Home Fires Burning Married To The Military, For Better Or Worse

Lauren WIDOWMAKERS: When Casualty Affairs Comes Calling Being there at Ground Zero for the first time yesterday was very emotional for me. I brought a picture of my husband and posted it there at the memorial. He would have been very, very proud to have his picture there with the NYPD and the fire department. --Lauren Fidell I went through a whole day not knowing my husband had been shot," 26-year-old Lauren Fidell* says. She is amazed and somewhat appalled that her best friend and the love of her life whom she'd been with since she was 16 had been lying in Afghanistan with a bullet from an AK-47 through his head while she had been shampooing the carpet. "I thought my body would know, that I would feel if something happened to him. So I was surprised when they knocked on the door that night and told me what had happened. I did not believe that he was dying. But they told me it was imminent." "They" were of course the men in uniform. And five months ago they brought Lauren the worst news of her life. While she acknowledges collapsing then, today she is unflinching. Which is not to say she doesn't cry--she does--but rather that she is undaunted by her tears, and figures I ought to be as well. When we speak for the first time, we sit in a very public place, a huge hall at New York City's Jacob Javits Center in the midst of a Maritime Security Expo Exhibit. She is there helping to raise funds for the Naval Special Warfare Foundation, a nonprofit that gives scholarships to U.S. Navy SEAL families. We sit at a large, round table in the exhibitors' lounge; two men in suits sit on the other side of the table negotiating a contract. In the course of our conversation, Lauren tears up a couple of times; I tear up a couple of times. When people notice, they politely avert their gaze. Lauren plows ahead. She remembers every detail of that night, June 24, 2003, she tells me, as if she were watching a movie--somebody else's tragic tale. It was 10:30 p.m. on a warm June evening. Her children, two- and five-year-old boys, were in bed. Her younger sister was visiting from out of state. "I was getting ready for bed and I had just laid down on the couch to watch TV when there was a knock on the door," Lauren says. "I was halfway across the living room when I realized that it was too late to be a neighbor knocking. I stopped. I had a bad feeling." Lauren stood there, in the middle of the living room, stuck. They knocked again. "My sister came to the top of the stairs and said, 'Open the door. It's just a neighbor.' " But six men stood in their dress uniforms on Lauren's porch. "They were very stern looking. One of them was the commander of my husband's group. One was a CACO officer," she says, referring to the navy's casualty assistance calls officer. "The CACO officer said my name, then he said who he was and where he was from." Lauren looked straight at him. "I know who you are," she said. He spoke: "Your husband was in a convoy that was attacked and he was very seriously injured and is not expected to live." Lauren began to scream, "I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet." Despite the fact that her husband was a navy SEAL, one of the elite units specially trained in dangerous maritime and amphibious operations, that he'd already been called away several times to undisclosed locations in the fight against terrorists, that she was pretty sure he had been in Afghanistan these past eight weeks, she says she hadn't thought about him dying. "I'm not ready yet," she wailed. "I wanted to talk to him," Lauren recalls. "But they kept saying, 'He's not conscious.' " He had been shot many hours earlier in a clash south of Kabul and had been transported to a hospital in Bagram. "What are his chances?" she asked. "He's dying. It's imminent,"Houppert, Karen is the author of 'Home Fires Burning Married To The Military, For Better Or Worse', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345461704 and ISBN 0345461703.