Profiles of American Service: Peter and Juliet Madsen

“Gentlemen, we had better get prepared.”

Written by Carly Swaim, History Associates

As the face of the military changes, so does the face of the military family. Peter Madsen, a retired Army aviator, knows this well. Shortly after his wife, Specialist Juliet C. Madsen, left for Iraq, he advised “This is a world where our mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives go to war. Gentlemen, we had better get prepared.”

After her husband retired from the military, Juliet went on active duty as an Army medic, in hopes of furthering her medical career.  After learning that she would be deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2004, her husband and three children moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in order to be closer to Juliet before her departure.

With Juliet’s deployment, Peter Madsen faced new responsibilities both as a home-front spouse and a single parent. In the early days of Juliet’s absence, Peter remembers feeling panicked. “I cried,” he said. “I had no idea how to get the kids to school on time let alone how to feed them on a daily basis.” Juliet had left him a list of reminders, but Peter quickly learned a few things on his own as well. “Lesson #1,” he wrote, “Just because they have changed the name to ‘Spouses’ Club’ from ‘Wives Club’ does not mean men are welcome.” Lesson number two concerned his eleven year old daughter and the realization that “girls do not go to barbershops.” Amid piles of laundry, his children intimated their desire to eat something other than pizza, so while Juliet cared for the wounded in Iraq, her husband slowly learned the nuances of taking on both parental roles. Peter knows the difficulty of being a home-front husband, acknowledging that “sociologists and psychologists would have an absolute blast in my home. I could write a book about what not to say to young children.”

The families faced further adjustments later in 2004 when Peter learned that his wife had suffered a stroke after being hit by an IED.  The Army evacuated Juliet with the same soldiers that she had helped treat earlier that day. The love and support she received during her recovery inspired Juliet to help wounded soldiers by sewing quilts, which she auctions in order to raise funds for injured veterans. Juliet’s deployment and return gave Peter a new appreciation for life as well.  As a father and as a husband he learned to “start each day with ‘I love you’ and end it the same way.”

The National Museum of Americans in Wartime honors the service of the Madsen family and all other Americans who have served the cause of freedom.

Source: Quotations from Andrew Carroll’s Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of US Troops and Their Families