Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, my name is Dahlia.
My husband is Justin.
He's a Major in the Marine Corps Reserves, and he was
injured in 2006.
Justin was supposed to call me that morning.
He had gone on a combat the night before, a
patrol, and he didn't.
But that was normal.
They couldn't always reach the satellite phone.
Now, at the time, my dad was still in Iraq, and he and
Justin were actually supposed to meet.
They were going to be in the same area in a couple of days.
My dad worked with the Army, though, and
Justin was a Marine.
And I reached out to Justin's best friend.
So between the three of them, I was able to get some news.
And within a few minutes of each other, they would tell
me, OK, he's been transferred here.
He's been transferred here.
He's been transferred here.
Because we weren't married, it was really hard to get any
information first hand.
They told me he was transferred to Landstuhl in
Germany, and I just remember thinking,
I've got to go there.
There's no way I'm not going to see what he's like.
And everyone kind of discouraged me from this
because they said, well, you need to stay
away from the hospital.
It's this.
How are you going to get there?
It's not right near any airport.
Landstuhl is several hours away.
And I said, no, I'm going.
I thought, I'm going to take a semester off from school.
I'll be with Justin.
Then I'll go back, and we'll continue.
The minute I saw him, I knew this isn't a
one-semester deal.
This is a lifetime of change that's going to happen.
And it wasn't--
I remember someone saying, was this a hard decision?
It wasn't a decision.
It was a non-decision in a way.
I saw him.
We're going to be together.
School can wait.
This is what you do.
And we knew it wasn't going to be easy.
But if we kept thinking forward and kept thinking
ahead, it would get us through.
He was a leader in the military.
He's used to being in charge, and he's a nurturer by nature.
He takes care of people so when he has to have someone
take care of him, it's really frustrating.
So he was cranky.
If we have a cold or some kind of illness, we're cranky.
So multiply that by a million, but it was hard.
We had this huge blow-up fights.
And at the same time, you feel guilty for fighting with
someone who's recovering.
You think, I've just got to shut up.
We went to a friend's beach house, and there was sand, and
seeing the sand reminded him of Iraq.
Fireworks, a car tire back firing, all those classic
symptoms that remind people of war.
The survivor's guilt was there.
And I remember working with refugee kids who had
survivor's guilt because they have come to the United States
and the rest of their family hadn't.
And you're still feeling guilty about everyone that
you've left behind, which is exactly what Justin was going
through, that he had left his team, that he
had let them down.
And once we got home, of course, there were nightmares
regularly, which have calmed over time but are still there.
He would get frustrated with himself because he thought,
well, I'm OK.
I survived.
Why am I feeling these things?
I'm OK.
And I didn't push.
I didn't say, you've got to go to counseling or I'm leaving,
which I heard people saying in the hospital.
Or you have to do this, or force the issue.
The minute I could see he was getting uncomfortable with the
conversation, I would let it go.
But I would bring it back up later.
I didn't let his discomfort scare me away from
talking about it.
It had to be talked about.
There have to be uncomfortable conversations.
I was uprooted from my life, and I think in the hospital
you're in adrenalin mode.
You're in go mode.
You just move.
But then you come back, and you're out of the hospital,
and you lose that sense of community of other patients
and other families, and you're by yourself.
And then I thought, what about my life?
And I think, I have a hard time sharing these things with
people I know because you sound like a bad person.
His first counselor was in Alexandria.
It was a VA counselor, and her husband had been in Vietnam,
so she knew it personally.
It wasn't just professional for her.
I could see a difference within several sessions of his
way of calming himself down or using visualization
techniques.
And I think he gave himself permission to
feel what he was feeling.
And the counseling is an outlet.
It's not, again, like they hand you a technique list, and
you just walk through it.
It's you have these things, and they have to come out.
They're going to come out one way or the other.
So if you release them in a counseling session, even if
you do nothing else but share them, then
they've had their outlet.
The outlet doesn't become your spouse or your children or
your parents.
It's almost easier I think, in a way to talk to a
professional because there's no social attachment.
There's no judgment.
You're not going to see them for brunch, and
they look at you.
So I definitely saw someone a couple of times.
And then as Justin started to heal, I started to heal, too.
And we could kind of get through it together.