While they still love each other deeply and believe their marriage is strong, she feels as if, month by month, they are losing sight of the thread that ties them together. Jodi says that Brad will still offer fatherly advice about their two small children, Sophia, 3 ½, and Hudson, 2, but increasingly she realizes that he no longer understands how they have developed into different kids. “He doesn’t know them as growing children. He hasn’t experienced what is going on here.”
They find it harder to connect about the simplest things. Recently Jodi was telling Brad about Sophia’s shenanigans at the beginning of preschool. “I just thought it was a funny story. At 12:30 after lunch all the children take naps. For the first week-and-a-half she cried and kept everyone awake. So we let her sit at a desk and color. Then one day she put her head on the table and fell asleep. Now she gets her blanket and folds it up on the desk. Yesterday she was out for 45 minutes. She’s so much like Brad—Little Miss Manipulative. I tell him the story and his first reaction is, ‘Yeah, that’s my girl,’ but then he starts saying that she needs to listen to her teachers and she needs to lie down with the other children. I thought it was funny and now he is turning it around on me. I give up. He can’t come over and talk to the teachers.” Jodi says things seem to be going that way a lot lately, straining their relationship. She says sometimes she’ll get so mad she just has to get it off her chest with e-mail after e-mail. “The first one, I’ll hate his guts, the next one I’ll be mad and by the end I love him so much.”
Brad does his best to stay engaged, but he spends most of his day on perilous duty, just trying to stay alive while completing the mission. He often returns bone-tired from lack of sleep. When he finally gets a chance to log onto the base computers, his patience is short, and he is wrenched emotionally when Jodi tells him the children are asking about him more and more. In a recent email she shared with NEWSWEEK Jodi wrote: “Hudson saw a plane today while he was riding his big wheel on the sidewalk and he was telling you hello. The plane went behind the clouds and he got upset that he couldn’t see it anymore. He asked where is DaDa with tears in his eyes, then threw himself on the ground.” Now she is trying to keep the children occupied with planning for Halloween. Sophia wants to be a princess “of course. It is all she can talk about,” says Jodi. Hudson is going to wear a dragon costume that Brad bought when Hudson was born, “if I can get him in it.”
Brad, who keeps pictures of his family in the military notebook he carries with him on missions, often showing them to Iraqis with pride, agonizes over how little time he has to get to know them. “My son speaks and runs whereas he didn’t walk/talk when I left. I try to keep him engaged with sounds and various questions about trucks, his favorite topic. He lasts 20 seconds and then he’s off to play with his trucks,” Brad writes Newsweek in an email . “My daughter speaks to me in organized, coherent, and logical conversations about her daily tasks and plans for the upcoming days only to hand the phone off to her mom. All I wanted to do is hear her little voice. She is so assertive. This is where and when I feel stress.”
Jodi says she feels that their conversations run off track too much. “When we get to talk, I feel like we are still carrying frustrations from the last call and the call before that—all this leftover frustration.” It doesn’t help that often Brad can’t call. His unit is a quite busy: the 4-23 is now at the center of Washington’s strategy to dismantle Iraqi death squads in Baghdad. Earlier this week, the 4-23 reported that a battalion in an Iraqi National Police brigade could no longer be trusted because it was so infiltrated by Shiite militiamen. In an unprecedented move, the entire brigade was then removed from action. Recently the couple had a fight when Jodi bitterly reproached Brad for not being there when she needed him. “I’m upset that you, my wife, and I can’t seem to get along,” Brad wrote back. “I don’t want to redeploy and go home to this type of a relationship. I’m sure you don’t want to either. What’s up with us? Life is too short to not enjoy it and feel loved by someone else.” He added: “I have changed since I left. I know what I want. I don’t want strife and preconceived ill feelings about how I feel towards the #1 person in my life. This type of life isn’t cutting it.”
The arguments are far worse, she says, because of the gaps in communication that come from being half a world—and universes—apart. Her universe is doctor checkups, parent-teacher meetings and costumes, his is IEDs and the ever-present threat of death. “The stress on my wife centers around her feeling of ‘waiting’ to continue her life, our future together,” says Brad. “She, as do most married couples, considers her life to be the time spent living with her complete immediate family (husband and children). Both of us consistently remind ourselves we are responsible for more than each other and our two children. I am responsible for 168 men and their families. She is responsible for them indirectly by bearing some responsibility for my well-being.”
Jodi is “a great Army wife,” Brad adds. But they both worry about how they will adjust to life as a family again. “He may think I’ve used bad judgment but I have to make decisions,” says Jodi. “He isn’t here, so it’s too bad. I’ve been alone for over a year and in some ways we are mourning someone who is gone and have to get on with our lives. They need to come home. This needs to come to an end because it’s tearing families apart.”
The 172nd Stryker Brigade is scheduled to return home in December. But at a recent meeting with families of the 4-23 at their base in Alaska, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he couldn’t promise that would happen. For Jodi, the uncertain wait can only be adding to the strain.
This is the latest in NEWSWEEK’s series of Web-exclusive reports, " War Stories ," about the daily lives of the soldiers and families of the 4-23 infantry battalion of the U.S. Army’s 172nd Stryker Brigade. Informed in late July that their yearlong deployment in Iraq would be extended for another four months, the soldiers are now fighting on the front lines of the Battle of Baghdad. The impact of this move on the troops and their loved ones was the subject of the report, " Straight to the Heart ," in NEWSWEEK’s Sept. 18 issue. During the unit’s extended tour, which is expected to last until December, our reporters will continue to tell the story of the 4-23 through the individual tales of a small group of soldiers and the families who anxiously await their return back at Fort Richardson, Alaska, and in hometowns across America.
