I’m in way over my head. On some impulse I followed a message left on a white board in one of my classes. It was for a support group for “those with loved ones serving in Iraq or Afghanistan”. That sentence does not apply to me in the least. If anything I’m the last person that should ever come in contact with war widows. I wrote a nothing of an article two years ago about a few doubts that struck me while watching a half-dozen soldiers eat at a Perkins. To my surprise there was a cult of girlfriends, fiancés, and wives who rounded off at least 3 separate messages to both myself and the Flip Side for printing me. In a rotten moods, too. I say cult because I’d never heard anything from these people before in 3 years of college. Not a word, a poster, a bubble on a white board, not a sign, and not a letter to a paper until my written fart stirred them up.
Whichever reason it was, it must have put some kind of itch in my ass, because now I’m on the trail of the elusive Counsel Creature. I’m exaggerating for the most part, I know (and it’s something to always keep in mind while you read my every word), but I feel like I’ve got been gladly thrown into a challenge of my brilliant budding intellect: The Angry Women in question two years ago suggested I shut my damn mouth until I know what I’m talking about, and there’s not many things more exciting to me than when my radar clearly picks up an area I’m blind-drunk ignorant in and I jump in full-on naked.
I don’t know what or how American soldiers come back as. I never actually admitted that I did anyway; The Women simply took my naturally curious nature as affronts to their soldier boys’ presence (or absence, however you want to want to look at it or whichever one’s grammatically correct). But they were still right—I didn’t know what I was talking about. I have no personal baggage in Iraq, no one in my family I ever knew personally has been killed in combat, I’ve never waited with a white shawl on the rain-fallen sea-side docks. So this is a backlogged debt. A chance to take them up on their offer.
It initially struck me as strange to see a notice written in basic marker on the far corner of a white board advertising something I thought would be a foregone conclusion years ago—support for the ones left behind. My logic would’ve guessed that the day after the boys on the boats left should’ve been the inaugural meeting , but maybe not. The other shock was that I actually saw the notice. Like I said, the group is notoriously cloistered, at least as far as I could tell, since being a compulsive reader, I figure I would’ve run into the group before I wrote The Thing two years ago.
I like seeking out the truth in a situation, because it’s sure to be more complex than anyone could guess at a passing glance. I’m masochistic in that sense—I like losing my footing and getting proved wrong, and there turns out to be enough finer points to the idea of “Support Group for those with loved ones serving in Iraq or Afghanistan” to keep me busy for a while.
Lisa Cooper-Murphy, coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Equity Center, and the organizer of the group (every other Wednesday, 7 pm, WAGE Center Schofield 30), even had initial trouble rounding up a fore-going group to follow in the footsteps of.
“There hadn’t been anything formal or publicized that I’d been able to find out about. I think other groups were just informal meetings between friends, or people that heard through the grapevine another person was going through the same thing.”
The idea came from a brainstorming session over the summer, once Cooper-Murphy found out she was getting the WAGE position. I was initially twisted when I found out she’s neither a psychology/psychiatry major, nor has a personal missing significant other due to the war. But the plan for the group has the full blessing of the Counseling Services, so I trust judgment of people who know better than me. Maybe it’s just a fluke. I’m overreacting, probably. If I can put myself in the shoes of the type of people that this group is for, I would guess I’d be happy to have a solid base of operations, a constant open-door spot where I knew people would be on call for the type of thing that I’m going to be coming in with every time I walk through the door. If you talk with Cooper-Murphy, you can tell she has plans together with what to do with the group, and has back-up contingencies for things that might go wrong.
“I put specifically on the posters that it wasn’t a political debate, and that’s what I was worried about, and I think that maybe a concern with some people that there’s such strong feelings surrounding whether or not we should even be in Iraq, that they’re afraid of having to take sides one way or another, so part of what I plan to do at the group is that if it gets into any kind of area like that where people are getting heated and starting to talk about politics rather than just their coping strategies I’ll have to diffuse that. I think that might have been a concern in the past that the real purpose of the support group would get lost in the political debate.”
The group has only had one meeting so far, and I haven’t been able to secure an interview yet with anyone who was there. I can’t speak on the meeting, either. I left on deference to privacy. But besides solid plans for a creative support group (baby-sitting support crews for those members left with children single-handedly, a reading list that Cooper-Murphy’s been going through on her own time, and the Counseling Services as a referential safety net for anything she feels is out of her powers) I felt good watching it come together.
These aren’t widows either, near as I could tell by first impressions at least. No black shawls. Mostly my age, with one mother whose son returned within the last month. But I’ve already been verbally bitch slapped once on this overall topic, so I approach on my judgments with caution. In the references Cooper-Murphy gave me to Counseling Services alone I’ve got more work to do with an interview I grabbed there with PJ Kennedy (till next issue kids), and I want to do everything the best I can. I’ve got at least four more issues left this semester to cover the whole 100-yard run of this topic to the best of my ability. I’m counting on being pulled back and forth. I know soldiers coming home and the support they and theirs get (or don’t get) is not something to face lightly.
Also, being the icon of high-class reporting that I am, I’m not actually done with this. It’s a piece-by-piece work in progress. This might go somewhere completely off of left field in the coming installments. Come with me as we have our mind’s blown and possibly find out everything we know is wrong. Or it might be really boring and a waste of your 75 cents of segregated fees (yes, you have already paid for this paper, in order to keep it free. Wrap your mind around that). The excitement is that no one knows which way it’s going to go, certainly not me. That’s always the fun of confronting your ignorance.
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