Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThisHearing the Call
To get through the separation, Julie says, "you compartmentalize -- you call home, then go back to work and get busy flying. But Mother's Day was hard. And Easter.''Last July, she missed her sister's wedding -- so little Isabel took her place in the bridal party, while Julie listened to the service via cell phone. "I also missed Isabel's first tooth, but now you can e-mail a digital photo.''
Some of the family pressures were obvious when Julie and the children came to Spain last October for a quick visit. While they were there, Jerry tried to keep things light, joking about how he is hardly roughing it with a queen-size bed and cable TV in his room on the base. Julie, however, talked about feeling the stress.
As for the kids, they ran around happily. But they're also keeping track of their own sacrifices. When one of them mentioned the movie Finding Nemo, Isabel reminded her mom, "I saw it with Daddy. You weren't there.'' Julie sighed and said, "I still have to watch the video from your dance recital too."
Julie and Jerry point out that their children have never had a highly regimented routine anyway, between her hospital hours and all their trips for the Guard. And neither of them believes in coddling. On the base one day, Jerry took the family up into a C-5 transport plane parked on the runway, ready for takeoff to Iraq. When Will balked at climbing the final set of ladder stairs up onto the flight deck and started to whimper, Jerry waved him up, saying, "He's got to learn.''
In the cockpit, the pilot seemed near the end of his tether too. "Activated for the year, mobilized for the duration,'' grumbled the man, a commercial pilot who asked to be identified only by his first name, Steve. "It's getting old. I've got little guys, too, 8 and 10." Flying into Baghdad "was fun the first time,'' he says, but that was a while ago.
Many in the Guard are upset they've been given no end date for their service, but the Kennons aren't complaining. "I got into this to fly and because I believed in the mission," Jerry says, "and that hasn't changed.''
Julie loves the Guard, too, but seems less certain of her future as a sky warrior: "If I'm back in the desert next spring? Honestly, I don't know...''
Hearing the Call to Serve -- Again
On September 11, 2001, Calvin Walker was working as a deputy sheriff in Rock Island, Ill., where he, his wife, Cristina, and their young son had just moved into a new home. "I always say a plane hit my house too," on that day, Cristina says. That's because as soon as he could talk her into it, Calvin quit his $36,000-a-year job to return to the Marine Corps, a full decade after he had left the military, as a low-ranking lance corporal making an annual salary of $20,000.
Then he drove their growing family -- Cristina was now pregnant with their second son -- across the country to their "new" new home, a boxy two-bedroom at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. As they passed through the nearby towns, "all I kept seeing were tattoo parlors," Cristina remembers, "and I kept saying, 'Where are the normal neighborhoods?' " Before long, Calvin had shipped out for eight months, spending time first in Iraq, then in Liberia, where the U.S. military was helping ensure a peaceful change of government.
At 32, Calvin is one of the many older veterans -- older, that is, by the standards of earlier conflicts -- who re-entered the military after the terror attacks. When asked about his decision, though, he doesn't get into American foreign policy. He doesn't mention President Bush or, for that matter, Saddam Hussein. For him, the whys of war are secondary to his faith that God, as well as Uncle Sam, wanted him back in uniform. With his country under attack, he says, "I thought I could do something better in the military than in law enforcement."
"He kept saying we don't need a lot of material things,'' Cristina adds, so the salary cut didn't deter him. Brought up in a nondenominational Protestant church outside Atlanta, he converted to his Portuguese wife's Catholic faith three years ago. In a long conversation in their living room -- filled with holy cards, a framed picture of Pope John Paul II and statues of the Virgin Mary -- Calvin repeatedly connected the dots between his service and his spirituality.
Advertisement 
