David Duhe returned to the United States in 2003, fresh from a deployment in Kuwait and Iraq and still on active duty at Fort Eustis, Virginia. 

There was a girl there, an enlistee from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, just finishing basic training. The two started talking.

Within a year they were married, with a baby on the way.

“You remember the ‘Mission Accomplished’ and all of that?” Duhe said recently. “That was, what, 100 days after we invaded? I thought I might be back one more time, but I basically thought we were done like everybody else — we whooped their ass; I assumed the UN peacekeepers were coming in,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time Duhe’s plans and anticipations were altered by the needs of his nation. Duhe enlisted in 1996. It was the end of history, and Clinton was supposed to be cashing in on a peace dividend.  

“My mom had been pushing me to do it,” he said. “But you know, when you’re parent’s push you to do something, you don’t do it.”

Duhe, the son of John P. Duhe II and the late Patricia Anne Duhe, had been out of high school for a while, managing restaurants in Lafayette and New Iberia, but had burnt out on that. 

“If you’re in the restaurant business,” he said, “you know you have no free time. You’re working insane hours.”

He began looking into insurance sales. He took the certification exam in Baton Rouge and prepared for a career selling life insurance in Lafayette.

“Then, one day, I just woke up and realized, ‘I’m not really happy with any of this stuff,’ ” he said, “so I went to talk to a career recruiter” with the U.S. Army. He wanted to learn about communications technology, then come back home and work for the cable or telephone company.

“If you’re a lineman for a telephone company in 1996, you’re making good money,” he said. It was a plan that, in a different world, would have gone smoothly.

And so there he found himself, a Signal Support Systems Specialist with the U.S. Army in a post-9/11 world. He’d already gone on one deployment. 

But now the calculation was different. The situation in the field was changing. Cracks emerged in the notion of a mission over and accomplished. And, more importantly, he had a wife and a child to provide for.

When someone one is enlisted and called for a deployment, he or she goes. When a married couple is enlisted and called to duty, they go. But when a married couple with a child is called, they are offered the option of letting one parent stay home.

David and Jennifer Duhe both continued to serve.

This was during the 2007 “surge” in troops. A 12-month tour turned into 16 months.  

They signed a Family Care Plan, which put Aaron in the hands of Duhe’s sister, Lisa Duhe Lourd, plus additional time in a rear detachment. 

“It ended up at about 18 months I was really away from my son,” Duhe said.

“The surge was such a surprise. That was the era of IEDs. When I went the first time, we were conquerors. We beat the enemy, it was ‘job well done.’ I thought we were finished. And then the second time I went back, it was just — you’re in the middle of a guerrilla war. Any time you go outside the gate you’re just waiting to go over a bomb.”

Duhe was stationed at an airbase the U.S. military had taken over in Tallil, in southern Iraq, which faced missile attacks from the nearby city of Al Asad. 

“When I got there I asked the people we were replacing how often they got attacked, and they said ‘very rarely,’ ” he said. “By the time we were leaving and the new guys were coming in asking us that question, it was like, ‘it happens, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Saturday — every other day. They’d set the missiles on a timer and just leave, and the next thing you know you’d get rained down on in the middle of the night, and you’d run to your bunker. And you take missile fire all the time.” 

They were living in CHUs — combat housing units — small, aluminum trailers. Missiles would destroy them, leaving gnarled shells behind. 

“You’d see ones that got hit, and the terrible things they could do,” he said.

Duhe still tears up remembering.

“It’s just the whole nature of it — you don’t know when it comes. And they got so good at it. They trained us that it only happens at night, they only fire at us at night, for a year, and then all of a sudden they switch and fire during the day,” he said.

He recalls the day they lost three men who were driving a truck on base when a missile hit. 

“No target or anything, just a dumb bomb from miles away, and hits a moving truck with three guys in it. Living like that, it was just crazy,” he said.

Over a shoddy internet connection, he Skyped into his sister’s home to talk to his son often. He says he put on a stoic face for his sister and son but confided his fears in conversations with his father.

“My sister was great — I couldn’t have done it without her,” he said. “It was tough.”

His son, Aaron, experienced his “Terrible Twos” slightly late, which meant that parenting through it fell mostly on his sister, Lisa. And, Duhe said with a smile, when he dropped Aaron off with her, Aaron had just started potty training. 

“When we got him back, he was done potty training,” he said. “My sister’s a fricking saint. She did it all.”  

After 16 years of active duty, Duhe returned to New Iberia, where he and some Army buddies rehabbed a home he and his wife bought. He began working surveillance at Cypress Bayou Casino and Hotel, then moved into IT, where he is now a systems technician. 

“I work for great people here,” he said, “I couldn’t be happier.”

After four years in the reserves in Lafayette, Duhe retired from the military this summer.

And after years away, his sister, Lisa, also moved back last year.

Duhe and his wife are also raising a nephew on his wife’s side, Jose McCleary, 17, who will graduate from NISH this year — Duhe’s alma mater. 

Aaron is 13. 

Jennifer Duhe meanwhile will finish a nursing degree at SLCC.

“I’m so glad we all moved back to New Iberia,” he said. “Me and my wife, and now my sister, who’s such a big part of my son’s life.”

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