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Seasoned Vet
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By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 15, 2003; Page A01
JACKSONVILLE, N.C. -- Janina Bitz drew a long, cleansing breath and stepped deep into the aquamarine tranquility of the baptismal pool. Her husband, she recalls, a muscly Marine with captivating eyes and a boyish smile, parted the water moments later.
They wore aspirant's robes. Modest. Knee-length. White for purity.
Baptisms, by definition, are about beginnings. For Janina and Michael, submitting to the sunken pool at First Christian Church that Sunday morning in 2001 promised a new start for their marriage and their family. It meant washing away the careless indiscretions that had threatened their lives together. It could not be a momentary whim; it had to be a transformation.
"There was too much garbage, too much noise. . . . We wanted to be better people, better influences," Janina says.
On the cool January evening this year when she kissed Michael goodbye, her belly swollen with unborn twins, Janina felt a sense of peace that their transformation was complete. Caleb and Taylor were born six weeks later, and Janina rushed off a picture to Michael, 31, in Iraq.
She had no way of knowing that her newborn children would never meet their father.
She also did not know there were other women just like her all across the United States, others whose children will spend today's holiday -- and every one after it -- honoring fathers without knowing what it was like to be held by their dads. At least seven widows who were pregnant when their husbands left for Iraq have given birth to eight children, including a set of twins, and six more are due in coming months.
When Bitz's twins were born, her husband, a sergeant with the 2nd Marine Division's 2nd Assault Amphibious Battalion, was making his way through Iraq on a trail that would eventually lead him to Nasiriyah, where his unit was ambushed March 23 by Iraqi forces pretending to surrender. He had always wanted a girl, and he'd also always wanted a little one with blue eyes. The couple's first child, Joshua -- who is 21/2 and so attached to his dad that he sometimes won't eat until a picture of Michael is perched on the table beside him -- has brown eyes.
Janina does not know whether Michael got her pictures before he died in the ambush. But she hopes her husband was able to see for himself that Caleb and Taylor look out at the world through blue eyes, just like their father's.
'Depressed Doesn't Work'
A cleverly scrunched baby blanket can do amazing things. It has to at Trailer Number 8, which is across from a corn patch on Croom Lane, a country road set back in the pines and farms north of Jacksonville.
The blanket holds Taylor's bottle while Janina, 25, chases Joshua past the plastic sheeting, insulation and duct tape that seal the trailer's drafty back doors. Taylor's eyes roll back contentedly, oblivious to the commotion; she is nearing sleep. She inherited Janina's prominent nose, not "the little button" nose of her father. She is beautiful.
The rocking baby seat minds Caleb. He has an utterly composed way of looking people right in the eye. He got his dad's cute, "wing nut" ears. Already he seems like a little man.
For a moment, all is calm. Joshua scratches inky squiggles on his little, orange notebook. Janina tosses frozen fish sticks into the oven. Then Joshua says something. His mom does not hear him at first, so he says it again, louder.
"Where's Dad?"
It has been only seven weeks since Janina buried her husband, the man she calls her "brother in Christ," but she answers with a steady voice lyrically inflected by her Australian roots:
"He's in heaven, baby. Daddy watches over you."
She received the news March 24. Marines, gentle, soft-spoken men in a little, green truck, drove up to her house to tell her Michael was gone.
Suddenly, she was the "Tassie War Widow," a nod from the Australian press to her native state of Tasmania. Days later, she found herself sitting with the president and the first lady, who had flown to Camp Lejeune to console families of the dead. Laura Bush held Caleb, but Joshua was more interested in the looming Secret Service agents.
Offers of help started coming. Kindly retired Marines checked on her, a bank donated diapers, and the "Fallen Patriot Fund," established by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, gave her its first grant of $12,000. Sometimes she was hesitant; it is not in the nature of this independent, adventurous, confident woman to accept help.
"It was weird," she says.
Acquaintances stop her at the store, at the military base, on the street. Some express shock that she is really one of those wives, the ones who will raise children alone.
"Why would you think I would lie about that?" she wonders. "Is it because I'm not here sobbing? I don't need to put on a public show."
But little things -- the essence of a man wearing Michael's favorite cologne, for instance -- can reduce her to tears, says her mother, Maree Heron, who flew from Australia to Jacksonville to help with the twins' birth and stayed until late last month because of Michael's death. For all Janina's resiliency, there are unbearable moments, such as the one-year anniversary in May of the day she and Michael renewed their wedding vows.
"All those things I kept inside came out: Who wants to take on a widow with three screaming children? Will I be loved again? Will my children have a daddy?"
Sometimes she gets by with dark humor. When friends ask how she has slimmed down so quickly after giving birth to twins, she says, "I lost my husband."
She doesn't want her kids to see a mushy, gushy mom. Michael would have wanted her to get on with life. Be happy.
"Depressed doesn't work with three children," she says, emphasizing her point with her flashing, bright-hazel eyes. "I lost my husband -- I didn't lose my common sense or my ability to live."
Bedlam, Then Baptism
An inconspicuously arranged row of photo albums lines the shelf next to Janina's television, above the stacks of soldier movies: "Saving Private Ryan," "We Were Soldiers," "Windtalkers." There are pictures of Michael and Janina singing at karaoke bars, clowning with friends at the beach, cuddling Joshua.
One of the earliest shows a teenaged Michael dressed in a martial arts robe and nimbly doing the splits while balancing on two chairs, just like his hero, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Growing up in Ventura, Calif., after bouncing across four Western states with his thrice-divorced mother, Bitz was always a daredevil, rigging up impossible skateboard and bicycle stunts. His teenage years were rocky, his mother, Donna Bellman, says. But there was always a sweetness about him. He would send her flowers for no reason and spruce up the kitchen.
"What teenage boy would clean the oven?" she asks from her home in Ventura.
Since Michael's death, relations have been strained between Janina and her mother-in-law. This is not uncommon. The soldier can act as a bridge between his parents and his wife, but when he is gone and the link with grandchildren seems less certain, the bridge can fall.
Bellman had encouraged her son to join the military when he was 23, older than most new recruits. He had to do something, she says: His life was going nowhere. He had married Teresa, a shy girl he met while working at a pizza restaurant, and they had a child named Christian, who is now 7.
When Michael's marriage foundered, he placed an ad with an online dating service, and Janina spotted it. She was working as an au pair for a Navy family outside San Diego, her second au pair job since leaving Australia.
The romance blossomed quickly, and a justice of the peace married them.
She followed him to Arkansas, where he was stationed as a Marine recruiter. They were young, a little wild and having a blast. She started dancing at a topless place in Little Rock called Foxy's, where they had gone together. This became work she did off and on for the next year or so, until Michael returned from a six-month deployment in the Mediterranean. After the couple moved to Jacksonville, the incongruities of their life grew starker.
Janina dreamed of living a solid family life, but she earned wads of dollar bills by whirling seductively at a topless joint called Tobie's, where lonely boys from Camp Lejeune order lap dances on payday. Michael professed devotion to his young wife, but he still caroused with his pals, acting for all the world like an untethered bachelor rather than a husband, a responsible father and a grown-up.
Michael had several affairs, Janina says. She strayed, too. Their marriage frayed to such a point that they needed to take drastic steps to save it. They agreed that the only way -- their last chance -- was to make a commitment to their faith. Religious texts began to fill their shelves. They were baptized. They renewed their marriage vows.
They soon learned that Janina was pregnant with twins. Michael was thrilled, not a bit nervous. Their new world seemed full of possibilities.
But, then again, it still does. A master budgeter, Janina doesn't worry much about money. A tax-free check arrives from the military each month: $948 for her as a surviving spouse, a benefit she can keep while she remains unmarried, and $237 for each of the kids until they are 18, enough income to let her stay at home. There is also a $250,000 military life insurance policy for the children.
Sometimes Janina rides into town in the Suzuki Vitara that she bought for Michael to use when he returned from war. She listens to the Shania Twain song "From This Moment On," the one they played when they renewed their vows last May. There was not much time to find a place for the service, so they had it in the chapel of a funeral home. She returned to the same funeral home to receive Michael's body, sitting alone with his unopened casket and a Wendy's hamburger lunch that she had picked up. She had asked the attendant for a straw and an empty cup so she could feel like Michael was joining her for the meal.
Some days, she checks on the vacant lot in a neat subdivision, within walking distance of three schools, where her new house will rise. She and Michael had talked about owning a home someday, and after he died it just made sense to make their dream a reality.
One day, in one of those rooms that have yet to be built, she'll sit down with Caleb and Taylor. She'll lay out medals and photo albums and newspaper clippings. She'll smile and introduce Caleb and Taylor to the father they never knew.
------------------------------------------------------------ Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. ------------------------------------------ 
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Seasoned Vet
 
Group: Registered User
Last Login: 10/2/2005 10:13 PM
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That is the worst part of the whole thing. Widows and kids.
Go with God, but make Him walk the point.
If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped - say with a stone axe - will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a Vernier. - Robert Heinlein
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