Family Copes With Separation

It was the middle of his overnight shift when Staff Sgt. Robert Warner came home, woke his wife and told her the Air Force was sending him to the Persian Gulf. In an hour.

April Warner remembers every minute of the next 60: Her husband paced their government-issue house, more nervous than she had ever seen. They double-checked the deployment bag he had packed 11 days before, on Sept. 11.

They went over the bills Robert had always handled and signed papers giving April power over their affairs. They decided not to wake their four children. And then they said goodbye.

“He kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you,’ ” April recalls. “And I kept thinking, ‘Is this the last time I’m going to hear him say that?’ ”

And then he was gone--joining the first wave of airmen sent from Grand Forks to “Base X,” the secret desert outpost 7,000 miles away that’s home for KC-135 Stratotankers to fly air-refueling missions in support of the Afghan war.

Back home, for the first time in her 11-year marriage--and her adult life--April was suddenly alone.

The next morning, she tried to explain to the kids.

“Did Daddy die?” 2-year-old Brittney asked.

April started crying.

“Daddy will be home, don’t you worry,” she said. “Daddy will be home sooner than you think.”

But at 29, with four children and far from her extended family, she was afraid at first that she wouldn’t make it on her own. The Warners had only lived in North Dakota a few months, after previous Air Force postings in England and Oklahoma.

The weekend ground away. April prayed at Mass on Sunday at the base’s Sunflower Chapel. She went to the base family support center Monday.

“Please help me,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. My husband left, and it’s our first winter here, and I don’t even own a snow shovel.”

Base Location Secret

Robert Warner’s first shift stretched for 40 hours as crews rushed to reopen Base X.

Contained within a larger military installation of its host country, Base X had been used occasionally by Americans in the 1990s. The Air Force keeps the base’s location secret for security reasons and because its host nation wants to limit knowledge of the help it is giving the United States.

Gray-green scrub dots the vacant desert between the base’s runways and “Tent City,” where the Americans live. Concrete barriers and concertina wire ring the compound, and sandbagged guard posts rise above its fence. Gravel streets line row after row of tan tents. Dust as fine as baby powder quickly covers vehicles.

The first crews found little more than half a dozen empty buildings on the rocky ground. Workers used two-foot-long bits to drill holes in the rock for support poles for 253 tents. The civil engineers who plotted the streets named them after the streets of New York--Park Avenue runs down the center of the camp, and Wall Street passes before the finance tent.

Standing near the center of Tent City is a mileage post marking the distance to several cities and landmarks, including the World Trade Center.

Eventually, some amenities came: a barber, tailor, sand volleyball court and outdoor movie screen.

The fuel building where Robert Warner was assigned looks out over a taxiway, runway and desert. From midnight to noon, six days a week, he drove one of 15 fuel trucks that pumped a quarter-million gallons per day into 10 KC-135s.

He and his co-workers strung 120 water-bottle caps on a cord hung below camouflage netting outside the building. Counting their duty as with an abacus, they slid a cap from one side to the other every day, another mark toward the trip home.

But when it became obvious that four months would pass and they would still be in the desert, they took the cord down.

Financial Advice

April Warner returned from the family service center with an armful of brochures, information most families receive to prepare well before someone deploys. Postcards for her kids to send Robert. Advice on finances. How to shoulder stress.

Robert took care of the checkbook and many household decisions. “I just had to step up to the plate and do it all,” April said.

Robert was the disciplinarian, a role she had a hard time filling. “My kids would laugh at me and say, ‘You’re joking, Mom. Daddy’s the one who sends us to our room, not you,’ ” she said.

Time passed. She remembers an afternoon nap--made possible by a base “Give parents a break” event where she had delivered her four children--as if it were a vacation.

The children had their own struggles. Ashleigh, 10, and Tommy, 9, slept in Robert’s T-shirts every night. “They smell just like Dad,” they said.

Ashleigh took five of her father’s fishing trophies into her room and put them on her dresser.

Things changed slowly. April grew as a default single parent, managing her house and her children alone. She made a point of rewarding Tommy’s first entry in a Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby because he built his third-place wooden racer himself.

After a while, she contemplated the changes in her life.

“I’m basically independent now,” she said. Thinking ahead to Robert’s return, she added, “I’m going to have to make my husband feel like he’s not just occupying space.”

April and Robert grew up in towns near Syracuse, N.Y. They went to the same high school. He proposed at a favorite fishing spot.

A car wreck on the way to church convinced April that “yes” had been the right answer: Thrown from the car, April broke every rib but one, suffered a collapsed lung, fractured her pelvis and was unconscious for a week. Robert never left her side.

“I knew right then and there that he was going to be a great father and husband,” she says.

Robert enlisted in the Air Force in 1993, three years after they married, deciding it offered a better chance to provide for his family than his job managing a pizza joint in Oswego, N.Y.

He was first sent to England, where 5-year-old Courtney was born, and then to Oklahoma. Then they moved to the Grand Forks Air Force Base in the flat, wind-swept Red River Valley, settling in last June.

“I never expected anything like this,” April says. “I never expected that he would enter the service, and I never expected that he would be away from us.”

Hope Buried

As Robert’s thoughts turned to going home, he eventually saw that hope was something best buried under routine.

Work, eat, exercise, sleep, repeat. That’s life at Base X. Laundry on his day off, when he would also “grab whatever bit of sand I could, just to be alone.”

His father sent a picture of Courtney at age 3. Robert told April he almost cried when he saw it. Knowing her stoic husband, she cried.

He and April e-mailed daily, and he talked about once a week with his children. He worried, sometimes about what might happen to him, but more often about something happening to his family while he was gone.

After Ashleigh told him ‘N Sync was coming to Grand Forks in late March, he bought two $100 tickets over the Internet from the base. It was the only thing she asked for while he was gone.

The Warners’ 11th anniversary passed, and two birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, which was marked at the base with a tree made of 2-by-4s and mosquito netting.

Robert, 32, said he rarely prayed before Base X. There, “I used to pray every night: ‘Get me home--safe.’ ”

Robert was at Base X when it held a service for Marines who died in a January KC-130 crash in southwestern Pakistan. Seven helmets rested on M-16s bayoneted into sandbags, memorializing the soldiers who had lived in the base’s 1,100-person tent city before being deployed closer to the fight.

“The worst part about it is thinking about the people who aren’t coming back,” Robert said. “I’m lucky.”

He knows many soldiers face harsher and more dangerous conditions than he found at his base, but he learned a simple lesson.

“It makes you realize how much you have at home when you really don’t have anything where you’re at,” he said.

Almost Back Home

After five long months, he is back home--almost.

“Daddy, get over here! Now!” Brittney Warner calls out from behind a chain-link gate inside a supply warehouse at the Grand Forks base, still 50 feet from her father, who stands in a crowd of 38 airmen and pilots shuffling up to a Customs checkpoint. It’s two hours since his jet touched down.

“Daddy’s the next one coming!” says Courtney, turning from the gate to dance an excited circle.

Another long minute as he clears paperwork, and then he’s through.

He is quickly covered in children. His face folds into a smile and he does not cry.

He tells his daughters they are beautiful and his son he is handsome.

“Will you give me a kiss?” he asks Brittney, taking her from his wife and into his arms. Then he leans forward to kiss his wife, whose red eyes fill with tears.

Three days later, Robert and April sit on a couch in their living room. A floral rug covers the linoleum floor before them and a sign hangs in the hall above the doorway: “Life is fragile. Handle with prayer.”

Robert says his daughters are prettier than when he left, and he plans to take Tommy to fish through the ice of Lake Ashtabula.

April says her faith strengthened her as she prayed for her husband’s safety, and she smiles broadly when Robert agrees.

Brittney climbs between them, raises her hand for a high-five and teases her mother, “Up high! Down low! Too slow!”

“She never was talking like this when I left,” Robert says, laughing at the toddler’s chatter and the way he’s stepped back into the life he left so suddenly.

“Everything here keeps going on, but you stop,” he says.

Robert may be sent back, but likely not for months. The Warners say they could handle deployment again, knowing they survived his first.