Military families’ link to hope

The woman on the phone sounded young and very scared.

The doctor, she said, had just scheduled her for a biopsy.

A year ago, she found the lump on her left breast, and the doctor had declared it benign. But so much was different then.

A year ago, her husband, a soldier, had been with her. Now he was in Iraq.

To make matters worse, she said, the grandmotherly neighbor who had volunteered to accompany her to the hospital no longer could. She had just had an emergency mastectomy.

“I have no family who lives here,” she told Red Cross caseworker Jesi Betancourt, who answered a toll-free number distributed to military families. “I need my husband for support. Please help me. Please.”

The request and the plaintive tone were familiar ones to Betancourt and the rest of the staff in this American Red Cross office, which has become a clearinghouse for the pain and anguish of those with loved ones serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this tidy, tree-lined business park several miles from any military base, calls come in 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from family members of military personnel in not only those hot spots but on bases around the world.

Nearly all the callers are women. Many are desperate.

Relatives have died or are dying. Children have been injured or taken ill. The payment for the rent or the car or the short-term loan is coming due and the bank account is empty. A father, mother, sister, brother or spouse is in the war zone, maybe for the second or third time.

As one of three large-scale regional Red Cross Armed Forces Emergency Service Call Centers nationwide, the San Diego office logs 2,000 official calls from throughout the country each month -- and handles many more for which there is no need to open files.

Sometimes caseworkers direct callers to agencies that can help.

Sometimes they research relatives’ stories to pass on to military commands, where officers decide whose situation is dire enough to merit a trip home.

“Sometimes people just want to talk, sometimes they want somebody to yell at, and sometimes they just cry,” said Red Cross worker Lisa Dance. “We sometimes end up crying with them.”

Thanks to e-mail and satellite phones, communication between deployed troops and their families has never been easier.

Still, the military relies on the Red Cross to review emergency requests and messages.

As the U.S. mission in Iraq stretches into its fifth year and into its sixth year in Afghanistan, military units require extensive information before they allow a Marine, soldier, or sailor to come home.

By arrangement with the military, Red Cross caseworkers check the facts -- that a baby has been born, that a parent or grandparent has died -- before sending a message to the Red Cross in Iraq. When requests from San Diego reach Red Cross workers in Iraq, they contact the military commands, which often ask for more information.

Exempt from certain federal privacy laws, Red Cross workers routinely call doctors, funeral homes, lawyers, child-protective workers and police departments on behalf of families.

Betancourt says she knows every coroner’s office in California and is particularly partial to the friendly workers in Kern County because she likes the jazz they play on their answering machine.

On a recent night, when the older sister of a young Marine called to ask if he could get emergency leave from Iraq to see his dying grandfather, caseworker Joyce Wheeler-Owens called the grandfather’s doctor.

“Is he actively dying at this point or is he just in decline?” she asked.

That was only the first step. Red Cross workers also regularly call family members and question them. Gently, they probe.

Did the sailor live near his grandmother as a boy? Was the Marine close to his grandfather? Can you describe how close the soldier was to her aunt or her uncle or her brother-in-law?

They scour medical dictionaries trying to figure out what’s at stake. But even serious illness isn’t necessarily enough for a strapped unit to grant a leave.

“I’ve had very sick babies and still the guys couldn’t come home,” caseworker Gaye Harris said.

About 60% of the calls to the San Diego center are from families in San Diego and Imperial counties. But the center also covers 60 Red Cross chapters nationwide and in Guam.

Calls from Los Angeles are routed to the Springfield, Mass., center. Calls from Orange County go to Louisville, Ky.

Some caseworkers are paid. Some volunteer. All handle not only military calls, but disaster calls from all over the country. On the night the soldier’s wife called about the biopsy, for instance, they were fielding calls about an apartment fire in San Francisco and a tornado in New Mexico.

Sometimes spouses lean on them to break the news that a car has been wrecked or that the pay is gone. One military wife asked that her husband and her lover -- stationed on the same ship -- be told that she had given birth.

Caseworkers draw the line at delivering “Dear John” messages.

They say certain problems seem to come in bunches.

“Every wife with a husband on the [aircraft carrier] Ronald Reagan had a GYN problem last weekend,” Betancourt said recently.

And the calls keep coming.

On one recent night, Betancourt was on the phone with the wife of a National Guard soldier who said she had gotten heavily into debt while he was in Iraq. Now he was on deployment in New York. One child had medical problems, another had dental problems. The rent was past due.

“It’s been one nightmare after another,” she said. “We don’t make enough to pay our bills.”

Red Cross workers often refer callers to military support programs. Sometimes they step in and help, cutting through the bureaucracy. For the wife with the money panic, Betancourt was ready with an application for an emergency loan from the Military Aid Society.

Steve Lepper, the San Diego caseworker with the most financial expertise, said an immediate $2,000 loan usually can be arranged.

Still, sometimes it is difficult to reassure desperate callers that help is on the way.

“By the time they get to us, they’re pretty stressed out,” Lepper said.

He and other Red Cross workers say they are getting an increasing number of calls that involve mental health issues, often from the spouses of reservists or National Guard troops, who never thought their loved ones would be sent overseas.

Many live in isolated places, far from military bases that have support groups.

“They’re the best possible clients,” Betancourt said. “They’re the loved ones of people who protect all of us. If we can protect them, it’s only right.”

Though she now works as a paralegal at the University of San Diego, Betancourt still takes calls part-time, mostly at the busiest times -- Friday nights and on weekends.

The work is stressful, and some caseworkers don’t last.

“You have to learn not to take it home. But after awhile you get addicted -- addicted to being able to make a difference for people in need,” said Fabrizio Casini, the caseworkers’ supervisor.

The military tries to support stay-behind spouses, but many are very young -- virtual newlyweds, barely out of their teens, inexperienced at coping with life’s difficulties.

A soldier’s wife, left to cope with three young children, told Betancourt that she had just rushed one child to the emergency room with breathing problems.

“My husband moved me to the boonies before he deployed to Iraq,” she said.

The wife of a Marine told Wheeler-Owens that the landlord had locked her out of her apartment. She said she and her children were living in a rundown motel.

“I was able to get her back into her apartment and squared away,” Wheeler-Owens said. Some calls are gut-wrenching.

There was the 4-month-old who died of sudden infant death syndrome while her mother was deployed in Iraq, the child who drowned in a hotel swimming pool whose mother was at sea, and the children who were killed in a fire while the father was in Iraq.

“I’m a mom,” said Dance, who is studying to be a social worker. “I can only imagine being overseas and getting a message like that.”

Some calls are memorable for other reasons.

Caseworker Joe Muniz won’t soon forget the call from Alaska, where a soldier’s uncle had been killed when his snowmobile collided with a moose.

Muniz, who served in the Army, asked when the funeral would take place. He was told there was no hurry, that the uncle’s body was being kept on the porch, where it would stay frozen a good long time.

The back and forth between the command and the Red Cross can take several days as a case is assembled and the military ponders whether to grant a leave or solve a problem some other way, such as by arranging for a videoconference between a service member and family back home.

The process also can be speedy. When a Marine’s command was notified that one of his close relatives had committed suicide, he was on a plane out of Baghdad within three hours.

Playing the role of middleman isn’t always easy.

Family members sometimes lash out when leaves are denied. “Sometimes they’re very angry,” Betancourt said. “They blame us.”

With the woman facing the biopsy, Betancourt listened and took notes. Some of the conversation was off topic, but she let the woman talk. Betancourt located the woman’s doctor, who said that her prognosis was excellent but that her husband’s presence would help.

In Iraq, the commanding officer was sympathetic. The soldier has a good record -- and in the military, as in other professions, hard workers often get special consideration.

Soon the husband was on a plane back to his wife.

“We were just glad it worked out,” Betancourt said. “That’s what keeps us coming back.”

tony.perry@latimes.com