"People laughed at Ronald Reagan for fighting the Cold War," Shona says. "We won't beat the terrorists in one year."
Jennifer listens and nods. "If it takes three, four, five years over there, get the job done," she says. "I'd rather have my husband fight than my children."
There are voices of dissent. Martha Jo McCarthy and her husband, Ryan, cleaned homes and scrimped for years. Last October, they bought a home in Wakefield, a town tucked along New Hampshire's eastern border. A few months later, Ryan, 31, flew with his National Guard artillery unit to Iraq.
He was assigned to military police duty at a prison. His e-mails to Martha Jo talk about 115-degree temperatures and dehydration and getting shot at. Nothing he writes smacks of victory. "No one is going to die from the heat but it sure is hell," he writes. "We heard firing Sunday night but we always hear firing."
Martha Jo has a yellow ribbon on her car and war wives to talk with when her skin starts to crawl. But her car also bears a sticker that says: "My Husband is Protecting Dick Cheney's Stock Price, Not Freedom." She has spoken at rallies for Kerry. "Ryan and I felt like going to Afghanistan was about protecting freedom," she says. "But Iraq? We've turned it into a breeding ground for terror, casualties have gone up since the handover. . . . It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it's going terribly."
Ryan's best friend got married a few months ago, and Ryan was supposed to be the best man. Martha Jo went in his place. "Ryan sent me an MP3 recording from Iraq and I blew up a life-size cutout photo of Ryan holding an Arabic Pepsi," she recalled. "When my turn came to give a toast, I played the recording of Ryan."
She looks away, her voice hitches. "You could have heard a pin drop."
Coming Home
The question lingers unspoken. Will the husband who comes home be the same guy who left? The wives had a trial run a few weeks ago, when their husbands got a two-week leave in the States. One husband drove through Londonderry looking side to side for bombs. Ryan McCarthy cranked up the heat in the Jeep until it was 85 degrees in October in New Hampshire.
"In one way, it was like riding a bike -- it was sooooo easy to be back with him," Martha Jo McCarthy says. "But Ryan was blasting that heat. He was a little angry, too. He did a lot of venting."
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 90 percent of the soldiers deployed to Iraq reported being shot at, a far greater combat exposure than for soldiers in Afghanistan or the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Fifteen percent of the soldiers report feeling major depression and generalized anxiety -- almost twice the rate as recent wars.
"There's a clear difference between training twice a year and living in a war zone -- we are seeing much more serious cases of PTSD," said Ehsan Biswas, chief of psychiatry at Manchester VA Medical Center, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder. "They constantly live with the threat of death. That hyper vigilance takes a great toll."
Back in Londonderry, Shona and Laura, Dawn and Jennifer talk about the day their husbands will return for good, about packing tents and beer coolers and suntan lotion and going on a "wicked awesome" vacation together. "Our husbands better like each other," Laura says, "because we won't give them any choice."
Their men have served nearly a year in Iraq and will remain through next summer. The two-week leave was fine, but also a tease. A soldier cannot unwind from a war in two weeks.
"When Dion came home," Laura says, "he just sat in that hammock with his beer."
Jennifer nodded. "My husband had a little issue with driving. His eyes went back and forth like crazy."
Shona hoisted her young daughter over her head. "Jesse had an issue with crowds," she says. "And he wouldn't unpack his duffel bag. He just kept it by his bed. He said this war isn't over yet."
