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Monday, February 13, 2006
Love in war
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeremy Redmon
For Matthew and Megan Narez, being married and serving in the same Army unit in Iraq can be a blessing and a curse at the same time.
Camp Rustamiyah, Baghdad — Six painful hours.
Spc. Matthew Narez said he worried through each of them.
He sat on a concrete barrier last month, he said, waiting to see his wife’s face again. She was outside the wire on a mission in Baghdad. He positioned himself so he could spot her coming down the road in her Humvee.
There had been a “communication blackout,” a time when the military shuts down telephone and Internet access.
Blackouts usually occur when a soldier has been seriously injured or killed. The military doesn’t want anyone breaking the news to a soldier’s family before the official notification.
Narez started thinking the worst. What if his wife, Megan, had been seriously injured? He said he smoked an entire pack of cigarettes as the hours wore on.
Finally, she returned to base, uninjured.
The couple said they never discovered the cause of the blackout. But it made them realize how difficult it is to serve in the same unit in a war zone. They serve with the Fort Benning-based 988th Military Police Company, which is training Iraqi police, one of the most dangerous missions here.
“It has its pluses and minuses,” said Matthew, 22, of Columbus. “I think we both worry more.”
Megan, a 22-year-old sergeant, said she has a “double whammy” to deal with.
“I worry all the time. It’s hard because I have my team to worry about,” she said of the other soldiers she looks after.
It would also be difficult, they said, to be apart. At this small camp in eastern Baghdad, they spend one or two hours together each day, often sharing meals.
But being together in a war zone is not the same. The military, they said, prohibits them from publicly showing affection.
After Megan returned from a recent visit to police stations in Baghdad, Matthew walked up and stood beside her. He couldn’t hug or kiss her as he would like. But he smiled brightly.
“We will be walking together and I will go up to him and… ‘Oh, I can’t do that,”” she said, puckering up her lips. “It’s natural.”
Matthew said he sometimes catches himself reaching to hold her hand.
Yet, privately, he calls her baby. She calls him “sweet cheese.” The two met during their first deployment in Iraq in 2003. They wed in July last year.
Matthew is not sure how long he will stay in the Army. But Megan plans to leave the military next year and go to college, perhaps to study massage therapy. The two plan to have children. Megan doesn’t want the Army deployments to hurt her family.
“I don’t see how married people do it in the military,” she said.
