Had the IGTNT series been active in 2003, I am certain that the story of Staff Sgt. Kimberly Voelz would have been told. But it wasn’t. And tonight, it is.
Today, while listening to the radio, I heard her husband’s story. They had met in the Army; they had been deployed together. And he had sent her to the mission that ended in her death.
Max Voelz met his future wife, Kimberly, on Valentine’s Day, while they were training to work in Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit — the Army’s elite bomb squad.
The two met while in explosive ordnance disposal school at Indian Head, Md. They married in June 1999 and she later joined him at Fort Knox, where she become a team leader in her ordnance group.
Both Max and Kim were sent to Iraq in 2003. One night, Max called in the location of an explosive and Kim was sent to disarm it. She did not survive the mission.
As he told the interviewer on StoryCorps (please listen at the link):
Her injuries were severe. One leg was blown off. She was in a medically induced coma when I got to the hospital. I talked to her the whole time she was in there. The nurses were telling me to talk to her because they assured me that they had seen people come out of comas before and that they remembered hearing things that people said. I mean, what are you gonna tell your wife who’s dying? That you love her and you don’t want her to die.
But I knew she was dead a long time before the doctors stopped working on her. You hold someone’s hand, and then it feels different.
Max is a war widower.
You know, I got married to her when I was 25. Our plan was to retire from the army. Now I’m 36 and I still don’t have a plan. I am an army widower. I don’t think there’s very many of us. And when I receive a condolence letter from a high-ranking government official that says, ”Mrs. Voelz, we’re sorry for the loss of your husband,” it just makes it seem like nobody knows we exist.