Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 29, 1992 TAG: 9202290052
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
SUPPORT GROUP STILL FILLS NEEDS
When Patricia Cook was called from her job as emergency-room nurse in Roanoke to serve in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War, she left behind her husband, Bill Cook, their three daughters - Becky, now 21, and twins Robin and Renee, now 19 - and grandson William Samuel, now 2.Cook, an Army reservist, went to Riyadh, where she gave instruction in emergency medical procedures at the U.S. Army Central Command.
Her departure cut the family's income by $1,800 per month and increased its anxieties a hundredfold.
"It's one thing for Daddy to go off to war," says Bill Cook, a civilian engineer at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. "It's totally another for Mommy to go off to war."
When his daughters decided to attend meetings of Operation Homefront, the support group for military friends and families sponsored by the American Red Cross in Roanoke, Cook gladly took them. When he saw how the sessions improved their morale, he stopped sipping coffee at a restaurant down the road and went to a meeting with them.
It helped him a lot.
Now, the war is over. Patricia Cook is working in San Antonio at a hospital with a critical shortage of nurses and sending her money home. The other Cooks are still spending one night per month at Operation Homefront meetings.
They are among a core group of about 15 people - down from 80 at the height of the war - who have decided to keep the support group going.
The members have taken food to patients at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Salem and provided food baskets to needy military dependents at Thanksgiving and Christmas. They've advocated full military benefits for veterans of the Gulf War and vowed to oppose any effort to open VA Hospital services to non-military patients, an idea the Bush administration dropped this week.
On the personal side, they've helped each other through separation, divorce and cancer surgery; shared the joy of a grandchild's birth; and seen one of their daughters become engaged to one of their sons - after he returned from the conflict in the Gulf.
Most of all, they've become friends - close friends who have gone through the sort of fear and worry the rest of us can only imagine.
Using the support group "was really critical with the girls," Bill Cook says. "They could sit and talk to me, and it wouldn't come out the same as being with the other girls and women. It made it a whole lot easier to be able to air their feelings and let the tears flow."
Cook spent two tours in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine and later served in the Army, Air Force and Marine Reserves. That didn't make him immune to the paralyzing anxiety the Gulf war caused.
For Shelby Smith, the war was a painful reminder that she could not always protect her only son, Michael Carroll, now 23 and out of the service.
"There was absolutely nothing I could do," she says. Until she found the support group, there had been no one with whom she could share her "raw emotions."
Even a song on the radio could make you cry, says Geneva Claybrook, another member. "You'd sit in church and look at a teen-ager or a little curlyheaded kid - everything could set you off. And I'm not usually prone to be emotional."
One of worst things for her and her husband, Frank, was not knowing where their son, Scott, was, what he was doing and what sort of dangers he faced. Scott, who went into Iraq during the ground war, is with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C.
At the support group, members shared nuggets of information. They listened to each other's worries. They consoled each other when they cried. And, in true support-group fashion, they came away feeling better for having shared their innermost fears.
"At night, when you were alone, or after you had watched so much TV you couldn't stand another minute of it, you picked up the phone and called someone, and found they were doing the same thing," Smith says.
Their suffering forged a bond that the end of the war has not broken.
"We're just inseparable," Smith says. "We meet for breakfast, shop together."
Four of the women are planning a trip to Myrtle Beach for a week in July.
"We are still one family - one big, happy family," says Deborah Graham, a middle-school teaching assistant who started out in the Operation Homefront group in Northwest Roanoke and now goes to the meetings at the Red Cross headquarters on Church Avenue downtown.
Her sister, Carolyn Crenshaw, will return from Air Force duty in Turkey next month. The group plans to welcome her at the airport.
Operation Homefront meets on the third Tuesday of each month. Members are redefining it now that the Gulf War is over.
Whichever direction it takes, they know its focus will remain squarely on military people, including veterans, and their families.
"We started this because we did not have anything," says Mickey Hedrick, whose son, Brad, is a 22-year-old Marine corporal. "We want to keep something going so 10 years down the road somebody won't have to start from scratch like we did."
As Graham says, you never know when another war might start.