Photo By Sgt. Adam Parent | Katie Kniss recovering in the hospital after the car accident she was involved in...... read more read more
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At first glance the Kniss family looks like any other American family you might find throughout the country. Josh and Katie are high school sweethearts, and they have four children ranging from adolescents and teenagers in the house to an older son living on his own. Both parents work full time, Josh as a sergeant at the local county jail and Katie as a health and wellness coach. Their house is adorned with family photos, packed book cases, and a fire place that would make anyone feel cozy sitting in their living room.
They are a family full of love, whether they show it by Josh bear hugging the kids any time one strays within his reach, or Katie extending her hand to Josh's arm when he's recounting a bad memory. But this family's story is not without bad times. They suffered a great trauma that took many difficult years for them to recover from.
Being a Marine was a goal for Josh since he was a child, but he went about achieving that goal differently than most Marines. His initial attempt at joining right after high school didn't work out, but after the War on Terror began and he saw friends joining the military he knew he had to do something too.
“I didn't want to sit on my hands, do nothin',” said Josh. “I figured if I didn't join, it was one of those things I thought I'd probably regret the rest of my life.”
After much discussion and praying over the decision with Katie, Josh enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 2003. They chose the Reserve so their family could continue their life as normal in Michigan without having to move every few years, one of the greatest challenges for active duty military families.
When Josh went to boot camp he was 26 years old, making him a few years older than most other recruits in the Marine Corps. He mostly kept to himself and enjoyed his initial training through boot camp and the School of Infantry, pushing himself physically and learning as much as he could. And after a few years of being in the Marine Corps Reserve he deployed with his unit to Iraq in late 2006.
His battalion, the 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, arrived in Iraq in early October and immediately began conducting operations in and around Fallujah. Josh's company, Alpha Company, was stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Black and had a high operational tempo; patrolling through villages, taking censuses of the population, standing watch, and maintaining a quick reaction force (QRF). In the little bit of free time he had he cleaned and prepared his gear, wrote letters to his family, and attempted a few calls on Skype.
A month and a half into his deployment, Josh faced some of the most challenging days of his life. His platoon had been conducting patrols in a village called Hasai, taking a census of military age males and any weapons in the area. On the first two days of their operation two Humvees were hit by improvised explosive devices (IED) and his unit received small arms fire.
During the second incident two Marines were killed by the IED. Kniss' squad searched for the enemy combatant who had triggered the explosive but the firefight quickly became too intense and his platoon had to pull back from the area to treat casualties. Their QRF was called and the rest of Alpha Company provided support to Kniss' platoon so they could safely regroup.
After a few days of recovering at their FOB, Kniss' platoon returned to the village to find whoever had attacked them before. During one of their patrols a couple of Marines walked over an IED that was meant to destroy a vehicle. Luckily for them the charge was shaped to explode straight up and not outwards, so both Marines survived with concussions.
When a helicopter came to evacuate the wounded Marines Josh was ordered to ride with them to the hospital. At the time he thought it was so he could provide support to medical personnel with some of the casualty care training he had received. Unbeknownst to Josh, at that exact same time his family back home was fighting their own battle.
Later that day he received a call from his company's first sergeant informing him that his wife had been in a car accident, and her life expectancy was 'guarded', meaning the hospital was not sure if she was going to survive. That was all he was told.
“ I knew that Kate had been in the accident,” Josh recalled. “I had no idea about any of the kids. Didn't know if Owen was hurt, didn't know if Hayden was hurt, or if Emilee was hurt.”
The next morning Josh began his journey back home, traveling in convoys, helicopters, and eventually a civilian flight over the course of a few days. He wasn't able to get in contact with his family on the phone until he landed in Michigan, and his father-in-law and grandfather rushed to get him to the hospital to see Katie. What he saw when he got there shocked him.
Katie was in a coma and her whole body was so swollen that Josh did not recognize her at first. She had suffered a head injury, bleeding on the brain, bruised heart, a lacerated liver, collapsed lungs, broken ribs, fractured sternum, a broken hip, open fractures on her leg, and a completely shattered ankle. It was caused by a head on collision when an oncoming driver traveling in the wrong lane of the road struck her van. Katie was driving to pick up their son Owen from school, with their other two children in the back seat.
Immediately after the accident a few bystanders were able to remove Hayden and Emilee from the van, but Katie was pinned by the steering column. The truck which had struck them caught fire and it was spreading toward the van. There was nothing the bystanders could do.
“And it just so happened, and I say that very loosely because I know God had a hand in the whole thing, that there was a state trooper driving an SUV with the ram bars on the front,” Katie recounts. “So when he just happened to be coming up on the scene he rammed the truck off into the side.”
Firefighters were able to remove her from the vehicle, and upon arriving to the hospital she was unresponsive and in a vegetative state. This was the condition Josh found her in a few days later.
“At that point I kicked everybody out of the room,” said Josh. “I kicked the nurses, the doctors, her family, I kicked everybody out. Just told them to get out at that point. I shut the door. I think I just, I knelt over the bed and just prayed for God not to take her.”
Katie had trouble the first time she woke up, she tried to fight her nurses because she was so disoriented and she had to be put into a medically induced coma. The next time she woke was much easier, and after that began a long recovery process for the family. Katie's body needed a lot of time to heal and Josh became her caretaker, cleaning and bandaging her wounds every day, and Hayden had suffered a pinched intestine which required surgery to fix. Katie had been pregnant before the accident but the baby was lost because of the crash. Not long into the recovery process she became pregnant again, although her body was not healed enough for it and that baby was lost as well.
“The first thing you want to do is you want normal back,” said Katie. “You just want everything to go back to the way that it was. So normal for us as I was pregnant, we were going to have four kids. We're preparing for that. That's how many kids we'd always wanted to have. So in my mind, getting back to normal meant we were going to have our four kids.”
Two weeks after the second pregnancy was lost Katie's ankle broke again. The prognosis from her doctor was not good, she either had to choose a lengthy recovery that would end in limited mobility, or an amputation. Her and Josh had some tough discussions about what to do, and Katie decided to go forward with the amputation. The procedure was scheduled for October 31st, 2007, but had to be canceled at the last minute when it was discovered that Katie was pregnant again.
Katie was healthy enough now to carry the pregnancy to full term, and endured the challenge of being pregnant while having a leg in a cast and being wheelchair bound. It wasn't until July 2008 that Katie was finally able to have her leg amputated. After Katie had recovered from that and life returned to normal the family faced a new trial to endure.
Josh began to have anger issues and lashed out at his family over trivial things. Katie believes he had put on a strong demeanor while everyone else needed help, and only let it go once the rest of the family seemed okay again.
“I was just angry at everybody,” said Josh. “Essentially everybody at home was on eggshells. If I was out in public and stuff, I was finding that I gave you a really good story of, 'Oh yeah, everything's going good,' But you know, in my head when I was by myself or at home I was not in a good spot. It got to bad enough to the point where that she said that she was taking the kids and they were leaving if I didn't start going to counseling.”
This was the turning point for Josh and he realized there needed to be a change. He got connected with the Department of Veterans Affairs and began seeing a psychiatrist, taking medications, participating in group counseling with other veterans, and going to marriage counseling with Katie. With the help of all those resources Josh was able to level out his emotions and take control of his life.
Over ten years have passed for the Kniss family since their recovery from multiple traumas. Any single one of the events they experienced during that time would be enough to permanently damage a person or family, but they all came through it stronger thanks to their faith and love for each other.
| Date Taken: | 11.10.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 11.11.2020 17:47 |
| Story ID: | 382798 |
| Location: | MI, US |
| Web Views: | 389 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, A Marine Family's Road to Recovery, by SGT Adam Parent, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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