News From the Cause
""I CHOSE TO STAY WITH MY MAN"
March 01, 2010
This is not about political wives who choose to stand by their cheating husbands.
Instead this is a story of a growing number of young women whose husbands have been severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is the story of RyAnn Noss and Ivonne Thompson, two young women who have decided to offer round-the-clock care to their soldier husbands at home rather than shipping them off to a nursing home.
This is the story of women who desperately need some help from a Congress that quickly authorized a president to send their men off to war but is now taking much too long to reconcile two versions of a bill that would offer these brave women some training, technical assistance, counseling and a modest monthly stipend.
Francis X. Clines of the NYT tells their story.
"I chose to stay with my man," RyAnn Noss told Clines as she "ministered to her husband Scott, once a powerful Army Ranger who was dragged from a helicopter crash in Afghanistan." Noss stopped work on her Ph.D. in Chemistry to become Scott's full-time caregiver.
The article goes on..."Across the way, Anthony Thompson, a Navy medic rendered helpless by a truck bomb in Iraq, was patted lovingly by his wife, Ivonne." She has given up her career as a schoolteacher and says "My life has taken a very different turn."
Clines says both women can't imagine their lives "without their men, however much damaged..."
Staffers for veterans affairs chair Akaka, author of the senate bill which is much more generous and covers many more people than the house version does, says both sides hope to a compromise before Congress takes another break at the end of march.
Members of Congress need to spend some time with RyAnn Noss and Ivonne Thompson to see what real love and commitment is all about!
