nearly 400,000 U.S. families whose soldiers belong to the Reserve or Guard - the citizen soldiers who, until the War on Terror changed everything, were men and women walking and working among us, donning their uniforms one weekend a month and two weeks a year. Even when the weekend warriors were deployed, it was mainly within the United States, to respond to natural disasters or assist with homeland security.
Now, though, for the first time since World War II, Reserve and Guard soldiers are fighting - and dying and getting wounded and returning home - just like their active duty counterparts. Except that they aren't like active duty soldiers in many ways; from deployment to the transition back into society, the Iraq experience of the citizen soldier presents a very different and, in some cases, more difficult set of challenges.
There is no military base for the families to call home, no walking next door to borrow a cup of sugar and benefit from a dose of shared angst. There are civilian jobs to leave and return to. There are sometimes severe pay cuts or, worse still, businesses left unattended. The soldiers typically are older -- 58 percent of Reserve and Guard soldiers deployed to Iraq are at least 30, compared with 32 percent in active duty -- meaning many are leaving established, entrenched lives.
"Since 9/11, everything has changed," said retired Col. Jerrold Jurin of the state's Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve program, which, among other things, assists in resolving conflicts between citizen soldiers and their employers. "I seriously doubt the reserve component will ever be the same again."
For Sophia Raday and Blair Alexander, an Oakland policeman, their Iraq experience is just beginning, and it seems likely to provide an unusual test.
Theirs is a red state-blue state marriage. Alexander is a West Point graduate who served seven years active duty, two as an airborne ranger, before they met. He saw combat in Grenada - a conflict Sophia protested.
The two met 11 years ago, and it was four-and-a-half years before they were married. "It took a while to be sure," says Sophia, who is writing a book about her bi-partisan marriage.
Blair had joined the Reserves after leaving active duty but planned to retire in spring 2002. Sophia was preparing for a more balanced life. Instead, the Sept. 11 attacks happened; Blair told her he had to stay in, but it wouldn't take long.
"That caused a tremendous amount of tension in our marriage because Blair's response was, 'If they ask, I will go,'" she says. "I thought it should be, 'Excuse me, I'll talk to my wife and get back to you.'"
Says Blair: "When the country asks you to do what you've been trained to do and you skirt away from it, you're just delaying the day when your son or daughter will have to do the same thing you ran away from. That might seem simplistic, but it's basically what I believe."
Alexander will be in Iraq for what could be more than a year. The couple, their kids, their families will navigate through a period unlike anything they could prepare for. And then, when Alexander returns, they will face an entirely new set of issues -- issues known in military parlance as reintegration.
"I hear that's the hardest part," Raday says.
Strains on a marriage
In early 2000, Lorin Bannerman was called by a recruiter with the Washington National Guard. Bannerman was 40, recently engaged and working as a food salesman in the restaurant industry. Back in the mid-80s, a few years after high school, he had enlisted in the Guard, and he had mostly enjoyed it for 15 years.
At the time he met his future wife Stacy in 1999, Lorin was taking "a little break from service." But the recruiter reminded Lorin that he had just five years to reach retirement and full benefits.
Stacy was 34, a peace activist and then-executive director at a Spokane non-profit, worried about Lorin getting dragged into a war, but he assured her, "What's going to happen? The world is a pretty peaceful place."
The Bannermans say they had a stable marriage, buoyed by coming to love late in life. Stacy was "unbelievably happy," living on a "sweet little cul de sac. It was fantastic."
In late October 2003, two years after the Sept. 11 attacks had shattered the country's peace, Lorin walked into Stacy's office. He wore a grim look. "I got the call," he said. Stacy began crying.
"That," she said, "was the moment our marriage started to end."
Within a week, Lorin was filling out paperwork - for his funeral, for his will, for power of attorney. Within a month, he was stationed at nearby Fort Lewis. Stacy tried to talk him out of going to Iraq, but she never had a chance.
"He would never, ever desert his men," she says.
Truth be told, part of Lorin wanted to go. "You train, and being an infantry solider, you train to fight, so part of you is hoping that you can put that skill set that you've learned into actual combat," he says.
By mid-March, 2004, Sgt. First Class Lorin Bannerman was stationed in Iraq at Camp Anaconda on Balad Airbase, as part of a task force patrolling the area. Nothing could have readied him for the next year. Not for the randomness of the mortar attacks, which occasionally came as many as 20 a day; nor for the countless roadside bombs the task force encountered. Lorin said the unit lost five men and many others were injured.
Lorin returned home in March 2005. The Guard, he said, did little to prepare him for reintegration. He went through several days of processing, but basically it was, "You're done, bye, see you, have a nice life, these are the benefits available to you."
The Guard and Reserve provide several services to ease the transition for returning soldiers like Lorin, from emotional counseling to employment help, but there are persistent challenges. According to a 2005 Department of Defense study, citizen soldiers are typically dispersed throughout the country, making it more difficult to obtain benefits information.
"You have a service member in the Guard or the Reserve, and they're coming back to their hometown in say, Oakdale, Calif., which is this small cowboy town in the middle of Central Valley. The families are not surrounded by the same resources as someone on active duty," said Nathan Johnson, who, as Global War on Terrorism outreach director for the Concord Vet Center, meets with Guard and Reserve soldiers and explains services available to them.
Stacy Bannerman knew to go slow, lower her expectations and not pressure her husband. But she found a different person in her house. Lorin was more self-contained, less tolerant. His language was saltier, he was prone to giving orders, he was distant. "His heart was in a deep freeze," she says.
Lorin noticed some changes but didn't think he was all that different. Maybe a little less focused, bored at times, perhaps somewhat more shut down, slightly edgy. He also was missing something. Part of him wanted to go back.
"I definitely noticed the need for the adrenaline rush," he says. "I just had this feeling of, 'OK, I need something.'"
Lorin will reach his retirement mark within the next few months, but he said he hasn't decided whether he will leave the Guard.
Last December, Stacy decided she had to leave Lorin and their Kent, Wash., home. She packed up most of her stuff and moved to Washington, D.C., to continue her anti-war activities. She also is part of a Bay Area organization called the Coming Home Project, which holds workshops to help veterans and their families with the reintegration process.
She had a book published last year: "When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists and the Families They Leave Behind."
Of her husband, Stacy says, "Some essential part of him did not come back."
21st century war story
My job is the toughest of all ...
It's a daily battle of emotions, tears and sweat.
It's a job that few women can do.
It's an intense and passionate job.
It's sacrifice and pride.
Those are the beginning lines of a poem written by Norma Muhlenbruch to her husband, David, while he was serving a one-year stint in Iraq. The poem ends, I am a soldier's wife, and it encapsulates a year of fear and growth, pain and love for the Bay Point family.
David comes from a family whose military service dates back three generations, while Norma was born and raised in Mexico, where her allegiance to country was muted by what she viewed as a corrupt Army.
David, a former Marine who had never seen combat, had been in and out of the reserves a few times when he met Norma. His first marriage produced two children but had ended in divorce in 2002, partly because of the strain brought on by a 10-month deployment to Washington state to do fill in for soldiers sent to Afghanistan.
In February 2005, itching to get into the fight, David, then 37, told Norma he had joined the California National Guard's 49th Military Police Battalion. By July, he was training in Texas. Three months later he was a sergeant in Iraq.
"At first, I went through all kinds of emotions, from being really, really sad to being really angry to being really sad again, then angry again," Norma said recently. "After I went through all those emotions, then I was just very proud after that."
David left behind the 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter from his first marriage and the 6-year-old boy Norma brought from a previous marriage.
It was all surreal to Norma. She was newly married, and now she was having conversations with her husband about insurance, combat pay and what would happen if he died at war.
But the Muhlenbruch's Iraq experience is a 21st-century war story, one of almost constant connectedness despite 7,400 miles, an ocean and a combat zone between them. Stationed in Ashraf, David and about 120members of his unit bought a computer system that provided a high-speed Internet connection. Norma had sent David a Web cam; between that and the phone, they were able to communicate almost daily.
"I think that helped me a lot," said David, who was part of a 12-person security detail responsible for driving field-grade officers around the country -- a nerve-wracking responsibility given the prevalence of roadside bombs. "I had no macho-ism. I could say, 'I'm missing the crap out of you.' I would tell her whatever was on my chest."
Norma would keep David updated on life in the East Bay. The connection minimized the dance steps of so many couples separated by war - the solider downplays the dangers, the spouse at home avoids burdening the soldier with the issues of everyday life.
It didn't eliminate the anxiety, but it created a bond that seemed to grow daily. David's frankness appeared to make Norma stronger, strength she, in turn, passed back to her husband. Prior to leaving for Iraq, David had Norma sit with him and watch the video of kidnapped U.S. contractor Nick Berg being decapitated. After David left, Norma watched it again, alone. Then she gave her husband a message.
"She was telling me, 'You better die like a f---ing solider, you better die like a man. If you have to kill yourself, kill yourself. Don't let those guys touch you with that blade,' because she didn't want to see my head resting on my back," he said. "And that gave me strength."
Said Norma: "That was my worst worry. I didn't want them to make him suffer."
David returned home in October, 2006. Reintegration has gone pretty smoothly, though both admit to smothering each other sometimes. David says he won't volunteer to return to Iraq, but that doesn't mean he's not missing it.
"If I could wake up at 9, go over there and take care of a little business and be back by dinner, you know, I would enjoy something like that," he says. "Not to say I'm a war monger. I do miss the adrenaline, I do miss not mixing it up a little bit, or at least not having that fear. Maybe that's what it is, tasting that fear."
Leaving the job
When Sam Gazzo left the Marine Corps in 2002, he decided to join the Reserves. He had enjoyed his military experience and wanted to maintain some of his connections. He was happily married, with a 2-year-old son and a newborn boy, and embarking on a career as a lawyer.
Gazzo had joined a medium-sized law firm in the San Diego area, and although the drumbeat to war was building, the last thing Sam or his wife Jennifer believed was that he would end up in Iraq. "My thinking was, it's got to be a big deal for Marine Reserves to get called up," he says.
But on the night of Nov. 1, 2003, Capt.Gazzo, then 32, received an e-mail from his commanding officer. His unit would be activated by the New Year and on route to Iraq soon after. Sam went to bed, numbed by the news. Jennifer woke up, Sam told her he was going to war, and they both lay there, scared awake the rest of the night.
Shortly thereafter, Sam informed his law firm. By law, he knew his position would have to be held, but he still felt uneasy.
The law protects civilian jobs of civilian soldiers while they are deployed, preventing employers from firing or demoting the soldiers. Still, the extended and multiple deployments during the Iraq war have created a heightened tension for some employees and employers.
"Employers are shying away from hiring Guard and Reserve personnel because they cannot run a company when someone is subject to being called away a year at a time," said Ted Daywalt, chief executive of VetJobs, which helps place veterans in the work force. Daywalt said the Defense Department reported more than 8,000 complaints in 2006 by returning members of the Guard and Reserve, nearly double the previous year.
Col. Jurin of the employee support group said 6 percent of businesses nationwide employ citizen soldiers, placing a heavy burden on a small group of employers. The biggest burden, though, falls upon those soldiers who themselves are small-business owners -- men and women forced to leave the company behind for as long as 18 months.
Sam Gazzo took an $1,800 a month pay cut when called to war.
In March 2004, Sam left for Iraq. He wound up at a Marine air base between Fallujah and Ramadi, working as the intelligence officer for aircraft flying from that base. It was a dreadful situation. There was no infrastructure: no phones, no mail, no Internet, no desks to speak of. They even got low on food because insurgents were blowing up convoys. It was a month before Sam got in touch with Jennifer.
Eventually, communication became consistent, although that spawned more fear. Sam tried to minimize the dangers, but he couldn't shelter his wife or his parents from the sound of mortars raining down on the base as he spoke to them on the phone. "I was thinking, 'Is this it? Is this the last time I'm going to speak with him?' " Jennifer says.
Jennifer, meanwhile, painted the 1950s picture of a house in perfect working order - despite being a mess, struggling to balance her career as a lawyer at Camp Pendleton with being an instant single mother of two.
"From my point of view, I never wanted to tell him how hard it was," Jennifer says. "I just told him how everything was wonderful, how sexy he is. In reality, I wasn't telling him how I was f---ing sick of changing diapers, the dog was crapping on the floor, his mom was promising to take the kids but then pulling out."
Even so, Sam and Jennifer survived it.
And then they survived worse. Just weeks before Sam returned from Iraq in September 2004, he learned he would remain on active duty in San Diego, then face a second deployment to Iraq the following February.
"It felt kind of like playing Russian Roulette," Jennifer says. "You can only spin the barrel around so many times before the chamber comes up. "
When he told his law firm that he wouldn't be coming back to work for another year, Sam could sense discomfort.
After another seven months at war, Sam returned home in September 2005 but remained on active duty until the first week of January. Finally, he was deactivated on a Friday -- and back at work the next Monday. He had been gone two years from the firm. Excellent support from the Marines made reintegration at home manageable.
However, Sam found his long absence from work had created many issues. He had risen up the firm's letterhead, but he believed his salary wasn't what it should be. He felt he was being penalized for serving his country. And now that he was finally back, he felt compelled to throw himself into work, both for himself and for the firm.
A couple senior partners took Sam to lunch the first day and insisted they would ease him back in slowly. Soon, though, he felt too many cases were being heaped on him. It didn't help that he was having trouble focusing.
"You don't want to be a whiner or a complainer, and the last thing I wanted to do was say, 'Hey, look, I've been gone from my family for two years, I want to be home for dinner,'" Sam says. "There was certainly not much empathy or understanding about my situation, nor do I think there was any interest in it, and that was disappointing."
Sam's obligation to the Reserves is over. Now a major, he could walk away if he wanted. But he hasn't. He said he has no plans to resign. Would he go back to Iraq?
"I do not," he said, "have an interest in going back soon."
E-mail the writer at mfainaru-wada@sfchronicle.com
Ellie