When Lindsey Stacy imagined something bad happening to her husband in a war zone, it was him getting killed. Or losing a limb. “Not this,” she said.
Standing in a hotel parking lot at Legoland, Lindsey Stacy felt her cellphone vibrate. She looked at the screen, recognized the area code and smiled.Her husband, a 34-year-old master technician with the Navy’s bomb squad, was on a six-month deployment in Syria, fighting ISIS. He was due home in three weeks.
The next morning, when Lindsey’s cellphone buzzed, she figured it was Kenton with the next-best thing: a birthday call from Syria.Nineteen months later, Lindsey still remembers how her heart sank right then, how even though she’d tried to prepare herself for this possibility, for this moment, she wasn’t ready.She wasn’t ready for what it would take to keep everything together while he was hospitalized week after week after week.
She said yes, but she also had to laugh: What’s a guy who wants to be a firefighter doing leaving flaming candles on a staircase? He went through the year-long training and discovered the work, people and culture suited him. He jumped out of airplanes, scuba dived in oceans, deployed with Navy SEALs and other special forces. He lifted weights, bulking his 5-foot-11 frame to 215 pounds, and got multiple tattoos — religious images on one arm, nautical themes on the other. He often grew a thick beard while overseas.
In May of 2017 they were in San Diego, living in military housing in Liberty Station. He passed the test to make master technician, and when his unit headed off on deployment a month later, he wanted to show his new rating wasn’t just window dressing. The group split up, half to Syria and half to less-risky Bahrain. He opted for Syria.
What triggered it is unclear, but one of the locals may have touched something. He reportedly was seen later with injuries to his hands, saying, “I’m sorry.” They were in the “golden hour.” About 80% of battlefield deaths occur in first 60 minutes after injury. Get someone help quickly, into the hands of surgeons who can stop the bleeding and make other repairs, and the chance of survival goes way up.
Along with caring for her four children, Lindsey Stacy goes to the hospital twice a day to be with her husband Kenton Stacy who is recovering at the VA Hospital in La Jolla. The children are, Logan , Mason , Annabelle and Sadie .When she imagined something bad happening, it was Kenton getting killed. Or losing a limb.Not him in a hospital bed, comatose, paralyzed from the chest down, blinded in the left eye, missing six inches of his trachea.
“Kenton Stacy would have died if not for Justin’s selfless love for a fellow warrior,” Trump said. “Tonight, Kenton is recovering in Texas. Raqqa is liberated. And Justin is wearing his new Bronze Star, with a ‘V’ for Valor.” When he talks, what emerges is barely a whisper because of damage to his vocal chords. He can’t talk for long, either, because of the strain. He tried an electrolarynx but didn’t like the robotic sound. It frightened the kids, too.
“We have shared so many laughs and tears,” she wrote in an anniversary message on Facebook. “I promise to you...I will be your arms, I will be your legs, I will be your voice until the very end.” After the explosion, commanders assigned someone to be there with him in his hospital room. Every day. “There’s a camaraderie in this group that’s hard to articulate,” Shepelew said. “We’d do anything for each other. I know if something happened to me, they would be there for me, too.”
EOD squad members in Virginia pitched in to repair the Stacys’ home in Chesapeake after a tenant trashed it. They helped make other fixes so it could be sold, and the real estate agent handling the sale donated her commission. She still finds it hard to accept that the man who went off to war was not the man who came home. Why did he have to go to Syria? Why was he on the hospital-clearing assignment that day?“Kenton and I talk about it,” she said. “At least then he’d be up and moving around.”
Kenton tells her to get away when she can, to re-charge the batteries through her passion for travel. She went to Spain with Mason last year. She took the girls to Japan in March. Thailand with her sister-in-law. Two “Welcome Home” banners hung nearby, including one with a photo of Kenton in uniform and the words “Husband, Father, Hero.” It had been used for earlier homecomings, when that last word meant something simpler.
Brittain, the master chief, walked up to Kenton and bent down to hear his words. Then he repeated them out loud. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Everybody come over and say Hi.”
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