Excerpted from The New Military Life: Heading Back to the War
by MONICA DAVEY
Among some of the soldiers themselves, the thought of returning to Iraq carries one puzzling quality: Unlike so many parts of life, in which the second try at anything feels easier than the first, these soldiers say that heading to Iraq is actually more overwhelming the second time around.
“The first time, I didn’t know anything,” Sergeant Garcia said. “But this time I know what I’m getting into, so it’s harder. You know what you’re going to do. You know how bad you’re going to be feeling.”
[…]
In Tucson, Elena Zurheide is preparing Christmas for her 7-and-a-half-month-old son, Robert III. “I hate Christmas,” Ms. Zurheide said. “I hate holidays. I hate everything right now.”
Her husband, Robert Jr., was a lance corporal in the Marines. He was killed in Falluja this spring, a few weeks before their son was born. He was on his second tour to Iraq.
“I never wanted him to go a second time,” she said. “I just started having the feeling that we were pushing our luck too far, and he thought so, too.”
She said she wrote to Corporal Zurheide’s commander before he left, asking that her huband be permitted to stay behind – or that he at least be allowed to wait for the birth of their son. She said she never heard back.
“I should have broken his arm to keep him here,” she said. “I knew it was too much to go again.”
Her son, Ms. Zurheide said, looks just like his father.