C^{asualty Notification Officer
by Gail Francis}

I’m a family man. Married my high school sweetheart, got three kids, two cars, big mortgage, the whole ball of wax.

Rhonda was the all-American girl when we started dating and she still is. She was my first and I almost didn’t know what to do once she stopped saying no. A part of me had been glad she had kept me back, but now it’s hard to believe I ever waited so long.

I don’t wait around on women anymore. I see someone I want and she wants me, no problem. We find a place and just do it. I’m no Casanova, but I don’t make a big production out of it anymore. Except with Lisa.

I never had what I guess you would call a steady mistress before. It’s different and I don’t always like it. I think it’d hurt Rhonda more if she knew about Lisa than if she knew about all the other girls combined. But Rhonda’s my wife and the mother of my children, and that’s where my loyalty lies. She knows I love her.

The truth is that I could not have gotten through this past year without both of them. Even with all they give me, I still hate to see the sun come up.

Most days on the job are normal; I do my usual work as platoon sergeant. I’m one of those that literally hold down the fort while everyone else is away in Iraq or Afghanistan and to a few places I’m not allowed to talk about. You’d be surprised what goes on.

A week or two goes by with everything fine except for the knowledge that everything isn’t fine. Because one day out of ten or eleven I get a call telling me that I am the Casualty Notification Officer for some kid who got killed over there. Not always a kid, though. Like I said, you’d be surprised.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of death, so then I notify people about what kind of shape their loved one is coming home in, or I tell them the soldier is missing, or whatever. I’d much rather be in Iraq right now than driving around Kansas like the angel of death. Rhonda cries when I say things like that, but Lisa understands. So does my oldest boy. He’s set his sights on an Army career too.

When I get that call I take out an Army vehicle—just a regular car, I mean. We don’t drive up to these people’s homes in a tank or anything. Normally I get a chaplain to go with me. If not, I take a driver so that there will be someone else there as a witness that I didn’t say or do anything inappropriate. Then I drive however far, up to three hours one way sometimes, all the time reciting the script like a damn rosary.

“The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son William died in Afghanistan on Sunday. He was patrolling an area to clear it of Taliban when he was shot by enemy fire. The Secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your tragic loss.”

Lots of variations on that theme, like if the soldier died in friendly fire instead of combat or whatever. Sometimes you talk to a parent, sometimes a wife, once in a while a grown child.

One time I did this notification to the soldier’s sister. There were just the two girls in the family, one went into the army and the other had some kind of bad disability that slurred her speech and made it hard for her to walk. No parents or nothing. All this crippled lady had was her sister. I mean, she didn’t even have a damn cat or fish tank or anything. So then I had to tell her about how her sister was killed in this stupid drunken accident hotrodding in a jeep with her boyfriend. But of course I said it more respectful than that.

They tell you not to stay long after you notify the next of kin, you’re supposed to just ask them if there’s anyone they would like you to call, and maybe wait with them until that person arrives. But this lady didn’t have anyone to call. “Your minister?” I suggested, though I’m not really supposed to do that. She snorted at the idea anyway.

She looked at me with hate-filled eyes and said, “I want you to call my sister.” Lots of people say sharp things like that, as if I’m the one who killed her, but what was really sad was that because of her slurred speech she had to repeat herself so many times before I could understand her. By then the words didn’t even sting.

She made me sit at the computer and look at pictures of her sister and read some of their email exchanges. Those two were closer to each other than I could ever imagine being to anyone. It made me think about how Rhonda is forever talking to her sister. So I stayed with her a bit. When she told me to leave, I didn’t need to ask her to repeat herself.

That was one of the first nights I realized I needed Lisa. I went home and I wasn’t even thinking about her. I just wanted to see my kids and feel their skin and know they were okay. They came home and told me about school, and Rhonda made some dinner and told me about her work and about a sale she was going to go to and all of a sudden I knew that Lisa was the only thing that would keep me from the bottle. I couldn’t have Lisa then, so I just drank myself numb. But that’s not the kind of husband and father I want to be, drinking every night and scaring everybody with my moods. My own dad was that way, and I don’t want it for my kids.

The next time I saw Lisa, I just told her how it was. I basically said, “Look, at my job sometimes I’m going around to families and telling them that their worst fear came true. I need an outlet and I’m not trying to disrespect you, but you’re it.” Some women really just want you to be direct.

I asked her if we could work out a way to see each other regularly and that was easy enough because her husband was away in Iraq and her kids were all grown, so it was no problem to meet at a hotel whenever. She had kept her body nice and she liked having a man to appreciate that. It worked out.

Topeka isn’t a big city. It’s where most of my casualty notification visits are and it’s where I live. My kids are in school there. Once I had to pay a visit to my daughter’s teacher’s house. He was in the Guard and had only been over there a couple of weeks. I went to the primary next of kin, and that was his parents. His dad had served in Korea and been wounded, but not like his boy was. That soldier was going to be coming home severely brain damaged. Sometimes I wonder if the miracle of modern medicine is such a good thing when I think how they managed to save that man’s life.

Then I went to the house of the guy he had listed as his secondary next of kin. He hadn’t indicated what the relationship was, so I was thinking step-brother or something.

The secondary next of kin has always been notified by the primary by the time I get there. I expected to show up to a tearful scene unfolding, or else to some sad show of stoicism. But we pulled up in the car, dressed in our blues, and approach the door, and I could tell right away the guy hadn’t heard the news. I saw him through the window where he was carrying a plate and he saw us and dropped it and put his hands to his head. He was saying “no, no, no.” You didn’t have to be a lip reader to see that.

We rang the bell and waited and of course he was on the other side trying to decide if he could handle talking to us. In the end he opened the door and let us inside and I gave my little speech and at first when he heard that the soldier wasn’t killed he got so happy, even though I told him about all the injuries. Then his face just froze and he said, “Oh my God, they’re going to take him. Aren’t they? His parents are going to keep him and not let me take care of him.”

I tried to say something neutral, but he lost control. I thought he would take a swing at me, but instead he grabbed a photograph of the soldier and smashed the frame and said, “You bastard. You goddamn bastard! At least you could have gotten yourself killed so I could visit your fucking grave!” Yelling and crying and shit. When we left he was still screaming at that photograph and weeping.

I thought about taking my kids out of public school after that, but you know there are people like that everywhere. You’d really be surprised.

That’s my life and there’s no escape from it. Like I said, most days nothing dramatic happens. Sometimes weeks will even pass. Once I went two months straight without a single call, but each day the dread got worse so that it was almost a relief when I got the assignment to tell this middle-aged couple that their only son had died.

They had been in the middle of a big fight already when we got there, and when I gave them the news they went right on blaming each other. You could feel the hatred in that room. It made me feel even sorrier for the boy who had died. Maybe that’s what he had joined the Army to escape.

I’m not cut out for this. I’m not a person who can do this. I’m a family man and I just can’t keep tearing these families apart. If this war doesn’t end soon, I’m going to request a change of assignment.

Like I said, at first I turned to Lisa as a way to avoid drinking, but now I need her and I need the booze. I still hardly drink at home, but when I get with Lisa sometimes I get so drunk that I can’t even get it up. She doesn’t make me feel bad about it, though I know it disappoints her. I’m just trying to keep it together for my kids, so they don’t have to see how much this is messing me up.

The other night Rhonda gave me a surprise. I got home and she had a babysitter there and she was dressed to the nines and she had laid out my dress blues and said, “Let’s go out.” She had even made reservations at this steakhouse we both like. So I went into our bedroom and I just stared at those blues and tried to imagine wearing them for a night out with my wife and I couldn’t. All I could think was that I was the angel of death. I sat down on the bed in my underwear staring so long that she came in and asked what was wrong. I never worked harder to keep from crying. I got dressed and we went out and I pretended that I was wearing civvies.

The next day I got a call and I put on those same blues to ride out to visit a young wife. Her husband was killed in friendly fire, but before I could even tell her what happened, she ran out the back door. She just ran away from me, but I waited for her to come back.

I waited in the car for two hours before she returned. She was talking on her cell phone as she approached. The driver and I got out. He stood at the door and I waited for her to address me. “Hold on,” she said to the person at the other end of the phone. “Is there something I’m supposed to fill out?” There was.

I asked her if there was anyone I could call for her but she pointed to the phone and said, “I’m already on the phone with them” and along with her words, liquor-drenched vomit tumbled out of her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she cried. She was making sounds that I think were meant to tell a story about the deceased, but it was all choked off with sobs. At last a car pulled up and the occupant—another soldier—picked her up and took her inside. He saluted me and said, “Thank you, sir, for notifying us. I can take care of things now until our parents get here.” As these sorts of things go, it wasn’t too bad, but it just got to me.

Whenever I have to do one of these visits, my commanding officer tries his best to give me the rest of the day off. That day I called Lisa and asked her to meet me at our usual hotel. She arrived before I did and was waiting for me in the shower.

I can’t get over stuff like that. I’ve had all kinds of women, and for a one-night thing lots of women will act all sexy—even my wife sometimes—but Lisa never turns it off. I get into the shower with her and she gives me that sultry smile and starts going down on me, right there with the water pouring all over me. Before she can make me come I stop her and I turn off the shower and I get out and I lift her—I literally lift her—all the way out of the shower onto the bed and I climb on top of her and I went for almost forty-five minutes before coming. I’m not kidding. I was so wound up all I wanted to do was pump. And she let me. Hell, she said she loved it.

One of my boys had a basketball game that night and the whole family went to see him play. We are close, but it’s not very often that we all do that sort of thing together so that was a special night for me, couldn’t have done it without that trip to Lisa. But ask any military man: our families are what keep us going.

This morning Rhonda took the boys to school and I dropped off our daughter. Then I went to work and I wasn’t there half an hour before the call came. When you get a call, you are under strict orders to make the notification of the next of kin your highest priority, setting aside every other duty. But it’s been over two hours since I got this call and I haven’t even moved yet.

Her husband didn’t have a combat assignment, but he was in an area where the insurgency was strong. He had died heroically, trying to stop some little kid from picking up a cluster bomb. It’s pretty common for the Iraqi kids to think those things are toys of some kind because of the way they look.

If it hadn’t been Rhonda’s cousin who had given me the call, I would have requested that they give this visit to someone else. No one in the Army expects you to be a saint, I could have just said a few words that would have let the person understand that this was not an appropriate visit for me to make, and nothing more would have been said. But I couldn’t say that to my wife’s cousin. I could have made up something else. Even now I could try to come up with a lie, but I can’t think of any that wouldn’t create more trouble down the road. Besides which, I don’t think it’s right to lie to another soldier.

I find the chaplain, I get the car. My cheek is twitching in a way it never has before. This will be the first time I’ve ever visited her house.

In my mind I recite the script like a rosary. “The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your husband Henry died in Iraq on December 9, 2006. He was attempting to stop a child from playing with a cluster bomb when the device detonated. The Secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your tragic loss.”

We pull up and exit the vehicle. She sees us and the color goes out of her face. She runs out the door towards us, but without looking at me. She pounds the chaplain’s chest and screams “Why are you bringing him here? Why?” Tears and terror are rendering her face unrecognizable and she’s shaking his shoulders. She looks old. I recite the script.

“Henry? No, not Henry.” She’s gone quiet and she looks as if she truly disbelieves me. “No, that can’t be. I can’t lose Henry.” Now Lisa looks at me. “You know I can’t lose Henry. Please don’t take him away,” she begs me just as other wives have. I am watching what would happen to my world if I ever lost Rhonda. I am seeing her emptiness begin. I ask her if I can call anyone for her, she asks for her daughter. We stay with her until her daughter arrives; she helps me fill out the forms.

I am going to try. For one week I am going to try to get by. If I can’t do it then I will either get another woman or I will become my father and really start drinking. If this war doesn’t end I am going to have to request a change of assignment.