Lived Through This
Love and War
I owe my new life to my Marine husband’s hideous death
Cleve’s prosthetic leg stood in the corner of my living room, its plastic foot still wearing his khaki Converse shoe. It was the third anniversary of his death, and I stared at the socket that once held his nub, remembering its shape. After the amputation, it was rounded, a pink scar cut clean across the top. As the muscle atrophied, his flesh hung like a boneless chicken breast, the scar left amorphous and supple.
On April 1, 2006, men were hiding in bushes on the side of a steaming-hot road in Ramadi, Iraq, when the Humvee driven by my husband, Marine Cpl. Jimmy Cleveland Kinsey II, passed. They waited for the perfect moment, then set off an improvised explosive device, blowing off the door and flipping the four-ton hunk of metal onto its side with Cleve and his buddies inside.
“The bomb was double-stacked,” he told me. “Twice the power.” He held his hands out wide to mimic its bigness.
He said the shrapnel flew in all directions like fireworks, ripping flesh from bone. Cleve got the worst of it. Afterward, he was flown to…
