Life after the battlefield

Q-C veterans tread uneasy road home

Q-C veterans tread uneasy road home

By Craig DeVrieze The Quad-City Times | Posted: Monday, May 31, 2010 2:00 

The primary goal of every Johnny (and Jill), since the advent of war, is to come marching home.

That doesn’t make coming home easy.

The vast majority of the more than 1.8 million active U.S. troops, National Guard members and Reservists who fought the twin wars on terror come home with their minds, spirits and limbs intact.

Very few, however, return unchanged and unchallenged, particularly the more than 410,000 members of the Guard and Reserve. Pulled from settled lives into active duty, they never again can be called weekend warriors.

“I felt like I was always doing something wrong,’’ Kyle Healy, a twice-deployed Reservist and married Davenport father of four said of his first days back home. “Getting out and driving your car and going somewhere, that just felt weird.’’

Each story is unique.

Willie Snodgrass, a Clinton, Iowa, man who is retiring after 15 years of active duty in the Iowa and Illinois National Guards, is more concerned about finding work than recovering from injuries suffered in a convoy collision in Afghanistan.

Kathy Hall, a grandmother of eight who has worked for the Guard at the Davenport Municipal Airport for 28 years, returned home for 10 days to bury her father during an eight-month deployment in Iraq in 2008.

As an only child, a myriad of follow-up details awaited her on return.

“I came home on emergency leave, patched it up as best I could and flew back,’’ she said.

Moline police officer Jacob Trudell is a married Bettendorf father of two whose second stint in Iraq found him providing security at a Baghdad courthouse. He prefers not to talk about his time overseas. But he said his work as an MP prepared him for police work.

Of the four Q-C warriors, only Healy has some experience with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Anxiety issues, things I’d never had before,’’ he said.

All four say the ability to communicate with loved ones during deployments helped their reintegration at home. And programs like the Iowa National Guard’s Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program work with warriors and families before, during and after deployments make the transition back as smooth as possible.

Healy, Snodgrass, Hall and Trudell all are happy to be home, and proud to have served.