UP IN THE AIR
Military family gets through father’s Middle East deployment with community support
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Nov. 8, 2017, edition of The Ark. It earned first place for Best Profile Story in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2017 California Journalism Awards contest.
By MATTHEW HOSE
mhose@thearknewspaper.com
While Lt. Col. Curt Wozniak was in Turkey and Syria with a special unit of battlefield physicians, his wife and two sons spent Friday nights having pizza with neighbors in their tiny cul-de-sac tucked just off Tiburon Boulevard.
In a town not known for hosting active military families, those neighbors, along with church parishioners, classmates, teachers and Cub Scouts, all helped form a vital support network for Shannon, Dean and Carl Wozniak while Curt was deployed.
“It helps lessen that burden that you feel,” Shannon says. “You feel like it’s a worthy cause, and you feel appreciated for it. The community did a lot for us while he was gone.”
Curt Wozniak, a 41-year-old cardiac surgeon with the U.S. Air Force, spent the first half of 2017 as part of a specialized team of doctors tasked with bringing ICU-level care to the battlefield.
Last week, he was invited to Reed Elementary School for a Veterans Day assembly, where 8-year-old Carl, a local Cub Scout, presented him with flowers.
But, even as Wozniak receives recognition at home for his service to the country, when he thinks about Veterans Day, he says he thinks of the men he met near the frontlines in the Middle East.
“There’s thousands of people — in my view, thousands of heroes — out there who have it much harder than us,” Wozniak says. “I think that’s what Veterans Day is really for, is for all those people that you sort of forget about. It’s that 19-year-old out there who’s sitting in a cement bunker right now with an M16 in his hand, hoping no one comes over the hill. That’s who I’m grateful for, and that’s fortunately who I got to hang out with a little bit in Syria.”
But, Shannon, whose father was an active-duty Navy officer while she was growing up, says she’s proud of the role that a physician plays in the military.
“It’s his job to take care of those men and women who I respect more than anybody, who choose to make a career out of service. I’m grateful that he serves and that he also takes care of those men and women who serve.”
Double duty
When Wozniak finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Idaho, he knew he wanted to be a doctor. In 2000, college friend Sara Thomson persuaded him to join her at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md.
Becoming a physician was always his ultimate goal, but Wozniak liked the idea of being enlisted too.
“It sounded nice to serve my country,” he says. “I have a lot of family in the military, I thought it would be a good way to put myself through medical school. I was sort of young, idealistic — it sounded great.”
Shannon says she’s grateful Curt chose the Air Force over the other branches.
“Coming from a Navy family, the Air Force definitely has a better family lifestyle,” Shannon says.
Thomson wasn’t just a key to Curt’s career path, but to his marriage. Thomson is married to Shannon’s brother, so when Shannon attended Thomson’s graduation in 2002, a uniformed Wozniak showed her to her seat.
“I … saw Curt in his uniform and was swept off my feet,” Shannon says. “The rest is history.”
Shannon, who had lived on or near Navy bases often in her life, says it was no coincidence she and Curt hit it off.
“I have a very strong sense of pride in the military, so it’s attractive to me to see a man who is not only a doctor but also in the military — truly dedicating his life to service in two different ways,” Shannon says.
They began dating, and when he graduated from medical school in 2004, he faced the prospect of a six-year residency in Dayton, Ohio.
“I wasn’t going to be moving there without a ring,” Shannon says.
They married that year, and after Wozniak’s residency in Ohio, they spent two years in Utah and one in Oregon while Curt went through training in specialized cardiothoracic surgery.
In 2013, he got stationed at the San Francisco VA Hospital.
As they were looking for a place to live in the area, Tiburon appeared as a brief blip on the map.
“We liked it here but we thought we’d never be able to afford it on my military salary, so we sort of just drove through it and didn’t give it a second thought,” Curt says.
But then a house on Pine Terrace — a small street just south of Del Mar Middle School — opened up for rent, and Shannon emailed the owner. She noted that they were a military family looking to move into town.
The owner replied that there was an ongoing bidding war for the house, but he says he wanted to do his part to help out a military family. So, if they wanted it, the home was theirs.
“I really appreciate that he made an effort to support us as a military family,” Shannon says. “I was grateful that someone was recognizing us in that way, because it is honestly difficult moving so much.”
They accepted the offer, sight unseen.
Shannon says it worked perfectly, as their son Dean was just beginning kindergarten and would be able to get into the Reed Union School District. The family quickly developed friendships with the people on their cul-de-sac, many of whom also had young children and welcomed them into the community.
“It is unique, being the only military family that we know of,” Shannon says. “There’s not a whole bunch of military in this area.”
But, with Curt’s training over, the family knew he had become deployable.
Last year, Wozniak got an offer to take part in a highly specialized group called the Tactical Critical Care Evacuation Team.
“I thought it would be something interesting, something different from my day job,” he says.
The team was created to provide immediate ICU-level treatment on the battlefield beyond what a normal medic in the field could do. Three-person teams composed of a doctor, nurse and nurse anesthetist are trained to give immediate medical attention to battlefield victims before they can reach a field hospital.
According to a study in the Journal of Trauma from 2011, 51.4 percent of battle-injury deaths were potentially survivable — a statistic the team was created to reduce.
Joining it involved six weeks of operations training, which included learning how to survive being taken as a prisoner of war along with dunker training, in which trainees are put in a giant steel contraption and dunked upside down into the water, simulating a helicopter crash. They then have to escape from the contraption.
Shannon says becoming a part of that team allowed Curt to see the operational side of the Air Force instead of working in a local hospital. He also would get to use high-level medical skills in the field while working in more interesting locations.
“That does mean dangerous (locations), but at the same time I (felt) like it was something that he would feel proud to do,” Shannon says. “And certainly I was proud to support him in doing so. I had no hesitation, it sounded like an honor to be selected.”
He was deployed in January of this year to southeast Turkey, where U.S. forces were based for air operations in parts of the Middle East.
From there, they went on missions into parts of Iraq and Syria, but his medical unit wasn’t ultimately needed for treatment. In March, Wozniak’s team was moved to a remote location within Syria.
Getting by with a little help
Once Wozniak got to the base in Syria, it became harder to communicate with family back home, as much of the time they only had a satellite phone.
“For the most part, I feel like I didn’t even realize how anxiety-provoking it was,” Shannon says.
Shannon recalls that on April 7, she saw on the news that the U.S. had launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat airbase after reports of the Syrian government using chemical weapons. She feared retaliatory strikes on U.S. forces and wanted to get in touch with Curt.
But the news came at nighttime in Syria, while Curt was asleep.
“That was horrifying, to not be able to get a hold of him and not hear from him.”
When Curt woke up in the morning, he called her and said he was fine.
“As soon as he contacted me, I had such an overwhelming flood of emotion and realized at that point how much I had been holding in, how much I really had been scared and anxious about it.”
Even afterward, she says, she felt anxious about retaliatory strikes from the Syrian government.
During that time, she relied on the support network she and her kids had in Tiburon.
“No doubt it was difficult for the boys, they missed their dad absolutely, but I did my best to keep things as normal as possible at home. That’s where our community is important.”
Many military families have built-in support networks, as they live on or near military bases.
But, with few military families here, Shannon says the community filled the role.
She says several of her best friends live on her cul-de-sac, and with many other kids living there, they would gather frequently for meals.
“People are so willing to reach out and be supportive and help out once they know it’s needed,” Shannon says. “It’s definitely one of the benefits to being in this community.”
Next-door neighbor John Corcoran biked with Carl and his own son Mason to school.
“It was definitely stressful for the kids,” says Corcoran, who is the chair of the Tiburon Planning Commission. “I don’t think they fully appreciated it while they were going through it, so the best you can do is show them love and support and give them flexibility because it is a stressful experience for them.”
Additionally, Shannon says, other dads from 7-year-old Dean’s Scout troop would bring him to pack meetings and special events.
“We just tried to be supportive to Shannon,” Corcoran says. “It’s really hard on a family. After a while they got into a routine, but it’s really challenging when one of the family members is away for a period of time. They give up a lot to live that lifestyle.”
At Reed Elementary, one of Carl’s teachers took a video of him climbing a rope in PE, and they sent it to his dad while he was in Syria.
And Carl got to contact his dad in a unique way, as he sent him a school project named Flat Stanley in the mail. Flat Stanley is a storybook character that kids send to different places to learn about geography.
Carl’s Flat Stanley made it all the way to Syria and back, having had his photo taken on the back of an Air Force plane.
When Curt came back from his deployment mid-May, he spent 36 hours in the air before getting back to California, but he says it felt like no time at all.
“When you get to the end, there’s only one thing you want,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how you get there, how tired you are — nothing else matters than just getting here.”
But it was a little jarring too going back to the things he had previously taken for granted — things like being able to use indoor toilets and having regular access to food from a refrigerator.
“You’re just so profoundly grateful for those little things in life that you never think of until they’re not there.”
Corcoran pointed out that even though Wozniak wasn’t fighting on the frontlines, leaving home for months at a time to head to a different world took its toll.
“Being in the Middle East in a warzone in a time in which we’re at war I think was a lot for him to bear, and it took a few weeks for the family to reconnect and get caught up with each other’s lives,” Corcoran says.
And active duty comes with other costs.
After he got back from Syria, Curt was deployed for a short-term assignment aiding the humanitarian-relief effort in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
He spent three weeks there, missing Carl’s birthday.
“Those types of things are hard, you know, like he was clearly looking forward to it,” Curt says. “That’s the first thing he brings up when we talk about this.”
But even still, he went back to the people he met in Syria, who have to endure much longer deployments in worse conditions.
“Of military families, we are probably among the most fortunate that there are, and I am among the most fortunate among folks that get deployed,” Curt says, noting that he was only gone for just over four months.
Shannon corrects him: “Don’t say four months. It was five months.”
Reporter Matthew Hose covers the city of Belvedere, as well as crime, courts and public safety issues on the Tiburon Peninsula. Reach him at 415–944–4627 and on Twitter at @matt_hose.
