By Jade Stone, wife to National Guardsman Jay

Well, if you are reading this you have either come back for more or have stumbled in and are new to the story so here’s a quick re-cap: The previous entry was an account of my humble entry into this world in Ft Bragg, N.C., shortly after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. The war took my father’s soul and replaced it with a capsule of dark memories and raging night terrors that would haunt him for the rest of his life. This would soon lead to the separation and divorce of my parents when I was about 2.

My mom started a new life in Springfield, Mo., with my beloved grandparents, and a surprise pregnancy which occurred towards the end of my parents’ relationship. So, in the famous words of Paul Harvey “and now, the rest of the story…â€�

As a 2-year-old, there are few things that really mattered in the world to me. 1) That I had my grandma wrapped around my finger; 2) the world revolved around me, and 3) that I was my mom’s pride and joy to dote on whenever possible.

Mom worked tirelessly at a fast food restaurant by the name of “Mac donals�, as I so fondly pronounced it, from mid afternoon to late evenings. She would keep me all day, and then drop me off at Grandma’s to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening.  Grandma would entertain me until bedtime, and then take me to that little white house for the evening bedtime ritual, put me to bed and wait there patiently until mom got home around 11.

You see, Grandma was also a very hard worker. She would then go home and sleep until 5, at which time she would get up and go to a local elementary school where she slaved in the kitchen as one of the last in a dying generation of school cooks who actually cooked everything from scratch. At times it seemed that she would pull into the driveway and mom would pull out.  While it may seem as though I was juggled around a bit, I personally never felt the sting of having an overworked, underpaid mom who, unbeknownst to me was not only struggling to keep us afloat but was also battling a broken heart and the rigors of morning sickness and all the ups and downs that go with pregnancy.

And then one day, “he� came along. Mom leaves for a couple of days and comes back with this screaming thing wrapped in a blanket. It seemed to suck the attention right out of any room and suddenly, no one came to see me anymore. All the attention I had come to adore was now redirected to that crying, fussy wad of blankets in the other room.

I no longer greeted people at the door but rather silently motioned them in and pointed to the other room because I quickly learned they were obviously not here to see me. That goofy crying ball of diapers got all the fancy ribbon wrapped presents and I got a pat on the head in passing. I wasn’t sure what this was about but I did know one thing, I did not like it! Needless to say, I had some adjusting to do!

Meanwhile, remember the young soldier I mentioned last time named Lynn? Well, as it turns out, he and mom had become close friends through the divorce process and when mom left North Carolina, they began corresponding by mail on a regular basis. Little did I know that they had become the best of friends, bound by common experiences. In fact, just before my little brother was born, Lynn was shipped to Belgium where he had been for almost a year when he decided he did not want to do this alone and the woman of two small children that he had grown to care very much for in the states needed help.

So, in January of 1978 he called mom and told her he wanted to bring her to Belgium and offered to care for her and her two small children in exchange for her companionship. Now Mom, being a single mother of two struggling to make it on small wages, faced what seemed like a no brainer.  This union would provide all of us with a nicer home then we had ever known, complete medical coverage, and a trip around a world compliments of the United States Army. What decision was there to make?

When a person finds herself in a situation such as mom’s, the decision is no longer based on ‘The man of ones’ dreams, or Love, but rather, what is best for the children involved and for two small children, much as it is today, insurance and security were commodities that we couldn’t afford to lose.

So, Lynn came home from Belgium on R&R (rest and recuperation) in February of 1978, they eloped to a small town in Miami, OK, to be married on February 9th  during a nasty blizzard, and by the 15th, we were loaded up and whisked away on the biggest airplane I had ever seen to a foreign land where everyone spoke a very strange, yet beautiful language. (That’s us in the picture above on our way to Belgium.)

What could God possibly have in store for us next ….

To read previous installments of Military Mama, including Part I of this story, click here.

By Jade Stone, Military Mama

I’ve been writing this blog for a couple of weeks now and it occurs to me that as a reader, it’s often difficult to understand a writer’s perspective unless you know a little about where the writer has come from and what experiences have sculpted that person into what he or she is today. So, that said, here’s a little about me. Disclaimer-the following are memories of a very small child collected with a slight dusting of time and as a result the details have become a bit foggy(or froggy, as my 4 year old would say!). 

My dad was a quiet, insightful, and intelligent man who had one tour of Vietnam under his belt as part of the infantry with the first Cav when he married my mom. She never knew him as “normal� nonetheless; she fell in love with this young soldier as a pen pal through a friend and married him at the ripe age of 17.  He was a gunner on a helicopter so it’s no surprise that the first tour left him shaken and most certainly riddled with PTSD which is a whole other batch of tales! He was told that he would certainly lose his mind should he return for a second tour.

Being the stubborn man that he was, nothing would stand in his way of fighting next to “his brothers�. Unfortunately, as expected, he began losing his sanity upon returning from round two. Sadly two tours just weren’t enough. As a soldier, Dad was hardwired to believe he wasn’t done until he had avenged the lives of the dear friends he had lost to the Viet Cong and so he ducked the detainment of the doctors and went back for a third tour. If there was anything left of his shell-shocked, Agent Orange-dusted mind, it wasn’t much. Somehow, he beat the odds and came home in one piece. At least his body did. I was conceived shortly after his third tour and began life in WOMAC Army hospital in Fort Bragg, NC, home to so many brave men and women. These are the humble beginnings of my life as I know it today.

Now, the next few years are fuzzy to me however. I’m sure my mom can see some of those days as if they were yesterday. Some of them I’m sure were great but there was a lot of heartache and turmoil involved in watching a loved one spiral into insanity through the misty jungle that was his mind.

I know that mom spent lots of time at the hospital, just like any new mother, with monthly checkups for me and the occasional cold/flu spell. Over that time, she became friends with one of the nurses there who was actually in the delivery room with her. Come to find out he held me before she did! This gentleman had also served three tours in Vietnam but as a medic with the 173rd and if I’m not mistaken, he and dad knew each other somehow, through the military of course. Interestingly, he managed to keep the majority of his sanity. His name was Lynn and he often worked in the emergency room and saw mom and I come through. It wasn’t long before they became friends. He understood what my dad was going through and was a friend to my mom when she needed one most. She was struggling to deal with the flashbacks, and strange stories dad had begun to tell. She remembers some of his night terrors so vividly and yet one stands out among the rest.

One night she was awakened by a tightening around her throat. As she opened her eyes, the image of my father standing over her with his hands around her throat materialized before her. All she could hear was “You Damned Gook�!!!  He nearly killed her that night and would have had no clue what happened the next morning. She never slept in the same room again but rather locked herself in another room at night, especially after I came along. Lynn knew this behavior all too well and tried his best to help her cope. Little did we know that this was the beginning of Lynn’s thread through our story.

As for me, Dad couldn’t handle the sound of a person crying or screaming. Unfortunately for me, as a baby, my fussy time was 8 p.m. every night. It sent him reeling into a particular memory of his first tour. He was new in country and was hiding in the bushes when he heard this screaming noise charging at them through the dense foliage. Fear and anticipation over took him and when the object emerged he opened fire. As the smoke settled, he realized he had just killed a screaming, frightened, pregnant woman…yes, he relived this nightmare every time I cried. He never forgave himself for that. To cope, he would simply place me in a dark room and walk away which was the safer alternative. You see, we had a beautiful German shepherd named Smokey that barked at anything suspicious and then one day he disappeared. I’ll let you guess what his fate became…So to escape, mom would take me to the mall every night to walk around until it was time for me to go to bed around 9 or so. She quickly became tired and increasingly more nervous about our safety, and for good reason.

Sometime shortly after the age of two, my grandparents, whom I came to love and adore, arrived on the doorstep of our small home under the cedar trees and politely informed my mom that if she wanted to live in this madness she could; however, their grandbaby would not! And thus moved me to what would soon become “home� in Springfield, MO.  It was only a matter of weeks before mom followed suit with divorce papers in hand. Dad loved us very much but his mind just couldn’t handle the people in his life because it was too busy dealing with the demons that chased him in his head. It had to have been hard for her to leave the love of her life and yet she knew for our safety, it was a must.  So, all 4 of us resided in a small rock house on Park Street for a few months until mom could get back on her feet. Soon, the day came that the divorce was settled. However, even that day proved to be bittersweet for her. Unbeknownst to me, it was also the day she found out I would have a little brother soon.

As for the time between that day and the day my little brother was born, I remember living in a small little white house with old wood floors, and a TV set up in such a way you could watch it from the bed in the other room.  It was here that I can remember eating saltine crackers in bed with mom watching Johnny Carson and thinking this was the greatest place on earth. I also thought that hot dogs and eggs were what everyone ate in the morning and that Grandma’s house was like going to heaven because there was nothing but love and all the most amazing food anyone could possibly want to eat!

Though I couldn’t help but wonder where all the big green men had gone (uniformed soldiers) I loved the new colorful world I’d landed in.  It was just me and mom to face the world around us with my Grandparents by our side.  As far as I knew, it would be smooth sailing from there on out…and then came baby brother. To be continued….

Jade is one of our newest mom bloggers at nwaMotherlode. She welcomes your comments here as well as any suggestions you may have for her future posts. You may also e-mail her at akajadestone [AT] yahoo [DOT] com. To read previous Military Mama posts, CLICK HERE. 

By Jade Stone

As I listened to the news of the horrific earthquakes in Haiti and watched as the death toll climbed, I thought about the people whose loved ones were lost to the tragedy and how hard it must have been for them to find out something like that.

Conversely, I think of the people who had loved ones they could not reach for several days who certainly feared the worst, only to find out that their loved ones were safe and sound. I can see the expression of relief through the tears washing over their faces only to be quickly replaced with a twinge of guilt for finding joy in the idea that “at least their loved one is alive�, while so many others lost so much. I have known this feeling all too well and fully understand the meaning of guilty thankfulness. Let me explain.

I was folding laundry one evening while Jay was deployed and had turned on the television just to have noise. I barely noticed that the news was on. At the time, I tried not to watch the news because often times it didn’t tell all of the real stories or the whole truth about the situation over there. But this particular evening I happened to hear the anchor person reporting a massive helicopter crash in the same area that my husband was stationed in. It immediately grabbed my attention. Jay happened to be a crew chief and Blackhawk mechanic and was known to go on several “outings� or missions for different tasks ranging from dignitary transport, and helicopter retrievals to carefully picking up and carrying the fallen soldiers to the home base or to the location of their “final ride home�.

So when the information registered that it was a helicopter from his unit carrying dignitaries, the words hung in the air like sharp icicles hanging from a cliff, dangling dangerously close to shearing off and seriously impaling anything in their path. 

As you can imagine, my heart hung in my throat as I tried to recount the timing of our last conversation to see if there was a chance he was accounted for during the incident but alas, he was not. I ran straight to the computer to see if he had left any messages or sent any emails but again, the inbox was empty. My heart sank as I desperately began writing an email begging him to call me ASAP hoping I would hear from him in the next 12 hours. But the 12 hours passed, and no call.  24 hours passed, no email, no call. 48 hours went by and still no word. I found myself cautiously watching the streets for any unknown vehicles and gingerly answering the phone praying it was no one but him and yet, all I could do was wait and agonize about the “what if�.

I had just enough information to convince myself that he must have been on board since he hadn’t contacted me yet. Finally, on the 3rd day, my cell phone rang and it was a number I absolutely did not recognize….part of me didn’t want to answer it, didn’t want to hear the horrible news that might be lurking on the other end, and yet, another part of me couldn’t stand not knowing.  After the 4th ring I answered the phone only to find that it was our FRG leader and all she said to me was “someone will call you with information on your husband tomorrow so please keep your phone handy. That’s all I can say at this point�. Then she hung up. I was stunned. I felt as though my worst fear had been confirmed. The names of the crew members had not been released until all family members had been contacted.  What were they waiting for???

Just as she promised, the phone rang at about the same time the following day. The world stopped turning, and I felt completely numb. This was the moment of truth and it was now or never.  I pressed the “answer� key on the phone, took a deep breath, and said hello. It was the FRG leader again.  “They have found your husband� she said. Oh dear Lord, my worst fear was confirmed. My voice quivered as I tried to ask what had happened but she interrupted me to say, “He’s fine and will be able to call in a few days.  The communication on the base has been locked down.  He was not on the flight.�

I thanked God out loud and rejoiced that the man I loved was still alive and well when she cut in again to say “My best friend’s husband had taken his place on the flight�.  I have never felt such extreme emotion at opposite ends of the spectrum in such a short time as I did in those 5 seconds.  The guilt was nearly instantaneous.  Here I was, rejoicing that my husband’s life had been spared only to realize that this happiness was at the expense of someone else’s husband’s life. 

I will never forget that day for as long as I live and the lesson I learned. No matter how happy I will always be that he is safe and sound, there will always be others whose ending is not so happy and that while I am thankful for his life, I must still be cognizant of those whose lives were lost, and the fact that their loved ones will never get it back. I also realized that we are all here for a reason and that God must have a plan!  It’s hard to imagine the complexity of those emotions until you have experienced them for yourself, but believe me when you do, it will be truly sobering.

Jade is a new mom blogger at nwaMotherlode who welcomes your comments here as well as any suggestions you may have for her future posts. You may also e-mail her at akajadestone [AT] yahoo [DOT] com. To read previous Military Mama posts, CLICK HERE.

By Jade Stone

It’s amazing how much kids learn from their environments, even when we are absolutely certain that they are focused on playing and paying no attention to their surroundings. Nonetheless we do our best to continue our daily lives while keeping a fine tuned ear to the music they listen to, and a watchful eye on the movies/shows/cartoons that are playing in their vicinity. We believe that at the end of the day, we’ve managed to protect them from the mean, nasty world that exists around us.

But there are two truths revealed in the world we live in: 1)no matter how hard we try, they do not live in a bubble; and 2) we cannot always shelter them from the harsh realities of the world.

With my husband being a soldier, we determined early on that we didn’t want our now 4-year-old son to know too much about what daddy does. Jess learned at a very young age that daddy works on “hedicockers�(helicopters) and sometimes has to go away to fix them.  We in no way share the harsh realities of deployment and all that entails. However, somehow he’s learning.

One day while preparing for a drill weekend, we were helping daddy pack so that he would have all the things he needed to “fix hedicockers�. He neatly folded all the important things into his backpack and began folding up his ACU’s (uniform) when Jess began gazing curiously at it.

You can always tell when a child is seriously contemplating an idea and working as fast as his cognitive wheels will turn to figure something out.  Well, this was the look.  We waited a millisecond to see if he  might share his thought when, before we could ask, Jess looked at the uniform with big, brown, inquiring eyes, and then up at Jay and asked “Daddy, do you shoot people�? You could hear a pin drop. 

If you’ve ever felt the air being sucked out of a room, you know that there is a tiny fraction of time in which no one breathes, or speaks. The blood drains from the face as shock overtakes your expressionless face while you frantically sift through your babbling thoughts to find a coherent answer, and not just any answer but one that a 4 year old can comprehend.

Jay and I looked at each other, dumbfounded at our little man’s sense of logic. As I tried to figure out where on earth he might have gotten such a notion, it occurred to me that he has learned from toys that gun-like objects shoot (Nerf toys, or any number of boys’ toys), and that on TV, men in clothes just like daddy’s carry guns (the news) so it stands to reason that he has put two and two together to make four. 

Finally, through tear filled eyes, Jay managed to explain that “daddy just works on helicopters and only uses his hands to help others�.  And while that answer seemed to satisfy Jess enough to continue playing, the sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs that represented the very possible reality of the future seemed overwhelming.

The fact is, one day we will have to approach this very same topic with our son in the future and while right now we could tell him the honest truth, we may not get off the hook so easily in the future with a much older, wiser little boy.

To read previous installments of Military Mama, click here.