Wives uplift each other as their husbands serve in hostile Iraq

[SoCalDem]

Found this in my hometown newspaper..


http://www.saljournal.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/1699/format/html/displaystory.html

Wives uplift each other as their husbands serve in hostile Iraq



By DARRIN STINEMAN
Salina Journal

In a sense, Tara Upson has been married to the war in Iraq longer than she has been wed to her husband. She and U.S. Army Capt. Kris Upson were married May 24, and he was deployed to Iraq three months later. For the past eight months, Tara has gone on with her life as a student at Kansas State University. But mostly, her life consists of waiting, worrying and wondering. “It’s just been hell,” said Upson, 24, Salina. “I wish I could paint this pretty picture of how it’s been, but I can’t. Sometimes, you just cry all day.”

On Sunday afternoon, Upson reclined on a deck behind her parents’ house in northeast Salina and savored her weekly phone conversation with Capt. Upson. She was joined by Betsy Rayfield, 24, who also was married just three months before her husband, Capt. Travis Rayfield, was deployed; and by Linda Longoria, 26, who has been married to Capt. Ernie Longoria, 25, for three years.

The three women are part of a support group for wives of Fort Riley soldiers fighting in Iraq, and they said having each other to lean on makes an impossible situation somehow bearable. “It’s huge,” Rayfield said of the mutual support. “They understand what you’re going through, which is a huge help.”

News accounts of American soldiers dying in Iraq have become almost a daily occurrence, but there’s nothing routine about them for these three women. “It snaps you back into reality, that’s for sure,” said Rayfield, who lives in Manhattan and is originally from New Jersey. “When stuff happens, you realize they’re in a dangerous place and that bad things can happen.” Rayfield and Longoria said they try not to be CNN junkies, hanging on every report to see how things are going. “I listen to (National Public Radio) on the way home from work,” said Longoria, Manhattan, who has an hour commute to her job as a Spanish teacher at Marysville High School. “Otherwise, you get kind of obsessed about everything.”

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Reporter Darrin Stineman can be reached at 822-1416, or by e-mail at [e-mail].