A military wife's battle is lost here at home

Twentynine Palms, Calif. — IT was the final day of Marine Sgt. Travis Woody's second tour in Iraq when the sergeant major pulled him aside.

"Do you know your wife has a drug problem?"

Travis sat back, stunned, as the sergeant major showed him an e-mail sent from Twentynine Palms, his home base.

Travis' wife, Nicole, was in jail, accused of helping a drug dealer rob, torture and imprison a man over several days in late August in her home on the base. Detectives seized hypodermic needles from a kitchen wastebasket, a police baton and a spoon crusted with methamphetamine.

The Woody children -- 7-year-old Cody and 2-month-old Austin -- were in protective custody.

Travis couldn't fathom how 25-year-old Nicole -- who had filled his mailbox with love letters and whose worst offense had been a speeding ticket -- could be involved.

He reached her by satellite phone.

"What the hell were you thinking?" he asked. She was crying so hard he could barely understand her. After seven minutes, the connection went dead.

He got an expedited flight home -- from Kuwait to Amsterdam to San Francisco to Palm Springs. When he opened the front door of his military-issue duplex in Twentynine Palms, black fingerprint powder was scattered across the countertops. Every drawer in the master bedroom was turned upside-down.

Three days later, he finally saw Cody and Austin at the San Bernardino County Department of Children's Services office. Cody ran outside and hurled himself into his father's arms.

"When are we going to Disneyland?" Cody demanded. "You said when you got home we could go to Disneyland."

In her first week at the county's West Valley jail in Rancho Cucamonga, Nicole Woody spent hours on her bunk, facing the wall, crying and murmuring unintelligibly to guards about "her babies."

Travis, on his first visit, tried to calm her. She begged him not to leave her.

"I'm here," he told her. "Everything is going to be fine."

Three weeks later, Nicole signed over custody of the children to her husband. It was the easiest way to keep them out of the labyrinth of child protective services, she said.

But the next morning, beneath the fluorescent lights of the jail visiting room, she was pale and remorseful, worried she might never see her family again.

"I've made mistakes, but I don't belong here," she half-whispered. "They don't care that you hurt and that you want to change. I didn't have to have everything stripped away from me to see what I had."