Last year, I told you about a friend of mine, Staff Sgt. Jake Pries, a fellow Iowa Army National Guardsman who served two tours in Afghanistan — a good soldier and a great man. Now, I need to tell you about a great woman who provided crucial support during those tours: Pries’s wife, Emily.
The two have been together since high school, and, when our unit was activated in early 2004, they moved their wedding up from September to February. “We didn’t live together until 16 months after we were married. I bought our first house while he was in Afghanistan,” Emily told me.
It had to be difficult buying a house and trying to establish a home with her husband so far away. “The first deployment was a weird time in my life because I graduated from college, and I came home. I was married, but my husband wasn’t there. So, a lot of things looked the same on the outside but felt very different on the inside,” she said.
One of the challenges she faced was fielding questions from friends. “People at church were well-meaning, but being asked all the time, ‘When is he coming home?’ was really hard.” After all, the Army doesn’t give families a precise soldier return date. “I ended up attending different churches sometimes just so I didn’t have to see people that I knew. [The questions] got to be too much.” No doubt each question was an added reminder of her loneliness.
Anticipating the same problem for Pries’s second deployment in 2011, Emily began writing a blog, the easier to inform the curious. On the second tour, Emily certainly didn’t have it any easier. By now, they had a son, an energetic 2-year-old.
To help the little guy, family friends offered Flat Daddy, a life-size cardboard photo of Pries. “He would be around for story time at night,” Emily said. “We took him to a friend’s wedding reception.”
During his first deployment, Pries came home on leave at Christmas. For the second, he visited in February for his son’s third birthday. “Christmas … when he wasn’t there was difficult. I wasn’t sure I wanted to put up a Christmas tree,” Emily confessed. “Two of my friends set up my tree and made me beautiful ornaments out of pictures of our family. That Christmas tree stayed up until Jake saw it in February.”
One night during the second deployment, Emily and her husband were chatting online. Pries told her he’d be on a mission and out of contact for a few days. At that moment, the news of the death of Osama bin Laden hit the airwaves. “I have to go,” Pries suddenly said, ending the chat.
Emily worried the Taliban might seek revenge for bin Laden’s death. She tried to tell herself everything was fine, but she didn’t know, and there wasn’t any way to find out. It was “that horrible balance of knowing too much and not knowing enough,” she explained. “I trusted that Jake was very good at his job, but it always scared me. If something happened, there was no way for me to get to him.” Fortunately, she found out, hours later, that Pries’s mission had been scrubbed for other reasons.
Finally, thanks be to God, Pries returned home. His mission complete, the cardboard Flat Daddy was forgotten in the basement. The reunited family was overjoyed.
“I’m proud of Jake for his service and sacrifices,” Emily said. “He was good at being a soldier.”
But he couldn’t have been a good soldier without being secure in the knowledge that things were taken care of back home. From making sure he had a house to which to return to taking care of their child, Emily Pries did it all. She and other military spouses deserve our profound respect.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
