Marines Find it Hard to Explain Afghanistan to Families

Marines Find it Hard to Explain Afghanistan to Families
September 14, 2011
Associated Press|by Christopher Torchia
PATROL BASE FULOD, Afghanistan -- "Baby, I walked on a path today. Everything was clear. Nothing happened."

That's what U.S. Marine Cpl. Ernest Tubbs, a combat engineer who looks for hidden bombs on patrol, often tells his wife when he has the chance to telephone her in the United States. Many a time, he has lied. Tubbs won't tell her about the close calls, the near misses, anything about his dangerous job that might rattle the woman he married last year after meeting her on a Florida beach.

"She would kill me" if she knew, he said. His father, Tubbs said, is proud of his military career but shuns the stress of full awareness, once telling his son: '"What happens, I don't want to know.' "

Unlike wars of decades past, most American troops in Afghanistan are able to stay in touch with their families with the help of Internet and telephone centers on larger bases, and even those in smaller outposts get a call out sometimes.

But technology, and old-fashioned letter-writing, do not always close the distance. For units in combat zones, where men die and lose legs in fights with the Taliban, it is easier to talk about just about anything else.
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