A Year of Absence by Jessica Redmond

In May of 2004, bad news came to southern Northumberland County in Pennsylvania for the second time that spring. Once of local soldiers, Captain Robert Scheetz was killed in action in Iraq on May 31st from wounds he received a previous day in an IED explosion. Captain Robert Scheetz grew up in Paxinos, PA and spent most of his adult life in the military eventually making Alabama his stateside home. I live near Bobby's family and every year I help them raise money in his memory for a scholarship fund.

As the third anniversary of his death drew, I did some research to see if anything was written about Bobby or his unit. Interestingly, I found a book titled, A Year of Absence, by Jessica Redmond. The book tells the story of six women's courage, hope and love while their husbands faced deployment in Iraq from Baumholder, Germany. Bobby's wife, Jennifer, used her real name in the book which sparked my interest to read it. The news of Bobby's death and trip home for the service is highlighted in the book.

I read the book while on vacation over the 4th of July. I did this for the most part on purpose. While we were back home enjoying the holiday, I read with the mindset our soldiers are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Somewhere the children and spouses of these soldiers are wondering and praying for their safe return.

Some parts of the book really hit home. With many deployments in the last 15 or so years, there really isn't a "handbook" how to handle or cope with it. In these days of cell phones, email, text and instant messaging, dealing with the loss of a communication was a tremendous burden to bear.

I was able to contact Ms. Redmond through her publisher and was able to conduct on online interview with her. Below are the questions that I asked and answers provided by Ms. Redmond:

A Year Of Absence Questions and Answers



Question – When did you decide to write the book? Before deployment, after or during?

Answer – I decided to write the book just after deployment. As I looked around the nearly deserted army base and saw other women struggling to cope with all the loss, fear, and stress that deployment brings, I was struck that their stories, and mine, were stories that were not being told. (That has changed since 2003, thank goodness, but at the time, little media focus went to those left behind by war.) It was important to me to give them a voice and, in doing so, I also found a way to get myself through what was a very difficult time in my own life.

Question – Were your subjects part of your inner circle of friends and acquaintances or did you have to dig?
Answer – Two of the women I knew prior to writing the book; one was a co-worker at the Education Center (I taught a basic academic skills class for soldiers) and the other was in my FRG. The other four women I met through the interview process. They responded to a query I put out, asking women to contact me to discuss their experiences with deployment.

Question – What were some of the characteristics of the women that seemed to have an easy time with deployment?
Answer – Independence, open lines of communication with their spouses/clear and mutually agreed upon expectations about that communication, and strong support networks (either family or other members of the community) were the three biggest indicators of successful coping.

Question – What type of spouses seemed to have the most problems? Characteristics?
Answer – The spouses who had the most problems during deployment tended to have unstable marriages that were threatened by the strain of deployment, self-isolated and avoided community involvement, and had unrealized expectations about the kind of relationship they would share with their spouse during and after deployment. Another indicator was the degree to which spouses viewed the deployment as a sentence, a purgatory to get through. Deployment is a tough balancing act – In order to maintain your sanity, it is essential not to put your own life on hold, but many spouses feel that if they do that, they will be betraying the spouse who is deployed, which only makes the already long days of deployment even longer.

Question – Did “Mission Accomplished” have a big effect on morale? Good or bad?
Answer – It really varied. Many spouses heard “Mission Accomplished” as a validation of what they already hoped to be true: that the hard part was over and their loved one would be home within the (then) standard army deployment of 6 months. For those spouses, hearing those words from the president made them proud of the soldiers’ accomplishments and it buoyed their spirits for a safe and speedy deployment. Other spouses took a more jaded view, fearing that the fall of Baghdad was only a small step in a bigger fight. Sadly, it was that view that history has proven right.

Question - What was the single biggest problems with separation that you witnessed? Infidelity? Alcohol? Financial? Single parenting???
Answer - I assume that you are asking what the biggest manifestation of the stress and grief of deployment was. Infidelity was certainly the most feared manifestation, if not the most prevalent (in my research, I found that incidences of infidelity were far less prevalent than generally perceived). Primarily for young, new couples separated for the first time, infidelity certainly was an issue, though I found it to be the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps even more insidious was the suspicion of infidelity. Army bases are small communities, and when the soldiers leave, they get even smaller. Many women I talked to felt that they could not so much as go out for coffee with a male friend without news of her supposed affair reaching her husband downrange, resulting in very real problems of jealousy and insecurity.
Those with children faced the most strain. Spouses on the homefront had to not only cope with their own feelings of fear and anxiety, but had to mask them in order to be strong for their children. As one woman put it, when your spouse deploys, you get all the hardship of single parenting without any of the freedom.

Question – How did deployment affect you???
Answer – It was hard. When my husband left for Iraq, we were still newlyweds. I woke up every morning and checked the CNN website, hoping desperately that he had survived the night and terrified that he had not. I, like others, went through a period of putting my life on hold and wishing there was some way I could simply make the year of deployment disappear – throwing away a year of my life seemed like an excellent trade off for putting an end to the constant fear and longing I was experiencing. In time, though, I decided that life is too precious to wish away, and that is when I began working on the book. The research, and the interactions with other women that resulted through it, were a real life line for me during what was and remains the most difficult experience of my life. That said, having come through the deployment with my husband safe and my marriage intact, I am glad to have had the experience. I am a stronger person and have a stronger marriage because of it, and I learned so much about war, those who fight it, and the true meaning of sacrifice – lessons I would not otherwise have learned.

Questions- Any recommendations to make for spouse who are deployed in the future?
Answer – In terms of advice, I think it is important to remember that everyone copes with the strain of deployment differently and that it is essential to give yourself permission to cope with it in your own (healthy) way. There are, however, a few universal guidelines to follow:

• Find a support network. This could be family, others in the military community, even an online chatroom. Isolation is often a natural response to the strain of deployment, but for most people, it is also the enemy.
  
• Maintain clear lines of communication with your spouse and discuss expectations about that communication before deployment. Long distance relationships are hard enough without Ides thrown into the mix; make sure you have a plan to cope with that.
• Set goals. Goals will help the time pass more quickly and give you a sense of accomplishment during what feels like, to many families of deployed soldiers like "wasted time."
• Limit exposure to the 24-hour news cycle; it will only feed fear and anxiety.

Visit here to learn more about fundraising for the Scheetz Scholarship Fund