When the soldiers burst into the cavernous hall at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, TX, Richard Ludwig couldn’t see his wife. No surprise there. Even in her combat boots, 33-year-old Kerri Ludwig is just 5’4″—not tall enough to stand out among the primarily male members of the 2-43 Air Defense Artillery Battalion.
Richard scanned the ranks as the welcome-home ceremony drew to a close, and watched as sign-waving civilians embraced loved ones back from their yearlong deployment to the Middle East. Still no Kerri. It wasn’t until Richard stood on a chair that the two finally spotted each other. “She ran to me and just held me for a while,” Richard recalls. At last Kerri looked up and said, “Let’s go home.”
Kerri’s fourth deployment—her toughest yet—was officially, thankfully over. It had been a very long year.
Joining Up
When Kerri joined the Army in 1996, she was 18 years old and thinking more practically than patriotically. “I wanted to go to college, and the military was a way to pay for school,” she says. In 2001, however, the 9/11 attacks changed what it meant to be a soldier. At the time, Kerri was stationed in Germany, a divorced single mom caring for two sons, 5-year-old Zacheriah and 3-year-old Isaiah. After the World Trade Center attacks, the Army raised security levelsat military posts around the world, so “everyday operations stopped and all we did were long patrols in 36-hour shifts,” she remembers. Things got so crazy that she sent her boys to Mills River, NC, to live with her mother. By the end of the next year, Kerri was among the first wave of soldiers deployed to Iraq for her first of two back-to-back tours of duty.
What it felt like to be in a war zone was nothing she could have anticipated. The mortar fire was terrifying. When it got close, some soldiers—male and female—broke down and cried. Others would be too panicked to put on their gear correctly or run for cover. “I wasn’t going to give in to the fear, though,” Kerri says. “It can lead to mistakes that get you killed, and I had two boys I had to go home to.” At night, she stared at the Powerpuff Girls dolls dangling above her cot—Isaiah’s gift to her—and wondered when she could call home again.
By the end of her second deployment in 2003, Kerri had decided to leave the military. She was under great stress. A fellow soldier and friend had shot himself, despite her pleading with him not to, right in front of her.
Kerri took a job as an office manager in Asheville, NC, and focused on her boys. Her two-year absence had been especially hard on Isaiah, who would rock and cry for hours in his preschool classroom. Diagnosed with anxiety, Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder and reactive attachment disorder (a condition in which young children do not develop healthy bonds with their caregivers), “Isaiah went through some serious trauma during my deployment to Iraq,” Kerri says.
Time Flies
In 2006, Kerri started getting letters from the Army inviting her to reenlist. As a former soldier, Kerri was part of The Individual Ready Reserve, which the military has the right to recall to active duty at any time. One of her friends who had also left the military had been called back. Kerri was torn. She didn’t want to leave her children, but her sense of duty called her to serve. To make her decision even more complicated, Kerri’s brother-in-law, a fellow soldier, was captured and killed in Iraq that summer. Kerri took her sons to the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where they witnessed firsthand the raw pain of their aunt and cousins.
Nonetheless, Kerri knew what she had to do. “I told myself, I’m not going to fight it, I’m just going to do what’s asked of me.” Rather than endure a long wait for the call, Kerri reenlisted in October 2006 and was deployed to Kuwait in January 2008. Naturally, her departure was tough on her boys, who returned to Grandma’s. “I worried about my mom getting hurt,” Zacheriah says now. “If anything goes bad, if she gets hurt…it changes everything.”