Women of War

Women of War

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Meet three women whose lives have been changed forever by the war in Iraq.

It’s more than a hot-button issue. It’s more than a controversy with the power to tip an election. Wars hit home. They hit hard. We talk with three women for whom the war in Iraq is deeply personal: a soldier, now a new mother, who fought in the war—and whose husband remains overseas; a wife and mother of three whose husband was stationed in Iraq for more than a year; and the mother of a 22-year-old son who just left Iraq and is waiting in Alaska to see if he’ll be ordered back. How did the war change them? How did it change their families? What’s it like to say goodbye, to be apart, then to have someone come home from one of the bloodiest places on the planet? If you have no idea—and let’s face it, many of us don’t—read what these women have to say.

Michelle McFetridge

The hardest thing about trying to raise her three children while her husband was away at war, says Michelle McFetridge, was resisting the temptation to indulge them. “It was difficult not to. You want to give them what they want because you feel bad for them,” she says. “But there is a reluctance in our society to suffer, when suffering can actually make you a better person.” McFetridge insists that the war, which took her husband away from family life for 15 months—time the McFetridges will never get back—made them a better family.

Jim McFetridge joined the National Guard Reserve after 9/11. He had served in the Navy, then attended law school in San Francisco, where he met his future wife. “We met on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation,” McFetridge, a devout Catholic, recalls, adding that she had been thinking about joining a convent or signing up with the Peace Corps at that very time in her life. “So my meeting Jim was definitely God-planned,” she says.  They moved to East Sacramento in 1994, and had three children: Isabelle, Mitchell and Matthew.

After her husband was called to active duty in March of 2005, McFetridge found out Jim would be leaving in May, first for training in Colorado and then to Iraq, to work as a command judge advocate in the 115th Area Support Group.

On May 21, the family made the somber drive to the armory in Roseville. Jim didn’t actually get on the bus until noon, McFetridge remembers, so the family had plenty of time to say their goodbyes—a good and bad thing. Seeing her husband being driven away was “like having half my heart gone,” McFetridge says.

At first, her husband was stationed in Kuwait, then eventually Iraq, where he was part of a joint committee dealing with policy for detainees who were suspected of insurgent activity. It was his responsibility to summarize detainee cases for review—relatively safe work, McFetridge admits. But when her husband was moved into and around Iraq, she knew he could be in danger. “Any time you move in that country, you’re in danger of being shot at,” she explains.