Before she went to war, Shelley Hermes was a junior high school teacher and mother of two young boys. Today she is in command of 140 soldiers from the 134th Signal Battalion, a communication division out of Hastings that was deployed last week to Iraq. Her story may sound like a TV ad for the Army National Guard, but it’s far more real than that to her husband, Brian, four- year-old Andrew and 18-month-old Nicholas. “She did it (joined the Guard) more or less to pay for college. She never thought something like this would happen,” Brian said as he held a squirming Nicholas on his lap at their home in rural Annandale. On his own The 43-year-old Annandale native has been raising the two boys on his own since Shelley shipped out to Fort Hood, Texas, the first part of March to begin training. “At first she was extremely depressed. She cried all that day,” said Brian, speaking of that monumental Sunday when they returned home from church to find the bad news recorded on the answering machine. “Then she was gung-ho about it; 140 people look up to her. She’s scared to death, but she can’t show it to her soldiers.” Shelley has been home three times since her battalion received its deployment orders. Her two-week stay in September was the longest and the hardest. It was her last visit before shipping out to Frankfurt, Germany, on Friday, Oct. 1. From there they headed for Kuwait, then Iraq. “Andrew has changed definitely,” Brian said. “When she comes home, he is just glued to her.” And when she’s gone? “He cries almost every night.” Brian owns a construction company in Annandale called Town and Country Exteriors. He and his workers hang siding year round, no matter the weather. He puts in 40-plus hours at work, then returns home for the never-ending tasks of doing laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, feeding, bathing, changing dirty diapers and soothing two children who miss their mother. While he’s learning a lot (like the joys of potty training and bottle withdrawal), and in ways growing closer to his children, he’s afraid he’s losing that good old quality father and son fun-time where they play catch in the yard and build tree forts. “It’s just go, go, go,” said Brian, who has solved the problem somewhat by mixing work with play. “The youngest one here loves to ride on the lawnmower,” he said. Once he even took Andrew and Nicholas to work with him. He pulled Nicholas around in a wagon and had Andrew hold the tape measure so he could measure a customer’s house. “It’s a change of lifestyle,” he admitted, then observed, “This is why there needs to be two people.To share the burden.” But Brian’s life partner won’t be back for 15 months. That means no wife and no mom for Thanksgiving, Christmas or the rest of the year’s special occasions. “She’s going to try to make it home for Andrew’s birthday, but she doesn’t know,” said Brian. Andrew turns five on April 1. Shelley is a University of Minnesota graduate and teaches at Eagle Ridge Junior High in Savage. Both of her parents died when she was young, so when the opportunity came up to earn some extra income to pay for college she took it. “She had the chance to get out last summer,” Brian said, and he feels guilty about advising her to stick with it. “She asked me ‘What should I do? By the way, I just got promoted.’ So now she was a captain … and she would have lost all the benefits,” he said. The guard covers nearly 100 percent of the family’s health insurance. The situation is doubly frustrating for Brian, who believed in the reason for going to war, but now feels the country is proceeding without a plan or clear-cut direction. “She’s well trained,” he said, explaining how last March her unit completed an intensive laser-tag type exercise in an arid region of California to get acclimated to the heat. “But you can’t train for this kind of war, where someone runs up to you with a bag of explosives.” Adding to the difficulties is the fact that he has no idea where she is going to be stationed. Since the soldiers don’t have a lot of access to phones, he will have to wait until they get an e-mail account set up before he can talk to her on a regular basis. In the meantime, Brian will continue to hold down the fort at home. Although neither he nor Shelley have a lot of family in the area to help out, he can always count on support from mutual friends John and Lavern Pelzer, who live in the area. Fellow members of the Beautiful Saviour Lutheran Church in Plymouth have been lending a hand by cooking meals for the motherless family, and Shelley’s sister Lori and her husband, David, who live in the Twin Cities, take the kids on the occasional weekend. As for Andrew, Brian and Shelley have a plan to get him through this as well. Every time he starts to miss his mom and cry, he will color a picture and send it to her, his father said.
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