Each year, Purple Heart Day is observed on August 7th, as a way to honor and express gratitude to the veterans who were wounded in battle. One of the oldest military decorations, the Purple Heart is presented to those who were injured or killed while in service to the United States. And it’s a decoration my husband has been the recipient of.
My husband is a Marine Corps veteran with four deployments under his belt — twice to Iraq, and twice to Afghanistan. His first two deployments, to Iraq, were eventful; in one, he worked as a security guard for the embassy in Baghdad. During that deployment, he sat in on the Saddam Hussein trial, and experienced a lot of attacks on the embassy. His second deployment was less eventful; he spent a lot of time driving convoys.
We got married shortly before his third deployment; using Space A, we flew to Hawaii for our honeymoon, got pregnant, and then off he went to Afghanistan. I think I was about two months along when I watched him drive away on the bus to deploy. And it took a very short time after he arrived in Afghanistan for him to receive the injury that led to his Purple Heart.
I was woken up in the middle of the night (specifically, I think it was somewhere around 4:00 in the morning) by a call from my husband; this wasn’t entirely uncommon, given the time difference, but right away I could tell something was wrong. He was slurring his speech, and told me pretty quickly that a vehicle he was riding in hit an IED. He said he wanted to make sure I knew he was OK, and to call his parents and let them know what happened, in case a CACO showed up.
A Casualty Assistance Calls Officer (CACO) typically arrives at someone’s door to notify them that their loved one in the military has died; it’s the knock on the door that every military spouse fears. In the instance that a CACO is sent, they time it down to the minute for each family member, so one person isn’t notified before someone else. Every deployment my husband was on, my heart would race every time I heard a car door slam, and I would rush to look through the windows and make sure it was not someone in uniform. A CACO can also get sent for a serious injury, though, and my husband was being sent to Camp Leatherneck to be assessed. He didn’t know how bad off he was, and he didn’t want anyone to be worried just in case they did send a CACO.
In this case, no CACO was sent, and after a week recuperating, my husband was diagnosed with a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and told he was fit to return to combat. His unit lost six people that deployment, and another four on the next. We were lucky that a TBI is all my husband got… it could have been so much worse.
My husband came home literally the same day we went to the hospital to have our son; he was not home for the birth of our next son, Wyatt, who has Down syndrome.
It took years — years — for him to actually receive his Purple Heart. And before then, he got virtually no medical care for his TBI. While he was still in the Marine Corps, he was outright mocked for asking to get seen by the on-base brain injury clinic; his gunnery sergeant literally laughed at and made fun of him with a group of Marines from his unit for thinking he needed to get evaluated for his TBI. This was the culture of the military when we were in, despite the lip service paid to taking things like TBIs and PTSD seriously. The reality was, no one cared. You were expected to shut your mouth and go on about your business, regardless of how you may be effected.
We still don’t know for sure the extent of his TBI or what kind of damage there is. He gets headaches now, when he never did before, along with other symptoms that we think are likely from it, too, like tinnitus. It can be harder for him to concentrate or focus, though he was still able to graduate with a degree in biology after he got out. He is a Purple Heart recipient, and though his injuries are nowhere near as severe as those others have suffered, this is our story.
