Part 38 (1/2)

Actually, I had wanted full sleeves, so, in my mind, it was a compromise.

GETTING READY TO GO

While I was home, Taya became pregnant with our second child. Again, that was a lot of strain for my wife.

My father told Taya that he was sure once I saw my son and spent time with him, I wouldn't want to reenlist or go back to war.

But while we talked a lot about it, in the end I didn't feel there was much of a question about what to do. I was a SEAL. I was trained for war. I was made for it. My country was at war and it needed me.

And I missed it. I missed the excitement and the thrill. I loved killing bad guys.

”If you die, it will wreck all our lives,” Taya told me. ”It p.i.s.ses me off that you would not only willingly risk your life, but risk ours, too.”

For the moment, we agreed to disagree.

As it came up to the time to deploy, our relations.h.i.+p became more distant. Taya would push me away emotionally, as if she were putting on armor for the coming months. I may have done the same thing.

”It's not intentional,” she told me, in one of the rare moments when we both could realize what was happening and actually talk about it.

We still loved each other. It may sound strange-we were close and not close, needing each other and yet needing distance between us. Needing to do other things. At least in my case.

I was antic.i.p.ating leaving. I was excited about doing my job again.

GIVING BIRTH

A few days before we were scheduled to deploy, I went to the doctor to see about getting a cyst in my neck removed. Inside his examining room, he numbed the area around it with a local anesthesia, then they stuck a needle in my neck to suction the material out.

I think. I don't actually know, because as soon as the needle went in, I pa.s.sed out with a seizure. When I came to, I was out flat on the examining table, my feet where my head should have been.

I had no other ill effects, not from the seizure or the procedure. No one really could figure out why I'd reacted the way I did. As far as anyone could tell, I was fine.

But there was a problem-a seizure is grounds for being medically discharged from the Navy. Luckily, there was a corpsman whom I'd served with in the room. He persuaded the doctor not to include the seizure in his report, or to write what happened in a way that wouldn't affect my deployment or my career. (I'm not sure which.) I never heard anything about it again.

But what the seizure did do was keep me from getting to Taya. While I'd been pa.s.sing out, she had been having a routine pregnancy checkup. It was about three weeks before our daughter was due and days before I was supposed to deploy. The checkup included an ultrasound, and when the technician looked away from the screen, my wife realized something was wrong.

”I have a feeling you're having this baby right away,” was the most the technician would say before getting up and fetching the doctor.

The baby had her umbilical cord around her neck. She was also breached and the amount of amniotic fluid-liquid that nourishes and protects the developing infant-was low.

”We'll do a C-section,” said the doc. ”Don't worry. We'll get this baby out tomorrow. You'll be fine.”

Taya had called me several times. By the time I came to, she was already at the hospital.

We spent a nervous night together. The next morning, the doctors performed a C-section. As they were working, they hit some kind of artery and splashed blood all over the place. I was deathly afraid for my wife. I felt real fear. Worse.

Maybe it was a touch of what she'd gone through every moment of my deployment. It was a terrible hopelessness and despair.