For Soldiers' Loved Ones, Violence Can Change Everything ("I Had Tears Of Blood")

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March 7th, 2008 8:56 pm
For soldiers' loved ones, violence can change everything

By Kimberly Hefling / Associated Press

Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq.

Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.

Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.

"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.

Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears - though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.

Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.

It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck - though some paid the ultimate price, as well.

- snip -

For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Mich., it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.

"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Va.

MORE

watiing for calls, I am fine honey.

Where are you? Port insert here... knowing full well that I could not ask, when did you come in and when are you leaving

Then there were those lovely staff cars. Last thing you wanted to see in Housing

And yes, I saw that once... it came to the subdivision and stopped in front of house.... heart skipped a bit... thankfully (if that is something I can say) it wasn't me.

Thankfully nobody died that day but a family's changed forever.

If this was necessary that would be a different story