Title: Not Quite A Military Wife
Name of Artist: Jen Haefeli
Date/Year of Completion: 2004
Medium: Mixed Media/Fiberart
Materials: Remnant Fabrics, Military Memorabilia, Combat Boots, Gun Belts, Military Patches, and Thread
Dimensions: 28” x 48”
Price: NFS
Images by Photographer Melissa Lew

Not Quite a Military Wife examines the emotional entanglements of a relationship that has ended. This is a conversation left to the mind after the heart has learned that it is no longer involved. In the early days of Shock and Awe, mothers and fathers all over Baghdad desperately tried to shield their children from the blasts in their neighborhoods while in The United States, there was fear of the unknown but suspected - Weapons of Mass Destruction. We would come to find that we became a weapon in many ways. We could be seen as liberators and destroyers. We inflicted casualties and occupied a land many consider merely dust, in what some would say was a justified call to disarm a dictator. Others would one day reflect on this time and see it as another turn of the wheel. A way that The United States intervened yet again to replace and install the next decade of rule. What we come away with, rather than confirmation of the suspected weapons arsenal, is a cache of damage. Many left with wounds. Some with medals. Some never came home. I watched from afar and knew that somewhere above the skies of Baghdad, Faluja, and Tikrit was a machine with whirling chopper blades, piloted by a man I knew barely enough to describe to our daughter should he not come home.