Soldier Discusses How He Copes with His Reconstructed Face

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• SUSAN DENTZER:

  Jeffrey, I'd like to start off by talking about your background, how it is that you came to be in the Army, what your aspirations were for going into the military

• JEFFREY MITTMAN:

  I originally joined right after high school, I graduated high school in '88 and went to college for a year. I decided to join the military. I thought it was a good thing to do and it allowed me to pay for school, for college. At that point, I wasn't planning on making it a career. Once I got in and had joined the Army and I found that I really enjoyed it. I think it was the lifestyle. I enjoyed the camaraderie and brotherhood of the men in my company. I changed my mind about getting out and ended up deciding probably about 3 years into it to make a career out of it. And that's where it took me, so that's where I went.

• SUSAN DENTZER:

  And you went around the world with the US Army.

• JEFFREY MITTMAN:

  My first duty station was in Germany. I spent two years there. I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, I spent three or four years there. I spent about five years in Fort Benning, Georgia. Then I went back to Fort Campbell actually, and was at Fort Campbell when I went to Afghanistan in 2002. Then I was in Iraq in 2003 on into 2004. And then back to New York about two years ago and then went back to Iraq again in 2005.

• SUSAN DENTZER:

  You were in combat in the first Gulf War and in Afghanistan and then in Iraq twice.

• SUSAN DENTZER:

  Now what point along the way did you two meet?

• CHRISTY MITTMAN:

  I'll let you take that one.

• JEFFREY MITTMAN:

  I had a friend of mine in high school and Christy was a friend of his younger sister's. We actually met in my parent's kitchen, in Indianapolis. We'd gone to high school together growing up, 2 or 3 blocks apart and didn't know each other. But we met immediately after me joining the Army, about 3 months.

• CHRISTY MITTMAN:

  Stayed in touch.

• JEFFREY MITTMAN:

  Stayed in touch and here we are 17 years later. So I guess it's worked out fairly well.

• SUSAN DENTZER:

  So you all have been married then how long?

• JEFFREY MITTMAN:

  Thirteen years.

• SUSAN DENTZER:

  You were married when he was in Afghanistan, Christy, and then the two times in Iraq. What did you think through those deployments?

• CHRISTY MITTMAN:

  Well with the first deployment, I was pregnant with our second child, so he actually missed her being born by three weeks. So I was kind of busy with, you know our first child, being pregnant again. But you just support him, do what you have to do to, to get through it and you know you move on with things, so you just wait for their phone calls, wait for their emails and send them in the mail whatever they needed and just wait for them to come home.

• SUSAN DENTZER:

  Did you always know in the back of your mind that something might happen?

• CHRISTY MITTMAN:

  You try not to think about it. You know it's there, but you just, you try not to think about it because if you dwell on the negatives then it's just downhill. So you just, you try to stay positive and you, like I said, you look forward to the phone calls and the emails to make sure that they're okay and just you know keep asking, when are you coming home? When are you coming home? Have you heard yet? So then you just, you look forward to that and you just, you don't think about what might happen or what could happen, cause you know it didn't happen the first three times. So . . . you just never know.