Soldier's wife finds new strength in challenging year

<p>When Sgt. Dan Caddy called home to tell his wife, Lindsey, how his work day had gone, it was sometimes pretty grim.</p><p>Deadly bombs exploding, small- arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks against his California National Guard company were all part of his work patrolling remote roads in southeast Afghanistan.</p><p>“Just another day on the job,” Dan, 26, would tell his wife at home in Cotati, attempting to minimize her worries about the 235th Engineer Company's mission.</p><p>The Petaluma-based company, due home this month after a year in harm's way, cleared more than 6,200 miles of roads of hidden bombs. Soldiers call it route clearance, the riskiest job in the military.</p><p>“I make light of a lot of the situations and try to find the humor in it,” Dan said in an e-mail this month from Forward Operating Base Orgun-E, a small outpost ringed by mountains in southeast Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.</p><p>“I told him I want to know what's going on. We're basically in it together,” said Lindsey, 25, who works as a Santa Rosa bank teller. “If I have to be without him this year, I want to know what's happening.”</p><p>Dan, who grew up in Marin County and graduated from Larkspur's San Andreas High in 2000, joined the National Guard the following year at age 18. His wife is “strong enough to deal with the information without getting overly worried,” he said.</p><p>He's a career soldier, and she may well have to endure future deployments, but their focus now is spending time back together.</p><p>Lindsey saved all her vacation time for Dan's return, with a Christmas visit to his family in Texas and a Hawaii vacation in the offing.</p><p>Married in May 2005, the Caddys have been separated for two of the ensuing 4½ years while Dan served a pair of tours with 579th Engineer Battalion, Sonoma County's only military unit.</p><p>It was his first deployment — on a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Peninsula, serving as a buffer between Israeli and Egyptian forces — that brought the couple together.</p><p>Dan's unit was departing via Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Wash., where Lindsey was a civilian employee, checking in soldiers as they entered the chow hall in November 2004. “I noticed her from the first day,” Dan said.</p><p>“I noticed him, too,” said Lindsey, who grew up in North Carolina. She wrote his identification number on a napkin so she wouldn't lose track of him. They dated for about a month before Dan left for an uneventful military year in the Sinai. They mutually pledged to wait for one another.</p><p>In March 2005, Dan called from Egypt and proposed. She said yes. “I was kind of hoping” he would ask, Lindsey said.</p><p>Some friends were skeptical, suspecting Dan wanted the extra housing pay that comes with being married. Lindsey's only regret was that it would have been more fun to get engaged in person.</p><p>“Most people would do this before they leave,” she said.</p><p>They married in May during Dan's two-week leave, and honeymooned at Lake Tahoe before he returned to the Sinai. Dan came home in December 2005, and left for Afghanistan exactly two years later.</p><p>Lindsey hasn't seen her husband since dropping him off at the Oakland Airport last December. At first, the separation was rocky; wracked by anxiety and fear, her sleep was fitful.</p><p>Doctors offered medication, but Lindsey was determined to do without it. “I had to refocus myself,” she said. In about a month and a half, sleep again came normally.</p><p>Lindsey, who went from living with her parents to living with Dan, discovered something new during her year as a wartime soldier's wife, juggling her fears, her job, paying bills and managing a household.</p><p>She became independent for this first time. “I realized how strong I am,” she said.</p><p>Dan kept a picture of his wife as the background on his laptop computer screen. Out looking for roadside bombs it was natural — and essential — to concentrate on his men and his performance. “If you are on a route clearance mission thinking about home and not the task at hand, you are all types of wrong,” he said.</p><p>On slow days, his mind drifted homeward. And with the 235th now getting ready to leave Afghanistan, Dan said he is “thinking of nothing but her and seeing her again.”</p><p>Post-deployment reunions don't always go smoothly. Both people have changed, adapted to challenges, endured stress that doesn't necessarily melt away.</p><p>“Thinking about home and not being in a combat theater can be at the same time both daunting and comforting,” Dan said.</p><p>Other wives have told Lindsey their husbands came home afflicted with nightmares, anxiety and hypervigilance, classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She thinks Dan will be fine, and if he needs help “he'll know where to find it.”</p><p>Lindsey wouldn't mind if the Afghanistan war ended soon, but if Dan gets called over again they will deal with it together, she said.</p><p>His wife understands a soldier's need to “balance duty to our country and duty to our family,” Dan said. “She supports me 100 percent.”</p><p>“They say the only thing harder than being a soldier is loving one,” he said.</p>