In ‘Alive Day,’ military widow shares the brutal reality behind service injuries

Mere months after their 2006 marriage, Karie Fugett’s husband, young Marine Jimmy “Cleve” Kinsey, is severely injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq. With a mangled leg and in incredible pain, the medications he’s prescribed unknowingly place the couple in the middle of a second national crisis: America’s burgeoning dependency on opioids.

“Alive Day” is an unflinching portrait of their fledging marriage during this cataclysmic time. Fugett beautifully contrasts the ordinary days of their lives against the extraordinary events that shape them: she’s a high school student during 9/11; five years later, Cleve deploys to Iraq as part of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror and returns as one of its nearly 32,000 wounded American casualties.

Amidst these world-shattering occurrences, their young lives unfold amongst the familiar: financial precarity, fights, falling in love. Fugett expertly dismantles the public narrative of wounded war hero and brave caregiver by sharing the full range of their experiences — their first brush with love as one-time middle school sweethearts, their reconnection as adults just beginning to figure out their lives, the complex emotions that arise in the aftermath of injury: fear, boredom, anger, tenderness.

She also honestly shares the often-stark reality behind the public veneration of wounded veterans: Cleve’s difficulty managing pain, the medication that began as help and then turned to harm, the shifts in their marriage as she became his caregiver in addition to his wife, as well as the numerous ways nonprofits step in to fill the vast gaps between what the military offers and what its veterans need.

In 2010, after a long struggle with addiction to his prescribed medications, Cleve overdosed and died.

An ‘alive day’ refers to the day in war in which you might have died, yet lived instead. In this finely drawn story of two lives caught within American systems that failed them, Fugett’s work serves as a poignant, urgent reminder that perhaps the best way to honor the lives of service members who sacrifice in America’s defense is to ensure their needs — and the needs of their families — are fully met at home.

“Alive Day” is our featured book for June’s Military Families Magazine Book Club. Join author Karie Fugett and Military Family Magazine’s Kate Lewis on Instagram Live June 11 at 11 a.m. EST for a conversation about Fugett’s work.