Army wife fights for empathy

They cried the other day for six Fort Lewis soldiers who died last month in Iraq.

On Wednesday, a former Army paratrooper was facing an investigation over the shooting death of an Iraqi official's bodyguard in Baghdad last December. We are reluctantly getting used to the culture of war — the casualties, the nightly TV news footage, the weight in our guts. But there are thousands of Army spouses living it, bridging the gap between home and The Unknown.

Janelle Mock is one of them. She is just 25, mother of 3-year-old Ellie, and the wife of a combat medic.

Mock grew up here and graduated from Skyline High School in 2000. While in Buenos Aires for a college program, she met Steve Mock, a fellow Pepperdine University student who would become her husband. After graduation, Steve enlisted in the Army, intent on becoming a medic, for the experience, and a way through medical school.

"Beyond that, he wanted to help people," Janelle Mock said. "He's got that little Christian-ness to him, where he knows that everything has a purpose."

And yet, Janelle Mock was unsure of her purpose in this new life as an Army wife.

"All I knew was the TV news, 'Blackhawk Down,' " she said recently. "You know there's danger, but you don't really know."

At Fort Riley in Kansas, where her husband was based, Mock started writing down what she saw: A woman kissing an envelope before putting it into the mail slot. A daughter trying to crawl into a duffel bag before a deployment ceremony, and after it, two wives sitting alone at separate tables at a McDonald's, bracing themselves for an empty house.

Mock started collecting their stories for a book called "Portraits of the Toughest Job in the Army: Voices & Faces of Modern Army Wives." (The book is available only online from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. A portion of sales goes to Fisher House, which provides free or low-cost housing to military families receiving treatment at military medical centers.)

"It's the in-between that I want people to see," Mock said. "The deployments, the funerals, that's the extreme. But our struggle is a continuous wave of emotion."

The stories include spouses' struggles to learn about housing, ID cards, ranks. The calls from mysterious locales. The empty bed. The kids' questions.

Once readers learn about the sacrifices at home, Mock said, maybe they will separate the troops from the politics.

"People are perplexed about why someone would join the service in wartime. They're sympathetic but don't feel too sorry for you," she said. "There needs to be a bridge between us. Your actions as a voter affect what my husband does as a soldier."

Meanwhile, she waits for her husband to come home — maybe by Halloween — and struggles to stay as resilient as other spouses seem to be.

"I see it as grace, that strength behind the soldiers," Mock said. "If I had my choice, the Time magazine Person of the Year would be a military family."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Average age: 23. Rest in peace.