Home and Away: A Story of Family in a Time of War

SixSeeds.tv's own David and Nancy French have a book coming out on July 1st, called Home and Away: A Story of Family in a Time of War.  This Memorial Day, we offer an exclusive peek into the book as we remember those who sacrifice for our nation.

Some sights you never forget. I can remember my wife’s face the instant before our first kiss.  I can remember my daughter’s tiny little body as the doctor held her up on the moment of her birth.  I can remember my son scampering up our stairs as he raced me to the Playstation before our first (virtual) NASCAR race.  And now I can remember the dark Iraqi landscape as I peered over the shoulder of a door gunner in a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter.

It was Thanksgiving eve 2007 and I was flying to Forward Operating Base Caldwell, in eastern Diyala Province, Iraq, with the 2d Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment - into the teeth of the Iraqi insurgency and within site of the Iranian border.  Amidst the indescribably loud clatter of the helicopter’s rotors, the unspeakable discomfort of hundreds of pounds of gear piled on and around me, and the terror at the thought of facing combat, I had the ultimate Admiral Stockdale moment.

“Who am I?  Why am I here?”

For a time, it had all seemed so dramatic.  So storybook.  At age 37, I was a lawyer --  a graduate of Harvard Law School -- and president of a successful nonprofit in Philadelphia. I had a dream job defending free speech and making various media appearances while the war in Iraq raged unabated and the Army struggled to meet recruiting goals.  That’s when I realized with shocking immediacy that I could no longer in good conscience support a war I wasn’t willing to fight.  

After reading an article about a wounded officer – exactly my age -- who’d called his wife and kids on a satellite phone to tell them that he was hurt but not to worry, I felt stricken.  How was he different from me?  Why was it right for him to sacrifice and not me?  After all, he no doubt loved his children as much as I loved my children.  He loved his wife as much as I loved my wife.  There was simply no good reason – no reason that made any sense – why I should spend my life secure in the knowledge that “someone else” would volunteer. So I turned to my wife, Nancy, and declared I wanted to join the United States Army Reserves.

She didn’t blink at that declaration.  She didn’t say no.  She didn’t laugh.  She didn’t immediately declare that I was insane.  Instead, she said that she’d think about it.  And she did.  She thought and prayed and – after a few short days -- told me not just that I could join but that I should.  I changed jobs to one more forgiving of a deployment.  I endured my first rounds of training, and then I volunteered to go . . . to Iraq and to the war.

No, actually, we volunteered.  This book is the story of a family at war.  Of a wife who loved me from afar and who lived as a single parent – wracked with worry for my safety – while taking the kids from school to Cub Scouts to Brownies to basketball to piano and working on her own career.  Of kids who learned what war meant when they heard “one of Daddy’s friends died yesterday,” and who began to understand what it meant to live for something more than yourself.  And of a balding yuppie sweltering in indescribable heat, sitting knee to knee with al Qaeda terrorists, making decisions with terrible consequences, and weeping at shocking losses.

We don’t live storybooks  but real – and messy -- lives.  Nothing is more real than war.  As a student of history, I’d read that war brings out the best and worst in human nature.  As a soldier, I learned that it does – but it’s more than that.  There’s nothing more absurd, more obscene, more horrifying than war.  And – in some truly strange ways – it can actually be comical.  Or, more precisely, comical things can happen in war. At the end of the day, our story is not really our story at all, but the story of all those around us who helped, and prayed, and laughed, and fought, and died. We were a family at war, but wars are not fought alone.

Read the full story of their year apart -- and find out Nancy's actual response to her husband's declaration that he wanted to join the Army -- by pre-ordering Home and Away here at Amazon or here at Barnes & Noble!