Needlenose

Via Think Progress, quoting this story from Glamour magazine in March seems like the best way to honor Memorial Day:

It’s a warm Friday night in Killeen, Texas, and the widows are out to dinner. They sit around a long table in the back room at Pignetti’s–where the authentic Italian fare is supplemented with dishes such as chicken tenders deep-fried in a Cap’n Crunch crust–drinking wine and trying to talk about anything but their husbands, all of whom have been killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom in the past five years.

. . . “Who helped me the most through the first year?” one begins. “Jose. That’s Jose Cuervo. I didn’t talk to anybody.“

The story goes on to explain how the widows’ club of Killeen, Texas was born:

After Linnie’s husband, Jim, a command sergeant major–the victim of a roadside bombing in Samarra on October 1, 2003–became the highest ranking enlisted soldier to be killed in Iraq, Debbie joined a group of wives who took turns bringing food to the house. . . . .

After several months something Linnie said stunned Debbie.

“How come you’re the only one who still calls?“

. . . When a husband dies while on active duty, the Army pays a death benefit, but the widow quickly finds herself cut off from military life. Army wives tend to have an active social world, organized by the Family Readiness Group (FRG) and usually run by the commanders’ wives. When the men go to combat, the FRG has traditionally been their main support system, and the only source of information–besides CNN–of what is going on in the field. But that support system usually vanishes when their husbands die. Often the wives whose deployed husbands are alive can’t handle being around the widows.

“When a soldier is killed, the rest of the wives think it’s a disease they’re going to catch,” laments one Fort Hood widow. “It’s like your bad luck is going to rub off on them.“

And so Linnie and Debbie started a do-it-yourself support group for local Iraq war widows, of whom there are about 200 so far. I’m not sure if they’ve gotten around to thanking George Bush for making sure they had so much company.

Stumble it!

Tags: costs of war, Iraq

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 1:41 pm by Swopa and is filed under Iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.