A Soldier's Wife
Her husband came home, and the war came with him.
BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO BY RICK LOOMIS
September 8, 2013
One night her husband thought he was back in Iraq and tried to kick down the door of their home on Garden Gate Lane. He shouted something in Arabic she didn't understand. As a cavalry scout in Baghdad, he had crashed through countless doors on nighttime raids. The "hard knock," he called it.
She clutched their infant son, afraid of her husband for the first time. She wouldn't let him in. He stared at her through the glass panes. Didn't he recognize her? He shoved, elbowed, punched. The lock began to buckle. The glass shattered.
It was February 2012. The war, her own small piece of it, had come rolling down the block the month before, in the form of a 22-foot Penske moving truck. Her newlywed husband was at the wheel, having crossed the country from Ft. Riley, Kan.
Candace Desmond-Woods told herself everything would be fine, now that he was out of the Army. Their lives as husband and wife would really begin in this white-fenced rental home in Irvine, a master-planned city where every manicured block was an argument against uncertainty.
The war would crash through her careful plans in a hundred ways, large and small. She watched it empty her refrigerator and shut off her gas. She came to feel like one of its strangest casualties, a widow with a living husband.
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http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-soldiers-wife-20130908-dto,0,3886158.htmlstory
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Brought back a lot of memories of my Dads return from Vietnam. My father was gone for 2 tours and came home in 1970. The Dad that left in 1968, I didn't get a glimpse of until I was 18. All those years my Dad suffered with depression, alcohol and repressed emotion. We should not have lost that time!
Enough is enough!!! No more men sent to serve greedy politicians and corporations! No more children wondering if their Daddy is coming home, literally and figuratively!!
