Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
San Antonio Express-News
March 15, 2009
Pg. 1
By Sig Christenson, Express-News
KILLEEN -- Army Sgt. 1st Class Eric Espino rose at 5 a.m. one day on his base northwest of Baghdad and logged on to his computer. Back in Texas, his wife was wrapping up the day as she, too, got onto the Internet.
The ritual of timing video chats at opposite ends of the planet had a familiar feel to it until Espino, on his second tour of Iraq, heard his young son, Adrian, burst into tears. A moment before, he'd been happy.
"I told you he has his meltdowns," Angie Espino told her husband.
A similar incident occurred another day in a grocery store, leaving both mother and child in tears.
Such outbursts have become common in an era some call "living in the new normal" - a land of repeated combat tours, single parenthood, injury and death.
This week marks the sixth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and there is a growing awareness of the stresses faced by Iraq veterans, families and the Army, which along with the Marine Corps, has borne the weight of the war.
Mounting evidence shows that survivors of multiple combat deployments are particularly at risk, and most worrisome of all for some experts is the potential impact of more deployments as the United States fights open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today's Army is the most battle-seasoned in the almost-36-year history of the all-volunteer force, says one top officer, Lt. Gen. David Huntoon, the service's staff director. Potent in the field as never before, it also guarantees long separations and one ever-present threat: the dreaded visit from casualty assistance officers followed by funerals with military honors.
A soldier's way of life is foreign to a nation largely disconnected from the all-volunteer force that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month called "incredibly resilient, and at the same time, very pressed."
At Fort Hood, home to a pair of divisions that have been in Iraq three times so far, fear, heartbreak and isolation are as much a part of military life as flag-studded farewell and homecoming ceremonies.
"There's always that constant reminder, and I think Americans have become numb to it just because it has been going on for so long," said Kerri Hartwick, whose husband, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Michael Hartwick, was killed in the April 1, 2006, downing of his AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter near Yusifiyah, Iraq. "Maybe not around here, where you're actually more connected with a base, but other parts of the country where there's not a military tie, I think they became numb."
The Army comes first
Soldiers like those from the 4th Infantry Division returning last week from Iraq are fortunate to live in the bubble of military towns around Killeen. The communities offer a growing array of support services for GIs and their families - from Army mental health clinics to First Baptist Church of Belton volunteers mowing lawns.
The Army's Resilience and Restoration Center, created in 2005, treats close to 200 soldiers at Fort Hood every day, most of them for mood and anxiety disorders.
Off-post services include help for children of GIs. One of them is Faith Calvert, a 17-year-old Harker Heights High School senior whose dad has been to Iraq twice and has deployed elsewhere overseas as well.
"That's my normal. That's what I've known. Dad's got to be gone because Dad's got to be gone, and I can't change that," said Calvert, a leader in the high school's Student2Student program, a peer support group that includes civilian as well as military kids. "If there's one thing I've learned after growing up in the Army for 17 years, the Army's going to come first, whether you like it or not."
So far 4,259 GIs have died in Iraq, with another 31,102 wounded. It's harder to pinpoint those scarred in mind and spirit. The Army believes that 300,000 GIs could suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Psychotherapist Edward Tick, author of "War and the Soul - Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," said PTSD is found in 20 percent of active-duty troops and nearly half of those in the National Guard and reserves.
West Point Professor Mike Matthews, a psychologist studying troops at war for Army Chief of Staff George Casey, said the PTSD numbers could be around 200,000, one in every five soldiers, but added: "I don't know."
If the precise number of people with PTSD isn't clear, some things are known about it. Those diagnosed with PTSD were exposed to death or serious injury, either by seeing or hearing about it and having an adverse reaction. It can be especially severe in cases of torture and rape, with an event being relived while awake or asleep.
Matthews, a one-time Air Force officer in San Antonio and a Universal City reserve policeman, said studies show that those with anxiety or substance abuse problems tend to be more at risk for PTSD.
They tend to abuse alcohol and their spouses more upon returning from the war zone, he said, and noted: "We're trying to break free of this, but it's true in the culture of the Army that there is some pushback to seeking help."
Tick, the psychotherapist, called PTSD "a cry of the soul" at an Army-sponsored seminar recently in Killeen.
"We continue to force them to carry the burden alone, carry the wound alone," he said, calling for "massive support for every one of our returnees."
Tearing up the family
The latest Army mental health study says soldiers on their third or fourth deployments are three times more likely to have anxiety and depressive symptoms than those going to war for the first time.
Suicides throughout the Army have skyrocketed since the invasion. In 2008, the Army said, 129 soldiers committed suicide, with 13 other cases to be resolved - well above the 2001 mark of 52. The Army doesn't track attempted suicides.
In Killeen, home to 81,000 military dependents, many of them veterans of two and three Iraq deployments, there are hints of trouble.
Fort Hood refused to release figures on the number of domestic abuse cases filed through the military legal system, but Bell County has seen a steady rise in assault with bodily injury cases, from 945 in 2001 to 1,349 last year - the highest so far this decade.
The city's population rose 16.7 percent from 2000 to 2006, to 102,003, according to the U.S. census.
Bell County Attorney Rick Miller said he doesn't track how many military personnel are charged with Class A misdemeanors, but added: "The greatest portions of the assault offenses can be traced to domestic violence, and I suspect that a large percentage of those involve military personnel."
Nationally, the Army said the number of substantiated spousal abuse cases has fallen from 3,953 in 2001 to 2,573 in the past fiscal year. But Christina Gindratt of Lone Star Legal Aid, which helps low-income clients in the Killeen area, said she notices spikes in divorces and protective orders when troops go to war and return. A lot of cases involve multiple-tour veterans.
"The trend has been going on for so long in this office, it's almost the norm," Gindratt said.
Just how many of those orders pertain to soldiers isn't clear. Precinct 4 Justice of the Peace Garland Potvin said he and fellow Judge Bill Cooke, who oversee the Fort Hood area, each issue an average of three or four temporary protective orders a week in family violence cases.
A justice of the peace in Killeen since 1995, Potvin thinks that as many civilians as soldiers are involved in family violence, but notes that the orders don't always specify the defendant's profession.
"Everything has risen on a daily basis - protective orders, thefts, DWIs. But it's either because of better enforcement or people saying, 'I don't have to put up with it anymore,'" said Potvin, who can't say if the increase is occurring because of population growth or the war.
It isn't clear whether divorces are up. But so many women now seek do-it-yourself divorces - one in every four in Bell County - that District Clerk Sheila Norman said commissioners hired a paralegal to help prepare the paperwork.
Longtime Killeen divorce attorney Dan Corbin represents 100 clients who allege their estranged spouses cheated on them, and said the cycle of going into combat every other year is tougher than World War II in part because there seems to be no foreseeable end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Corbin said the strain of multiple deployments "just tears up the fabric of the family."
Retired Army Col. Bill Parry said much is unknown about the effect of repeated war zone tours on families.
"There are soldiers out at Fort Hood that have been deployed three times, maybe four times," said Parry, executive director of the Heart of Texas Defense Alliance, an advocate for the post and allied businesses in the Killeen area. "And just the stress of my father or my mother being gone four years out of the last six, especially at that formative age about elementary education, has got to have some sort of impact."
Stress management
Awareness of the problem and its potential for trouble has risen, however, as the war in Iraq has dragged on. Troops are screened before and after deployments, responding to questionnaires that ask about mental and physical health. "Battlemind," an Army training program, helps prepare troops and their families for the strains of war.
One booklet offered in the Battlemind program, "Goodbyes are Hard," targets 6-to-8-year-olds. A segment called "Feelings" starts with, "When one of my parents goes away, I have all kinds of feelings. I have sad feelings, confused feelings, even some happy feelings."
In addition to the Resilience and Restoration Center and pre- and post-deployment health assessments, Fort Hood has a Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Evaluation Service.
It offers groups and classes for everything from conflict resolution to parenting skills, as well as a behavioral health Web site, and hot lines for wounded troops and those with mental issues.
The Army Family Advocacy Program offers an advocate for domestic abuse victims, while the Combat Stress Reset Camp mixes group therapy with yoga, tai chi, biofeedback, acupuncture and a massage therapist.
Off-post, every military family in the Belton school district gets a packet listing support services. Communities in Schools targets children at risk of dropping out. Last year, CIS served 8,000 students in Bell and Coryell counties, 3,500 of them military dependents.
PTSD sufferers come in all sizes and ages. Harker Heights High School sophomore Lorissa Carns, 16, said she suffers from PTSD, as does her mom, Linda, and older brother Phillip. Her dad, retired Chief Warrant Officer 5 Ron Carns, was badly injured when his attack helicopter crashed nearly six years ago in Iraq after a malfunction.
"I saw the therapist for two years after my dad's accident," she said. "Me and my mom, we were affected the most, because I was really close to my dad, so having the fear of almost losing him and him never being the same really affected me."
Losing sleep, talking back
There are 100,000 school-age children of troops in Texas, the largest number in the nation, said Mary Keller, executive director of the Military Child Education Coalition, a worldwide group serving 2 million kids in the active-duty, National Guard and reserves. Three in every four kids are under age 12 worldwide, Keller said. The average parent is 27.
They are warrior families in every way. In many cases their children have lived in the shadow of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, noting that a child who was 3 or so at the time of the invasion is now 9 or 10.
He or she often hasn't seen much of one parent thanks to a cycle of train-ups, deployments and returns that repeats itself.
"It's not like a deployment cycle anymore," said Keller, whose Harker Heights-based group began with eight people sitting around a kitchen table at Fort Hood in 1996. "It's a continuous path, a continuous journey, so it's not like you're pre-deployment, deployment and reunion and you're in some sort of state of reunion."
Militarychild.org has launched 20 initiatives, all geared toward children of military service members, including Student2Student and "Living the New Normal - Supporting Children Through Trauma and Loss."
The latter program trains doctors, nurses, educators and community members, including Scout leaders and church youth directors, to support children in ways that help them overcome death, injury or trauma suffered by a parent in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Keller and others interviewed say it isn't uncommon for kids to have hair-trigger emotions. Deployments fracture routines, which in turn can cause young children to lose sleep. Older kids may fight more often, talk back to teachers, cut classes and abuse alcohol and drugs.
Susan Young, the wife of a three-tour veteran of Iraq, said skipping school is a way for some to assert themselves. Yet others don't act out in any way, Keller said, and don't even talk with others about deployments.
"It can even be a growth experience for kids, a positive growth experience," Keller said, explaining that many children grow more resilient. "The kids begin to see this as a way to build their confidence, and they're proud of their parents. So there's a lot of ways that help kids, I believe, with adults helping them understand it."
That is a primary goal of Student2Student. The group seeks out new students at Harker Heights High, 20 minutes from Fort Hood's main gate.
They regularly get together to talk, but also help new students plug into their classes and extracurricular activities. The idea is to have peers set a standard for each other, making it less likely for new students to struggle academically, feel isolated or join a bad crowd.
No longer 'carefree'
An elementary school student at the time of the crash, Carns went from playing racquetball with her dad and wrestling with him to spoon-feeding him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Now she's a trusted confidant for teenagers who've learned of her ordeal and are grappling with the same fears.
"Some of them, they're confused a lot and they don't know how to handle things, and a lot of my friends, they do come to me about stuff like this and I hang out with them and I'm the shoulder they need to lean on ... because I've been through almost the worst - thank God not the worst," Carns said.
Calvert, the Student2Student leader at Harker Heights High, is a veteran, too. Her dad, Lt. Col. Paul T. Calvert, invaded Iraq and later was posted to Anbar province, one of the hot spots of the Sunni-led insurgency. Then a seventh-grader, she detected the sounds of battle while talking with her father on the phone.
"I remember being very scared and stressed because reality hit me. Part of me felt like I'd grown up a lot. I was no longer a carefree kid. I had a lot of responsibility and I became a worrywart," she said. "But he came back and it was all good."
Relief turned to anger as his next deployment rolled around. Dad would miss most of her junior and senior years. She felt anger and frustration toward God, but six months into the tour it occurred to her that the time had passed quickly. Part of the reason for that was age, Calvert said, and the realization that crying wouldn't help.
"Tears wouldn't bring him home. I mean, tears aren't going to grant me pity from Congress and say, 'OK, we'll send you your guy home.' That's not reality. And again, sending the troops home, what's that going to solve? I've been watching the news so long now. Just because a little girl's sad isn't going to solve anything at all."
Just back from Iraq, Eric Espino sits at the dining table of his one-story house in Harker Heights with his wife and son, Jordan, 13, and concedes the pace of deployments is wearing down his family.
He hasn't thought about the big issues surrounding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of them the belief of many in and out of government that the Army and Marine Corps simply are too small to cope with the nation's foreign-policy requirements.
But Espino knows his kids are growing up too quick. He and his wife agree that the repeated deployments to Iraq are robbing Jordan and Adrian, 7, of their childhoods, but that's how it's got to be; he's four years from retirement. Another 4th Infantry Division tour to Iraq or Afghanistan looms in a year and he'll be on the plane, rucksack and rifle in hand. He and his family will soldier on.
"I'm not OK with it," Espino said, "but it has to be done."
March 15, 2009
Pg. 1
By Sig Christenson, Express-News
KILLEEN -- Army Sgt. 1st Class Eric Espino rose at 5 a.m. one day on his base northwest of Baghdad and logged on to his computer. Back in Texas, his wife was wrapping up the day as she, too, got onto the Internet.
The ritual of timing video chats at opposite ends of the planet had a familiar feel to it until Espino, on his second tour of Iraq, heard his young son, Adrian, burst into tears. A moment before, he'd been happy.
"I told you he has his meltdowns," Angie Espino told her husband.
A similar incident occurred another day in a grocery store, leaving both mother and child in tears.
Such outbursts have become common in an era some call "living in the new normal" - a land of repeated combat tours, single parenthood, injury and death.
This week marks the sixth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and there is a growing awareness of the stresses faced by Iraq veterans, families and the Army, which along with the Marine Corps, has borne the weight of the war.
Mounting evidence shows that survivors of multiple combat deployments are particularly at risk, and most worrisome of all for some experts is the potential impact of more deployments as the United States fights open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today's Army is the most battle-seasoned in the almost-36-year history of the all-volunteer force, says one top officer, Lt. Gen. David Huntoon, the service's staff director. Potent in the field as never before, it also guarantees long separations and one ever-present threat: the dreaded visit from casualty assistance officers followed by funerals with military honors.
A soldier's way of life is foreign to a nation largely disconnected from the all-volunteer force that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month called "incredibly resilient, and at the same time, very pressed."
At Fort Hood, home to a pair of divisions that have been in Iraq three times so far, fear, heartbreak and isolation are as much a part of military life as flag-studded farewell and homecoming ceremonies.
"There's always that constant reminder, and I think Americans have become numb to it just because it has been going on for so long," said Kerri Hartwick, whose husband, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Michael Hartwick, was killed in the April 1, 2006, downing of his AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter near Yusifiyah, Iraq. "Maybe not around here, where you're actually more connected with a base, but other parts of the country where there's not a military tie, I think they became numb."
The Army comes first
Soldiers like those from the 4th Infantry Division returning last week from Iraq are fortunate to live in the bubble of military towns around Killeen. The communities offer a growing array of support services for GIs and their families - from Army mental health clinics to First Baptist Church of Belton volunteers mowing lawns.
The Army's Resilience and Restoration Center, created in 2005, treats close to 200 soldiers at Fort Hood every day, most of them for mood and anxiety disorders.
Off-post services include help for children of GIs. One of them is Faith Calvert, a 17-year-old Harker Heights High School senior whose dad has been to Iraq twice and has deployed elsewhere overseas as well.
"That's my normal. That's what I've known. Dad's got to be gone because Dad's got to be gone, and I can't change that," said Calvert, a leader in the high school's Student2Student program, a peer support group that includes civilian as well as military kids. "If there's one thing I've learned after growing up in the Army for 17 years, the Army's going to come first, whether you like it or not."
So far 4,259 GIs have died in Iraq, with another 31,102 wounded. It's harder to pinpoint those scarred in mind and spirit. The Army believes that 300,000 GIs could suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Psychotherapist Edward Tick, author of "War and the Soul - Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," said PTSD is found in 20 percent of active-duty troops and nearly half of those in the National Guard and reserves.
West Point Professor Mike Matthews, a psychologist studying troops at war for Army Chief of Staff George Casey, said the PTSD numbers could be around 200,000, one in every five soldiers, but added: "I don't know."
If the precise number of people with PTSD isn't clear, some things are known about it. Those diagnosed with PTSD were exposed to death or serious injury, either by seeing or hearing about it and having an adverse reaction. It can be especially severe in cases of torture and rape, with an event being relived while awake or asleep.
Matthews, a one-time Air Force officer in San Antonio and a Universal City reserve policeman, said studies show that those with anxiety or substance abuse problems tend to be more at risk for PTSD.
They tend to abuse alcohol and their spouses more upon returning from the war zone, he said, and noted: "We're trying to break free of this, but it's true in the culture of the Army that there is some pushback to seeking help."
Tick, the psychotherapist, called PTSD "a cry of the soul" at an Army-sponsored seminar recently in Killeen.
"We continue to force them to carry the burden alone, carry the wound alone," he said, calling for "massive support for every one of our returnees."
Tearing up the family
The latest Army mental health study says soldiers on their third or fourth deployments are three times more likely to have anxiety and depressive symptoms than those going to war for the first time.
Suicides throughout the Army have skyrocketed since the invasion. In 2008, the Army said, 129 soldiers committed suicide, with 13 other cases to be resolved - well above the 2001 mark of 52. The Army doesn't track attempted suicides.
In Killeen, home to 81,000 military dependents, many of them veterans of two and three Iraq deployments, there are hints of trouble.
Fort Hood refused to release figures on the number of domestic abuse cases filed through the military legal system, but Bell County has seen a steady rise in assault with bodily injury cases, from 945 in 2001 to 1,349 last year - the highest so far this decade.
The city's population rose 16.7 percent from 2000 to 2006, to 102,003, according to the U.S. census.
Bell County Attorney Rick Miller said he doesn't track how many military personnel are charged with Class A misdemeanors, but added: "The greatest portions of the assault offenses can be traced to domestic violence, and I suspect that a large percentage of those involve military personnel."
Nationally, the Army said the number of substantiated spousal abuse cases has fallen from 3,953 in 2001 to 2,573 in the past fiscal year. But Christina Gindratt of Lone Star Legal Aid, which helps low-income clients in the Killeen area, said she notices spikes in divorces and protective orders when troops go to war and return. A lot of cases involve multiple-tour veterans.
"The trend has been going on for so long in this office, it's almost the norm," Gindratt said.
Just how many of those orders pertain to soldiers isn't clear. Precinct 4 Justice of the Peace Garland Potvin said he and fellow Judge Bill Cooke, who oversee the Fort Hood area, each issue an average of three or four temporary protective orders a week in family violence cases.
A justice of the peace in Killeen since 1995, Potvin thinks that as many civilians as soldiers are involved in family violence, but notes that the orders don't always specify the defendant's profession.
"Everything has risen on a daily basis - protective orders, thefts, DWIs. But it's either because of better enforcement or people saying, 'I don't have to put up with it anymore,'" said Potvin, who can't say if the increase is occurring because of population growth or the war.
It isn't clear whether divorces are up. But so many women now seek do-it-yourself divorces - one in every four in Bell County - that District Clerk Sheila Norman said commissioners hired a paralegal to help prepare the paperwork.
Longtime Killeen divorce attorney Dan Corbin represents 100 clients who allege their estranged spouses cheated on them, and said the cycle of going into combat every other year is tougher than World War II in part because there seems to be no foreseeable end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Corbin said the strain of multiple deployments "just tears up the fabric of the family."
Retired Army Col. Bill Parry said much is unknown about the effect of repeated war zone tours on families.
"There are soldiers out at Fort Hood that have been deployed three times, maybe four times," said Parry, executive director of the Heart of Texas Defense Alliance, an advocate for the post and allied businesses in the Killeen area. "And just the stress of my father or my mother being gone four years out of the last six, especially at that formative age about elementary education, has got to have some sort of impact."
Stress management
Awareness of the problem and its potential for trouble has risen, however, as the war in Iraq has dragged on. Troops are screened before and after deployments, responding to questionnaires that ask about mental and physical health. "Battlemind," an Army training program, helps prepare troops and their families for the strains of war.
One booklet offered in the Battlemind program, "Goodbyes are Hard," targets 6-to-8-year-olds. A segment called "Feelings" starts with, "When one of my parents goes away, I have all kinds of feelings. I have sad feelings, confused feelings, even some happy feelings."
In addition to the Resilience and Restoration Center and pre- and post-deployment health assessments, Fort Hood has a Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Evaluation Service.
It offers groups and classes for everything from conflict resolution to parenting skills, as well as a behavioral health Web site, and hot lines for wounded troops and those with mental issues.
The Army Family Advocacy Program offers an advocate for domestic abuse victims, while the Combat Stress Reset Camp mixes group therapy with yoga, tai chi, biofeedback, acupuncture and a massage therapist.
Off-post, every military family in the Belton school district gets a packet listing support services. Communities in Schools targets children at risk of dropping out. Last year, CIS served 8,000 students in Bell and Coryell counties, 3,500 of them military dependents.
PTSD sufferers come in all sizes and ages. Harker Heights High School sophomore Lorissa Carns, 16, said she suffers from PTSD, as does her mom, Linda, and older brother Phillip. Her dad, retired Chief Warrant Officer 5 Ron Carns, was badly injured when his attack helicopter crashed nearly six years ago in Iraq after a malfunction.
"I saw the therapist for two years after my dad's accident," she said. "Me and my mom, we were affected the most, because I was really close to my dad, so having the fear of almost losing him and him never being the same really affected me."
Losing sleep, talking back
There are 100,000 school-age children of troops in Texas, the largest number in the nation, said Mary Keller, executive director of the Military Child Education Coalition, a worldwide group serving 2 million kids in the active-duty, National Guard and reserves. Three in every four kids are under age 12 worldwide, Keller said. The average parent is 27.
They are warrior families in every way. In many cases their children have lived in the shadow of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, noting that a child who was 3 or so at the time of the invasion is now 9 or 10.
He or she often hasn't seen much of one parent thanks to a cycle of train-ups, deployments and returns that repeats itself.
"It's not like a deployment cycle anymore," said Keller, whose Harker Heights-based group began with eight people sitting around a kitchen table at Fort Hood in 1996. "It's a continuous path, a continuous journey, so it's not like you're pre-deployment, deployment and reunion and you're in some sort of state of reunion."
Militarychild.org has launched 20 initiatives, all geared toward children of military service members, including Student2Student and "Living the New Normal - Supporting Children Through Trauma and Loss."
The latter program trains doctors, nurses, educators and community members, including Scout leaders and church youth directors, to support children in ways that help them overcome death, injury or trauma suffered by a parent in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Keller and others interviewed say it isn't uncommon for kids to have hair-trigger emotions. Deployments fracture routines, which in turn can cause young children to lose sleep. Older kids may fight more often, talk back to teachers, cut classes and abuse alcohol and drugs.
Susan Young, the wife of a three-tour veteran of Iraq, said skipping school is a way for some to assert themselves. Yet others don't act out in any way, Keller said, and don't even talk with others about deployments.
"It can even be a growth experience for kids, a positive growth experience," Keller said, explaining that many children grow more resilient. "The kids begin to see this as a way to build their confidence, and they're proud of their parents. So there's a lot of ways that help kids, I believe, with adults helping them understand it."
That is a primary goal of Student2Student. The group seeks out new students at Harker Heights High, 20 minutes from Fort Hood's main gate.
They regularly get together to talk, but also help new students plug into their classes and extracurricular activities. The idea is to have peers set a standard for each other, making it less likely for new students to struggle academically, feel isolated or join a bad crowd.
No longer 'carefree'
An elementary school student at the time of the crash, Carns went from playing racquetball with her dad and wrestling with him to spoon-feeding him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Now she's a trusted confidant for teenagers who've learned of her ordeal and are grappling with the same fears.
"Some of them, they're confused a lot and they don't know how to handle things, and a lot of my friends, they do come to me about stuff like this and I hang out with them and I'm the shoulder they need to lean on ... because I've been through almost the worst - thank God not the worst," Carns said.
Calvert, the Student2Student leader at Harker Heights High, is a veteran, too. Her dad, Lt. Col. Paul T. Calvert, invaded Iraq and later was posted to Anbar province, one of the hot spots of the Sunni-led insurgency. Then a seventh-grader, she detected the sounds of battle while talking with her father on the phone.
"I remember being very scared and stressed because reality hit me. Part of me felt like I'd grown up a lot. I was no longer a carefree kid. I had a lot of responsibility and I became a worrywart," she said. "But he came back and it was all good."
Relief turned to anger as his next deployment rolled around. Dad would miss most of her junior and senior years. She felt anger and frustration toward God, but six months into the tour it occurred to her that the time had passed quickly. Part of the reason for that was age, Calvert said, and the realization that crying wouldn't help.
"Tears wouldn't bring him home. I mean, tears aren't going to grant me pity from Congress and say, 'OK, we'll send you your guy home.' That's not reality. And again, sending the troops home, what's that going to solve? I've been watching the news so long now. Just because a little girl's sad isn't going to solve anything at all."
Just back from Iraq, Eric Espino sits at the dining table of his one-story house in Harker Heights with his wife and son, Jordan, 13, and concedes the pace of deployments is wearing down his family.
He hasn't thought about the big issues surrounding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of them the belief of many in and out of government that the Army and Marine Corps simply are too small to cope with the nation's foreign-policy requirements.
But Espino knows his kids are growing up too quick. He and his wife agree that the repeated deployments to Iraq are robbing Jordan and Adrian, 7, of their childhoods, but that's how it's got to be; he's four years from retirement. Another 4th Infantry Division tour to Iraq or Afghanistan looms in a year and he'll be on the plane, rucksack and rifle in hand. He and his family will soldier on.
"I'm not OK with it," Espino said, "but it has to be done."