As I was belting out “IS HE ALIVE“, I could see the answer in the faces of those men. “Is he alive? IS HE ALIVE?” I screamed at them like a little child screaming for her mother. They asked me to sit. I couldn’t even bring myself to say my husband’s name. Uttering the words “Is Aaron alive” was beyond my comprehension. “No, ma’am, he’s not. He was on the Medevac that crashed this morning.” The Medevac? Oh, I thought to myself. Aaron wouldn’t have been flying a Medevac. He flies Kiowas. I kept repeating these words over and over like a broken record in my head. “He doesn’t fly Blackhawks. You have the wrong person!” I’m telling you. I was defiant and I was angry. I truly believed these men were mistakenly telling me my husband was dead, while some other poor wife sat in the car line at her child’s school or lay in her bed at night thinking her husband was still alive.
I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t freaking out. I wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t my husband. I paced around these men in uniform like a horse waiting for the face to start. Mistakes are made every day, right? It wasn’t my husband. I can remember a quote that was hanging in a picture frame on the wall that day at Townsend Real Estate, my place of employment. It read, “Faith is one believing in something when common sense tells you not to.” I had all the faith a girl could ask for that day, times one hundred.
In my head I replayed the last conversation I had with my husband. We talked about our children, Savannah and Austin. We talked about work and we talked about what life at war was like. I remember him also mentioning he had to fly to Baghdad that week to get his monthly cancer screenings. Having testicular cancer a year before he was deployed made him ineligible for deployment. He was permitted to go to war on a medical waiver, which he fought with his superiors to obtain, under one stipulation; once a month he would fly to the hospital in Baghdad, have his blood drawn and allow it to be tested for cancer cells. The Medevac. The Medevac. The Medevac. Didn’t the news say it was a Medevac Blackhawk?
