Just Married, Then Off to Iraq and Twist of Fate

The attraction between the tall, lean Army sergeant and the petite blond was instant. After a night of slow dancing at a bar, Joe just had to see Peggy the next day.

He offered her $150 if she’d call in sick to her job as a waitress and go out with him instead. Flattered, she agreed to see him after her shift ended.

Before you knew it, they were married. It all happened so fast. Then, just as quickly, Joe Jenkins, who was making the Army his career, was off to Iraq.

After just two months there, he found himself on one of the most dangerous battlefields of the war. During a rooftop firefight in Fallouja, a bullet pierced his spine, leaving him without the use of his legs.

Joe is back home now, and everything has slowed down.

As he learns to live in a wheelchair at age 36, both Joe and Peggy are angry. They speak candidly about how the injury has begun to pull apart their marriage.

“It’s not fair, and who do you blame? You can’t blame anybody,” said Peggy, 40. “We didn’t even have a chance to start a life together before it totally changed.”

Sitting around their kitchen table in November, Joe was sullen, his head drawn down. To comfort Peggy, he stroked her hand. At times, she squeezed his nerve-damaged right hand to ease bursts of pain.

“I don’t want to be in here for the rest of my life,” Joe said, talking about his wheelchair. “I want to be able to take a walk with my wife and hold her hand.”

Even when soldiers return home uninjured, the adjustments are enormous -- for the veterans and their families. Disabilities only make matters more difficult.

“When a soldier goes to war, the family goes to war. When the soldier gets wounded, the family gets wounded,” said Michael Wagner, who heads a family assistance program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

For Joe and Peggy, the challenges surface every day.

The couple and Peggy’s three children live with her father in Saltsburg, about 35 miles east of Pittsburgh, because his home is wheelchair-accessible. They spend their days going to doctors’ appointments, picking up prescriptions and haggling on the phone with bureaucrats.

“It’s hard on us,” Joe said in his military matter-of-fact manner. “It’s definitely caused some problems for us.”

Two days after first meeting Peggy at Big Dogs, a bar outside Pittsburgh, Joe returned to his Army post in Germany. The romance continued by phone, sometimes in calls twice a day.

Three months later, in June 2003, they decided to get married.

They had wanted to marry on a beach in Jamaica. That changed when Joe, also originally from western Pennsylvania, was transferred to Ft. Drum, N.Y. Peggy made arrangements to move to the post with her children, now ages 6, 15 and 18.

For the Aug. 16, 2003, wedding in Pennsylvania, she rented a fire hall, where about 40 friends and family members watched the happy couple dance to Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow’s duet “Picture,” a song they had danced to the night they met.

Within months of moving to Ft. Drum, Joe was shipped out to Iraq. Peggy, new to military life, tried to set up her home and adjust her children to their new surroundings.

In April 2004, Joe’s unit made its way to Fallouja. They were on the fourth day of what was supposed to have been a three-day mission to block the Iraqis from escaping the city as Marines swept in.

As a firefight erupted, Joe was with other soldiers on a rooftop firing his weapon when he ran out of ammunition.

“I went to get more and as I was moving, that’s when I got shot in the neck. And it threw me backwards,” he said. “I pretty much knew right there that I was paralyzed.”

Peggy got the call while watching TV at home in Ft. Drum. The children were asleep. It was April 29, 10:41 p.m.

“Baby, I’ve been shot in the neck. I’m OK,” Joe told her. Peggy began crying, screaming. She ran to a neighbor’s house to seek solace.

Joe spent about two weeks at Walter Reed, where Peggy says the Army made the family feel welcome.

After that, Joe was taken to a Veterans Affairs hospital in Cleveland that specializes in spinal cord injuries. A social worker encouraged Peggy to return home and take care of the family while her husband stayed at the hospital to learn to cope with his injuries.

But both Peggy and Joe thought that he would do better at home. He left the hospital after a little more than a month, with a warning that it would be difficult on their own.

“We thought being together would help,” said Peggy, who had quit her job when they married.

In January, Peggy and Joe are back at their kitchen table talking about how he’s progressing. The body language is different this time. Joe holds his head higher as he talks. Peggy is more defiant.

Joe has gotten stronger and learned to be more mobile in his wheelchair. He no longer relies on Peggy to help him get in and out of the chair, or to bathe or dress. He’s taking classes through the VA to learn how to drive a specially adapted car. He gets calls once a week or so from a VA liaison who is pushing him to get more active, maybe take some classes so that he can work again.

Baby steps, they agree. Baby steps.

Peggy pushes him, too, to exercise and be more aggressive about his rehabilitation. She encourages Joe to practice at home what he’s learned at physical therapy, which he stopped going to because they were dissatisfied with the care. She also tells him that he needs to learn to take his wheelchair apart himself; she saw a disabled man at a hockey game do that.

She goes to a friend’s house every morning to drink tea and chat, the kind of break that is recommended for all caregivers.

For a couple who courted over the phone and then lived together only briefly before his deployment, Peggy and Joe now spend all their time together.

But Peggy says the more she tries to motivate him, the more it comes across as nagging.

“If I push, then I’m pushing him away,” she said. “If I don’t, then I sit here and see him suffer.”

Joe sits quietly, listening to her talk about their relationship. It’s hard for him to hear, he says, and hard to talk about himself.

Money is another problem. The Army didn’t discharge Joe until Dec. 1, and he was still waiting for his first retirement check, they said. Recently, Joe ran out of the methadone he takes for the pain in his right hand. It’s taken weeks to arrive, and the two argue over who should make the follow-up call.

They joke that they should have two phone lines in the bedroom -- one on Peggy’s side of the bed and one on Joe’s -- so they can talk to each other. It worked so well when they were courting.

They are seeing a marriage counselor.

After a few sessions, Joe expressed doubts that it’s actually working. He says maybe they need to talk with a different person.

He says he’s not really motivated to do anything. Sometimes, he blames himself for getting shot.

Maybe he should have moved differently on that rooftop, he thinks.

“It’s hard to talk about it. She’s my wife. I just feel like she shouldn’t have to hear it,” Joe said. “It’s not her fault I’m like this.”

Despite the troubles, they say they want the same things: to buy a house, get job training for Joe and stay married.

And despite the daily fights, they still have tender moments. Going to the door with visitors to their home, Joe tells Peggy how pretty she is. She blushes, then smiles.