Posted on 05/26/2003 9:31:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
CAMP VICTORY, Kuwait - Most troops wanting to share their thoughts about life in the war zone call home on an international cell phone, if they can round one up, or they manage an e-mail, and in extreme cases, even write a letter.
When Staff Sgt. Larry Reliford wants to share his joys and sorrows from the distance of Kuwait, he walks across the tent to talk about the day with Mrs. Reliford.
Spc. Chandra Reliford, an Army operations clerk, is assigned to the same combat unit as Staff Sgt. Reliford, an infantry squad sergeant turned combat support trucker.
It's their kids who have to wait for the cell phone call or the e-mail.
The Relifords' four children are being cared for by grandparents in Apple Valley.
"We've got two boys and two girls, Larry III and Felicia, 12 and 10 years old, and Kayshonta and Cedrick, 8 and 6 years old," Spc. Chandra Reliford said.
"If it weren't for the cell phones, this would really be difficult," Staff Sgt. Reliford said.
The Relifords attended Victor Valley High School together and are high school sweethearts who married. They've been together 14 years, through Larry Reliford's infantry duty in Germany, and now together in Kuwait at the door into the still unsettled Iraq.
"I was in the 3rd Infantry Division in Germany," Staff Sgt. Reliford said. "Loved it. We were 'The Rock of the Marne.' Audie Murphy's division. I couldn't get enough of it."
Reliford referred to the historic defense 3rd Infantry staged in World War I when it earned the name "Rock of the Marne" for its defense against German troops along the Marne River outside Paris.
Now the 3rd Infantry is outside Baghdad, and that's the direction the Relifords are headed. With a staff job, Mrs. Reliford may be able to do most of her work in Kuwait, but that is uncertain, depending on the movement of their unit, the 1498th Transportation Co., a California National Guard unit with a lot of soldiers from the high desert.
Before combat support duty beckoned, the couple also shared employment with the National Guard near San Diego in an assignment called "Counter Drug" that supports the U.S. Border Patrol.
Chandra Reliford left a grocery job for more challenge, joining the Army in 2001 and completing her advanced training just as the terrorists' jetliners piled into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
"Our drill sergeants told us, 'You might be going to war,' " she recalled.
"I admire my wife," Staff Sgt. Reliford said. "She went through basic training 10 years after I did. She's a strong person."
"Hey," she said, "I'm a Reliford. We're strong people."
And now, she and her husband have gone to war together.
The married soldiers, both 31, got recruited to come to "The Big Awesome Truck Company." Both were surprised and to some degree taken aback when they discovered they would both soon be on orders to a combat zone.
"The grandparents don't like it at all," Staff Sgt. Reliford said. "Both mothers are upset, and my dad is upset that we are both even over here."
That said, neither of the Relifords are trying to "wiggle out" of what Staff Sgt. Reliford refers to as "The call to duty."
"I believe in the cause," he said, referring to the war waged on terror and against Saddam Hussein in Operation Iraqi Freedom. "I'm a staff sergeant. If the commander-in-chief, President George W. Bush, says 'You've got to go,' then, you've got to go."
Staff Sgt. Reliford said he also sees a larger purpose in the journey he and his wife have made toward "The Main Supply Route" on the road to Bagdhad.
"We've got family at home too, and I prefer to be here fighting the war than to have to fight the war at home."
"I support the cause, too," Mrs. Reliford said. "I feel exactly the way he does."
The couple is making the best of it, in a harsh environment, close to the still-smoldering fighting that continues to dog the interior of Iraq.
"We decided that if we can go together, we can get the experience together," Staff Sgt. Reliford said. "If one of us has a day that's down, one can pick the other up."
Staff Sgt. Reliford chuckled. "And I have someone besides other NCOs (noncommissioned officers) who will listen to what I have to say."
Mrs. Reliford comes from a military family, with a father who invested his life in the Air Force and a brother following the same career.
"If it hadn't been for me being in the Army, she (Chandra) would have been Air Force," Staff Sgt. Reliford said.
So, how does it go, with a married couple working together in a combat zone? For one thing, marital proximity is close but limited by restrictions that govern other soldiers.
The Relifords live and work in the same tent that houses the 1st Platoon, a tent shared with about 50 soldiers. Staff Sgt. Reliford sleeps on a cot on the "male" portion of the tent, which is about three-fourths of the area.
Spc. Reliford lives in the "female" section of the tent, segregated by the thinnest of divisions, a few camouflage poncho liners hung from parachute cord. In the evening, when the temperatures cool from the usual 100-plus degrees, the couple meet beneath the camouflage netting outside and discuss the day's trials.
Quietly, in the evening, one can hear the couple greet. Like the other soldiers, they would have shed the desert "cammo" fatigues in favor of the Army athletic shorts and T-shirt, or a more fashionable combination with a Kuwait scorpion emblazoned on shorts and shirt.
"How are you this evening, Spc. Reliford?" the staff sergeant asks.
"Fine, and you, staff sergeant?"
"I tell him everything that happened during my day, and he tells me everything," Spc. Reliford said.
The pair have family ties to the Antelope Valley, with a favorite aunt of Staff Sgt. Reliford, Erma Johnson, living in Lancaster. A few years ago, Staff Sgt. Reliford watched his cousin, Dionshea Johnson, put in a great season as a running back at Highland High School.
Staff Sgt. Reliford helped coach football at Victor Valley College, and as a community college athlete, he remembers with relish a tough game against the Antelope Valley College Marauders. "The Marauders beat us 24-14, but I had a pretty good game."
This much time away from the children is a kind of hardship neither anticipated.
"We're here with the taste of the dirt and the sand in our mouths, and we just have to do it together," Spc. Reliford said.
My squad leader in Bosnia was married to one of the females in the base camp. Oddly enough it was the same rank situation- he was an E6 and she was an E4.
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