While giving birth to her first child two months ago, Tiffany Strehlow felt the spectral presence of her late father, a Persian Gulf war hero who had died in 1991 trying to dismantle a bomb at a captured enemy air base.
“I want to name him after Dad,” Tiffany Strehlow said tearfully as a doctor hoisted her 9-pound, 3-ounce baby boy into the world.
The infant, 10 days overdue, was delivered Feb. 25 by Caesarean section–12 years, minus one day, after the death of Sgt. William A. Strehlow.
“It brought back all the memories,” Tiffany said, “and all the memories we would have had.”
Though the government says the war in Iraq is all but over, and those who died have been laid to rest, the American landscape is dotted with families for whom forging ahead will be difficult if not impossible.
The burden that history has placed on families like Strehlow’s provides a time-lapse look at what lies ahead for the widows and children of those killed in Iraq this time around.
Seeing the war come to an end made Strehlow’s mother, Carolyn Vandervelde, think of the hard road she faced 12 years ago, when the men in dress greens came and she found herself a widow and single mother with three bewildered children. Tiffany was 8 then, Bill Jr. was 7 and Cory was 2–too young to remember his father.
What they discovered in the long years that followed was that the pain subsides but the void remains. For those who lose a family member in combat, the deceased, invariably young, is absent from an endless and ever-widening circle of family events.
“He wasn’t there to see me dressed up for my senior prom,” Strehlow said. “He wasn’t there for homecoming; he’s not going to be there to walk me down the aisle, to give me away, to see me have the rest of my children. …
“It gets easier, it gets harder. It’s never going to be the same.”
The ripple effect of a single death is evident only years later, out of the public eye, and can continue for generations in children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren unborn.
Some survivors, the forgotten casualties of war, never move on. Widows in small towns hear the hateful gossip stirred by their dating and spending habits, know their every action is seen by some as a betrayal of the dead. Some find new love but postpone remarrying so they won’t stop receiving death benefits from the military.
Other survivors simply lose a piece of their hearts once and for all.
In Oceanside, Calif., Lolita Keller alone raises the son she had with Sgt. Kenneth Keller, who was killed in the Gulf War when his helicopter crashed in the Arabian Sea, and she doubts she will ever remarry.
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“I just don’t want to be hurt again,” she said.
Parents still suffer
In suburban Mt. Prospect, Kenneth Keller Sr. still weeps over the death of a son who had planned to give him more grandchildren upon returning home to his wife, saying softly: “I took it hard. I still do.”
And in tiny New Auburn, Wis., Cassie Nelson, who lost her husband, Rocky, on Nov. 30, 1991, when a truck he was directing struck him in Saudi Arabia during the Allied buildup in the Persian Gulf, still gets teary-eyed when Journey’s “Open Arms” comes on the radio.
“I asked a friend of mine, `When am I supposed to stop hurting?'” Nelson said.
“I guess I’m just learning to live with it. I’m happy. I’ve never been happier. But I probably never will get remarried. I don’t think I can love that way again. It’s too painful.”
Once, long ago, Rocky made faces at Cassie in science class. He kissed her for the first time while the two were perched atop a tractor, disking his father’s cornfield.
He proposed at the wheel of his Chevrolet Malibu, en route to the mall to buy a pair of cleats.
I suppose we could look for engagement rings.
Yeah, I suppose we could.
And then he joined the Air Force and went off to war and one morning a man in Air Force dress blues came knocking.
“I regret to inform you,” the man said, and two weeks later they buried Rocky outside the church where he and Cassie had been married, where their daughter Sasha had been baptized.
“I was so lonely,” Nelson said. “You’d be around people all day and still be lonely.” But moving on was difficult.
“If an anniversary or a birthday or something like that came up, that was my day to get a baby-sitter and go get ripped,” she said.
“When I started dating, I was always trying to make them care about me the way he did, treat me the way Rocky did.”
Six years ago, Nelson was in a bad relationship with a man Sasha couldn’t stand. The girl–ever her daddy’s child, unwittingly standing just like him or making expressions just like his–asked, “When are you going to be happy, Mom?”
Taken aback, Nelson started thinking and decided to effect some changes in their lives. She dumped her boyfriend and promised Sasha she would make up for all the years of sorrow and guilt and anger and loneliness. She bought an old white-frame farmhouse with blue shutters and a rickety barn.
“She always wants to know, whatever she’s doing at the time, did he do it and how did he do it,” Nelson said. “And we tell her. She’s always getting something of him.”
Father they never knew
The poignant task of creating and perpetuating the memory of a dead father in the minds of young children with little or no personal recollection of the man is not something that Susan Miller of Ft. Wayne, Ind., takes lightly.
Her son, Matthew James Miller, was born Feb. 21, 1991–seven days before his father, Army Cpl. James R. Miller Jr., 20, was killed in Kuwait when he hopped out of a supply truck and stepped on a land mine.
Susan had passed word about Matthew’s birth through the Red Cross, but she doesn’t know if it reached her husband before his death.
“Every year during spring cleaning we look through all his old Army things,” she said.
This spring, it’s the same. Except that 12 years have passed and another war against Iraq has been fought and more American widows made.
Watching the war was excruciating for Kenneth Keller Sr. “I didn’t want anybody else to die,” he said, his voice breaking.
Said Strehlow: “It didn’t bother me at first, but then it hit too close to home.”
Her father was just a kid himself, really, a short and sinewy kid with dark eyes, when he went off to war, leaving his young wife and their three children.
He had proposed to his high school sweetheart, Carolyn Curnes, in his mother’s kitchen.
“You gonna answer him?” Cora Strehlow asked the speechless girl.
To make a better life for his family, he shaved off his bushy hair and joined the Army.
After his death, Carolyn was boosted from depression by a girlfriend who reminded her she had three young children counting on her and by a mother-in-law who urged her to date the casualty-assistance officer sent to her by the Army, a tall reservist named Lynn Vandervelde.
She resisted at first. She felt guilty. And her children, especially Tiffany, balked at the idea of a new father.
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But soon Vandervelde began forging ahead with her life. Four months after William Strehlow’s death she bought a house in Kenosha.
“The weekend I moved in here, my in-laws went to Washington, D.C., for a ceremony honoring the war dead,” Vandervelde said. “I had the choice of moving into my new house or going to D.C. I chose not to go. I was taking that step toward my new life. And I couldn’t do that if I kept going backward.”
Despite feeling guilty and awkward, Carolyn started dating the casualty-assistance officer. Within a year she fell in love with him and they were married, hesitating only briefly at the thought of losing her military death benefits. Now the couple have a 6-year-old daughter together.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that his death has not affected us one way or another,” Vandervelde said of her first husband. “But there’s also not a day goes by that his life doesn’t affect us. I look at his daughter and she looks like her father. She is the spitting image of her daddy.”
Tiffany Strehlow, now 20, still dreams about her father, feels him sitting on her bed just before she wakes, talks to him and believes he is there, watching over her.
Ever since her first husband was killed, Vandervelde has had a recurring dream. In the dream she is married to Lynn, her second husband, but Bill, her first, has come back, placing her in an agonizing dilemma.
“I can’t choose, why do you want me to choose?” she pleads in her sleep, so that Lynn teases her the next day by asking, “So, is he back?”
But once her daughter’s baby was born–“William it is!” the doctor said that day–the dream changed.
Now in the dream, Vandervelde has an answer for the demanding ghost of Sgt. Strehlow. In a level voice, she tells the man she used to love:
“I won’t choose. I’ve started a new life.”