Her husband came home, and the war came with him

UPDATE
'A Soldier's Wife': Readers are moved by family's struggles
LA Times
By Deirdre Edgar
September 10, 2013

“A Soldier’s Wife” in Sunday’s Times, the story of an Iraq war veteran’s struggles, moved readers with its stark narrative by Christopher Goffard and photography by Rick Loomis.

The story, which Goffard and Loomis spent a year and a half chronicling, followed the plight of Candace Desmond-Woods, an Irvine woman fighting to hold her family together as her husband, Tom, battles post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism.

Dozens of readers took the time to email The Times in response to the story.

Some of them said the intensely personal story gave them new insight into the challenges faced by veterans
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If the government agencies are doing something and charities are doing something and colleges are doing something, then why the hell is this still happening? This was what my family life was like 30 years ago when nothing was being done!

A SOLDIER'S WIFE
Her husband came home, and the war came with him
BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO BY RICK LOOMIS
September 8, 2013

Candace Desmond-Woods tries to comfort her husband, Tom, an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD and alcoholism. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

One night her husband thought he was back in Iraq and tried to kick down the door of their home on Garden Gate Lane. He shouted something in Arabic she didn't understand. As a cavalry scout in Baghdad, he had crashed through countless doors on nighttime raids. The "hard knock," he called it.

She clutched their infant son, afraid of her husband for the first time. She wouldn't let him in. He stared at her through the glass panes. Didn't he recognize her? He shoved, elbowed, punched. The lock began to buckle. The glass shattered.

It was February 2012. The war, her own small piece of it, had come rolling down the block the month before, in the form of a 22-foot Penske moving truck. Her newlywed husband was at the wheel, having crossed the country from Ft. Riley, Kan.

Candace Desmond-Woods told herself everything would be fine, now that he was out of the Army. Their lives as husband and wife would really begin in this white-fenced rental home in Irvine, a master-planned city where every manicured block was an argument against uncertainty.

The war would crash through her careful plans in a hundred ways, large and small. She watched it empty her refrigerator and shut off her gas. She came to feel like one of its strangest casualties, a widow with a living husband.
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If you think I'm kidding on this, read For the Love of Jack, His War/My Battle and know, how terrible it is to watch a story like this and remember all of it.