was a small gesture, but the message was bigger: If he trusts the water, then so can
you.
When one or both of us traveled somewhere in the wake of a tragedy, it was
often to remind Americans not to look too quickly past the pain of others. When
I could, I tried to highlight the efforts of relief workers, educators, or community
volunteers—anyone who gave more when things got rough. Traveling to Haiti
with Jill Biden three months after the 2010 earthquake there, I felt my heart
catch, seeing pyramids of rubble where homes had once been, sites where tens of
thousands of people—mothers, grandfathers, babies—had been buried alive. We
visited a set of converted buses where local artists were doing art therapy with
displaced children who, despite their losses and thanks to the adults around them,
still bubbled with hope.
Grief and resilience live together. I learned this not just once as First Lady
but many times over.
As often as I could, I visited military hospitals where American troops were
recovering from the wounds of war. The first time I went to Walter Reed
National Military Medical Center, located less than ten miles from the White
House, I was scheduled to be there for something like ninety minutes, but instead
I ended up staying about four hours.
Walter Reed tended to be the second or third stop for injured service
members who were evacuated out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Many were triaged in
the war zone and then treated at a military medical facility in Landstuhl,
Germany, before being flown to the United States. Some troops stayed only a
few days at Walter Reed. Others were there for months. The hospital employed
top-notch military surgeons and offered excellent rehabilitation services, geared to
handle the most devastating of battlefield injuries. Thanks to modern
developments in armor, American service members were now surviving bomb
blasts that would once have killed them. That was the good news. The bad news
was that nearly a decade into two conflicts characterized by surprise attacks and
hidden explosive devices, those injuries were plentiful and grave.
As much as I tried to prepare for everything in life, there was no preparing
for the interactions I had at military hospitals and Fisher Houses—lodgings where,
thanks to a charitable organization of the same name, military families could stay
for free while tending to an injured loved one. As I’ve said before, I grew up
knowing little about the military. My father had spent two years in the Army, but
well before I was born. Until Barack started campaigning, I’d had no exposure to