Military moms share thoughts on Afghanistan plan
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PDF Military moms share thoughts on Afghanistan plan __ The SouthtownStar __ News
December 6, 2009
President Barack Obama decided that sending 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan is the best course in the eight-year war there. He’d talked with military leaders and his own advisers.
What Regina Byther wouldn’t have given to talk to him, too.
If only the president she voted for – and who sent her a condolence letter when her daughter died in March from combat wounds – had looked her in the eye and told her why the war is going on for at least two more years, she might better support his plan.
Illinois already has lost 44 soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001, and another 158 in Iraq since 2003, according to the Defense Department. Nearly 1,200 more have been wounded on both fronts.
Given the chance, Susan Stanker would have encouraged Obama to finish the job that cost her son’s life. Maribeth Dulkowski might have asked for better supplies for her son currently freezing in some small Afghan town. Debbie Kohany would have reminded him not to forget troops like her daughter and her friends once they’re back.
As soldiers’ mothers, they have packed up supplies, lived in hospital rooms and joined veterans’ efforts. With a fierce love, some signed enlistment papers for kids determined to serve at 17. And they accepted flags, on behalf of a grateful nation, for their children killed in action.
“I know fathers care, but I don’t think it’s the same as a mom. It’s a bond and I don’t think some people understand it,” Byther said.
“I would die for them,” Kohany said. “As a mom, there’s just something you feel in your heart you never felt before. It’s just different.”
For these moms, this war is more than a foreign policy or budget decision. It’s personal.
**
Debbie Kohany’s daughter just returned from a year in Afghanistan.If sending tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan will finish the job, then Debbie Kohany supports it, even though such a strategy surely sends her daughter, Illinois National Guardsman Sgt. Jennifer Kohany, back to the war zone she just left.
But deploying new troops is only half the issue, said Kohany, who wants President Obama to pay more attention to veterans after they return.
“Don’t forget these soldiers after they come home,” she wishes she could tell the president. “These soldiers are coming back and they can’t find work. That should be one of his ways of saying ‘thank you.’
“Take care of these kids,” Kohany continued. “They have taken care of us. Find them jobs and take care of their mental health. They have done one, two and three tours.”
Obama didn’t once use the word “veteran” in his 35-minute speech Tuesday night when he spoke of military and civilian involvement. He never laid out any plans for returning vets, or even mentioned them, beyond setting a July 2011 date to begin the permanent withdrawal. The costs he quoted referred to the battlefield, not the aftermath at home.
“You either have to send more (troops) to get the job done or take them all out because there’s not enough there,” Kohany said. “And now we’re starting to lose more and more and more. So we do need to go in and take care of business, and get it done and get out.”
Kohany’s daughter returned unharmed to Oak Lawn in September after a year in Kabul, where she worked as an intelligence analyst. Jennifer was lucky to fall right back into her job as an intelligence research specialist with a federal drug task force in Chicago.
“She’s got a big opportunity, unlike a lot of soldiers who’ve come back,” her mother said. Still, the 24-year-old is notedly quieter, especially when they watch the news together.
“They all have a degree of PTSD, every one of them, Jenny included,” Debbie Kohanay said. “There’s a change. I’ve seen it. These are things she has got to address. I think she has flashbacks of things I’ll never know. She did things I’ll never know.”
Sgt. Kohany’s service to the guard lasts a total of six years and runs through 2012. Though the guard says its units get three years home before redeploying, she’s likely going back because of her specific job, her mother said.
“Do I want her to? That was the hardest year of my entire life, was her being gone. But she signed up to do this. And if she has to go, we’ll get through it again,” continued Kohany, who leaned hard on her faith to get her through the separation.
“I hope it won’t be her. But she’s got friends over there. She knows people over there. She knows when she put her name on that paper, she knew what she was signing up for, she was prepared.
“They all are.”
LAUREN FITZPATRICK
**
Regina Byther prays no other mother will have to grieve like her. Regina Byther would have fought her way to Afghanistan the minute she learned her daughter, Simone Robinson, had been hurt in January in an explosion.
She had to settle for meeting her badly burned daughter in Germany, at a hospital that stabilized her enough to fly to Texas.
Two months later, on March 1, Robinson died. The 21-year-old Thornton High School grad left a baby daughter, Nyzia, who’s now 3.
No one else should lose a child like this, said Byther, of University Park, who hopes her president knows what he’s doing.
“Everybody knows they (are) going to come home one way or another, alive or dead, and I’d rather see everyone come home alive,” Byther said in her living room, full of her daughter’s medals, honors and photos. “I’m praying Obama’s making the right decision and if he can, get this war over as quickly as possible. And bring them troops home, safely, everybody come home safe.”
Because victory in Afghanistan doesn’t matter anymore to this grieving mother of five daughters, who now is raising her granddaughter.
“So be it. People win, people lose, you know? I mean, I wish it would just end now, win or lose, it has to end,” she said. “I know they swore to deliver what they supposed to do when they joined and everything like that.”
Byther didn’t see the speech. She hasn’t watched the news since her daughter deployed. First it worried her, then seeing news of other fallen soldiers just hurt too much.
Robinson enlisted in the National Guard thinking the military would pay for her education. At 17, she needed her mother’s signature. Byther asked the recruiters if Robinson would get sent to war.
Their answer: No.
“I thought it would be better for her than to go into the Army, but I never thought there would be a war that she would have to go to,” she said. “I wouldn’t have signed.”
If Robinson, known as “Big Mone,” was scared when she left, she didn’t tell her mother.
“She was just getting everything prepared to go. I’m very proud she did go, and stood up for her country. And she wasn’t out here in these streets like all these teenagers and kids getting murdered now. She was doing a good deed when she left.”
Robinson’s unit, the Crestwood-based 634th Brigade Support Battalion, was training Afghan troops. On Jan. 17, a bomb exploded near her security post near Camp Eggers in Kabul, injuring her and five other soldiers, and instantly killing another.
As she was carried through the streets of Kabul on a stretcher, she sang out a hymn, her mother was told.
“Singing? Lord Jesus, I hope she was singing a church song,” Byther thought at the time. “And she was. I knew God was with her then.”
So Byther continues to pray for the soldiers.
“I’m not against the war or anything or the service or anything, but I just pray, just get them home.”
LAUREN FITZPATRICK
**
Maribeth Dulkowski’s son John just started a tour in Afghanistan; his older brother, Matt, could get called back.
The slam of a car door makes her sit straight up in her Tinley Park home. Hearing more than one door terrifies her.
What if those cars contain Marines bearing the news from Afghanistan she dreads most about John?
“I never felt like that before when they were in Iraq,” she said, apologizing for her tears.
Both Marines, Matt completed two tours in Iraq, in 2005 and 2006, and John’s first deployment overseas, to Iraq, was in 2007.
The mother of four boys arguably has done her part in the two-front “War on Terror,” though she’d tell you the sacrifice isn’t as much as other parents have made. And she follows news of the war closely.
“It’s been going on for eight years already,” Dulkowski said. “How long do you stay in that country? Slowly, let’s get out of there. It’s not going to be winnable. I don’t think it can be.
“Granted, people say we’re fighting the war over there so we won’t have the terrorists over here. But you know? They keep having more terrorists come out. That’s how I don’t see how we could win because there’s always someone else who’s willing to make another IED,” Dulkowski continued.
Matt, 23, finished his active duty and moved back to Tinley Park. But he isn’t necessarily done for good.
“They can call him back if they need to,” his mother said. “He was just saying the other day that President Obama may want to send (30,000) extra troops. I says, ‘Well, you’re not going.’ He says, ‘I don’t know where they’re going to get (30,000) extra troops if they don’t call people.”
And John isn’t even prepared to do the job he started in October, the 22-year-old told his mother on a recent phone call.
” ‘We need better weapons,’ that’s what he said,” and better infantry pay, she said.
Since Oct. 5, Dulkowski has mailed seven boxes containing gloves and thermal underwear, good socks and foot warmers, cans of soup and a pot to heat them in.
“Today he said it’s very cold there, and he’s in a tent and he’s cold,” she said.
“My husband thinks the government should provide whatever they need out there. So my husband says, ‘You know, can’t they provide him with all that stuff?’ “
They probably should, she admits. Meanwhile she’ll be the one making sure cold is the last thing John worries about on his mission.
In September, knowing he’d soon be shipping out to Afghanistan, John was a little anxious, his mother said.
“I think he kind of wanted to go in a way. He kind of likes that adrenaline,” she said.
Still, her son was scared after hearing the ominous warnings from his superiors, she said.
“They tell him, ‘You may not come back,’ and then he tells me.”
LAUREN FITZPATRICK
