The Invisible Front by Yochi Dreazen

Author:Yochi Dreazen [Dreazen, Yochi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-34784-6
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Fort Sill, Oklahoma, March 2004

Mark Graham had made up his mind: It was time to leave the military. He was barely hanging on after Jeff’s death, doing his best to stay strong for Carol and Melanie while keeping his own grief bottled up and hidden away. Carol had come home one night and found him alone in the garage, cradling one of Kevin’s old golf clubs. His close friends could tell how much sadness Mark was feeling, but they knew he was also grappling with overpowering feelings of guilt and regret. It wasn’t simply that he had lost a second son, though that was devastating enough. It was that Jeff had been killed in action, at the start of an army career modeled on that of his father. Mark was haunted by the thought that Jeff might still be alive if he had chosen a different profession. The army had taken so much from him and Carol. How, Mark wondered, would he be able to put on his uniform each morning and salute the flag as if nothing had happened? He had loved every moment of his service in the army, but it was time to move on.

Mark and Carol arrived back at Fort Sill on March 10 and returned to a house full of ghosts. They had spent their first year at the base mourning one son and praying for the safety of the other, only to lose him as well. The framed pictures of Kevin and Jeff stabbed at Carol like daggers, painful reminders of a family that no longer existed. My boys are gone, she told herself. My precious boys are gone. She didn’t know how she would stifle her own thoughts of suicide, let alone continue as an army wife. She and Mark worried about Melanie and pleaded with her to leave the University of Kentucky and join them in Oklahoma, but their daughter wouldn’t step foot in a house whose walls were lined with photos of her two dead brothers. Melanie told her parents that being around them simply made her too sad.

“You got to live forty-seven years of your lives in this perfect world where nothing bad ever happened,” she told them. “My world basically fell apart when I was eighteen. I have to somehow find a way to live the rest of my life.”

The only surviving Graham child wasn’t sure she could. Melanie never told her parents, but Jeff’s death left her actively considering whether to take her own life. The only thing that kept her from committing suicide was the thought that she simply couldn’t cause her parents any more pain. “I have to keep going until my parents are either old or dead before I kill myself,” she remembered thinking. “Nobody will care then.”

Mark barely slept the night of March 10 and woke up early the following morning ready to put in his retirement papers. He had prepared a new résumé; the moment had come to send it out to potential employers in the civilian world.

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