Isaac and Joey missed their father. Brian had been the only parent in the boys’ lives since their mother lost custody, and they couldn’t bear the thought of losing him too. But for as long as they could remember, Brian had taught them the importance of serving their country. He used words like “duty” and “courage” — words that sounded bigger and more important than something as childlike as needing their dad.

The boys, then 12 and 7, tried their best to live up to those words when they learned they would be leaving Fort Drum — and everything they knew — to live with their Uncle Shawn in Wisconsin for the year Brian was overseas. Still, when the time came to leave, Isaac howled and scratched at the window of the truck “like a caged animal,” Brian said.

Hundreds of miles later in central Wisconsin, Isaac and Joey put up photos of their dad in the bedroom they borrowed from their cousin. The brothers started at new schools and tried to fit in, but Joey seethed and was suspended from first grade for fighting. The adults agreed: He felt abandoned.

During the first six months of separation, one thing steadied and cheered the boys like no other: the promise of their father’s midtour leave. Isaac and Joey fantasized about what they would do when they saw Brian, where they would go in those two weeks together. At the same time, a question gnawed at Isaac, one that he tried to push down: Would his dad be different?

When Brian walked off the plane in uniform and the boys ran into his arms, onlookers at the gate applauded and wiped away tears. To Isaac, his father — who was chiseled from working out and had a beaming smile — seemed more like a hero than ever.

Over the next two weeks, they went to their favorite water park, fished, and traveled to New York City to see the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero. The boys got “high and tight” haircuts to match Brian’s.

But the time passed too quickly. Sitting with his father at a diner one day, Joey grew quiet, then began to weep. Brian was leaving the next morning. The boys insisted on sleeping in their dad’s bed that night.

At the gate, they huddled together.

“Six months, OK?” Brian said. “Just think, once I’m back, we’re going to have all kinds of fun, all right? OK?”

“The thing I’m worried about,” Isaac said, “is anything can happen.”

“Anything can happen anywhere,” his father told him. “I got a lot of training. I know what I’m doing, K? I’m not going to purposely do anything stupid. I’m going to go over there and do what I got trained to do.”

“You know as soon as I get on that plane, the sooner you’re going to stop crying, right?” Brian continued.

“Be safe, Dad,” Isaac repeated over and over.

Joey didn’t speak much. The brothers clung to their father and cried.

Brian was airlifted to Germany for an emergency surgery, then transported to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He had been shot in both legs, and doctors said the left one was so severely injured he might be better off without it. But he wouldn’t hear of it.

For Isaac and Joey, who visited him at Walter Reed, the world had been turned upside down again. They were relieved to have their father back from the war and out of harm’s way, but they were shaken at seeing him so vulnerable. Isaac jumped at the chance to push his wheelchair, while Joey talked about taking revenge. “I wanted to grab a machine gun and go bop, bop, bop, bop,” he said. “You shot my dad, I kill you.”

After months in hospitals and rehabilitation, Brian returned with the boys to Fort Drum in February 2011. His wounds left him with a significant limp and in near-constant pain. Still, he summoned his resolve. He would stay in the Army. He would prove the doctors wrong about his leg. He would run again.

But over time, those goals slipped away. First, he realized that staying in the Army didn’t make sense. Because of his damaged leg, he couldn’t perform the infantry jobs that gave him a sense of worth. He learned he could earn more in retirement, with a pension and disability benefits, than as an active-duty soldier. Brian decided to give in to practicality, retiring as a master sergeant.

Then there was the question of his leg. For a couple of years, he willed it to improve. Every so often, seized with optimism, he would try running a few yards, only to suffer two days of debilitating pain. It was clear to him that the doctors had been right.

Isaac and Joey remained fiercely proud of their father, but they missed their old life together, full of water gun fights and camping adventures. They had moved into a house with lots of land to play on, but their dad rarely joined in. The boys always had to be careful not to bump into his leg.

Since getting shot, Brian had had trouble sleeping. He replayed the ambush and his response in his mind each day. Two questions haunted him: Had he done the right thing in trying to rescue the Afghan police officer? And, now that he wasn’t a soldier, who was he?

When Brian had his leg amputated in July 2014, it felt like a new beginning. Heading into the procedure, he had a partner by his side. Maria Torres was 39 and had three children from a previous marriage — two already out of the house, and a son who was 11, the same age as Joey. She and her youngest, Jordan, had moved in with Brian and his boys a year earlier.

Maria gave Brian comfort and support that he had lacked, and gave Isaac and Joey the mother figure they had craved. She was a warm presence in their lives, baking brownies, asking about their day, persuading Brian to let the boys have a hamster.

Brian remained a believer in the power of goals, and his amputation opened the door to new ones. He would compete in the last bass fishing tournament of the season wearing a prosthetic, run a 10K race within a year and lose the almost 40 pounds he had gained since getting shot. Already, he could feel himself getting back to the old, more motivated and successful Brian. He gave his amputated leg a name — Stumpy — and joked about wearing shirts that read “2014 hopscotch champion” and “I’m in it for the parking.”

He was in less pain than he had felt since his injury, and he felt hopeful about the next chapter of his life. On a family trip to a Renaissance fair, he got down on both knees and proposed to Maria. Isaac, Joey and Jordan applauded.

Once again, Brian’s battle wounds interfered with his plans. The stump wouldn’t heal, and he became irritable and withdrawn. During sleepless nights, he distracted himself with video games, trying to drown out his flashbacks from the war with virtual combat on the screen.

He proceeded through a series of ill-fitting prosthetics as his stump changed shape and nerve growth caused him new pain. While he didn’t regret having the surgery, he couldn’t resume many of the activities he had thought he would be able to, like getting on a wrestling mat with his sons to teach them his old winning moves from high school.

Isaac and Joey, now 16 and 12, had both followed him into wrestling, but they diverged on whether to follow his career path. Joey was sure he wanted to go into the Army. His eyes brightened when he talked about shooting guns in a far-off war someday.

Isaac, however, imagined a different life. He wanted to go to college and become a police officer, so that he could serve his community without leaving the family he hoped to have. “I don’t want my kids to go through what I went through,” he said. As a first step, he enrolled in a public-safety class.

But his aspirations created tension at home. His father was convinced that Isaac, who had struggled to focus in school, would have trouble in college. Brian saw young people in their community in minimum-wage jobs with no career path, and he felt a responsibility to push his children toward something more. “I am hard on them because I want them to succeed,” he said. Despite the risks, he saw the Army as the surest bet.

The wedding day came 10 months after the amputation. That morning, comfortable in his recliner, Brian made his peace with the things he had not achieved. He had tried running a few times, but it hadn’t gone well. His gut was bigger than he wished. But as he thought about the woman he was about to marry, that all faded away. He wanted to settle into middle age, to plan a quieter future together. Soon enough, the kids would be out of the house. Brian and Maria looked forward to the freedom of being empty-nesters, growing old together.

During the ceremony, Brian wiped away tears as Maria walked down the aisle. The groomsmen and bridesmaid surrounding them were the most important people in their lives: their children.

Once before, in a field in Afghanistan, the lives of the Eisch family had been upended in an instant. Brian assumed that the shooting and its aftermath would be the singular trauma of his life.

But on July 24, 2015 — not two full months after the wedding — Joey was hit by a pickup truck while riding his bike to his best friend’s house. Brian and Maria got a phone call as they were driving.

It didn’t seem possible. Only a few minutes earlier, as they pulled out of the driveway, Brian had leaned out the window and said to Joey, “I love you, buddy.”

The 12-year-old had waved back. “I love you, too.”

“Stay off the road on that bike,” Brian had told him.

When Brian and Maria arrived at the hospital, doctors said Joey was brain-dead and asked about withdrawing life support.

“It was the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” Brian said.

After the machines were turned off, Isaac recalled, he lay his head on his little brother’s chest until his heart stopped beating.

At the funeral, stricken classmates and their families gathered on the football field to release purple balloons, Joey’s favorite color. The guard rail at the accident site was transformed into a memorial, covered with notes written in permanent marker and slung with Joey’s wrestling shoes. People left flowers, a stuffed animal, a toy car. The Eisches passed it every day driving to and from town.

The house was piercingly quiet. Brian wept so much that he sometimes wondered how he had any tears left. But Isaac soon felt unable to cry at all.

On the first day of school that September, Brian asked Isaac and Jordan to pose with a photograph of Joey. “It’s your last first day of school, ever,” he yelled to Isaac, who was starting his senior year. Brian stifled tears as he watched the school bus pull away.

Anger, guilt and bottomless sorrow filled their home. But the Eisches clung to one another and found comfort in the support from their community.

Brian, Maria and Isaac each got a tattoo of Joey’s name in his own handwriting, a conversation piece that would give them a chance to tell Joey’s story to anyone who asked.

On his birthday in December, the family remembered him at his favorite restaurant, Red Lobster, then released lanterns into the sky.

Isaac found meaning in his losses: They brought the family closer, taught him not to take things for granted, helped carve out his path in life.

Ultimately, he joined the Army before finishing high school. If Joey couldn’t grow up to be a soldier, Isaac would become one in his stead. Enlisting early would give him first pick of jobs, and he would go to basic training shortly after graduation.

But as Isaac was committing to follow his father’s course, Brian encouraged one important change. Instead of joining the infantry, Brian suggested he become a parachute rigger, charged with packing and inspecting parachutes, and preparing vehicles and supplies for airdrop operations. It would be a more stable job, his father figured. More important, it would keep Isaac safe: A parachute rigger would be less likely to see combat.

Isaac didn’t argue. His family had already lost one son.

Over his senior year, Isaac transformed. He spent hours in the gym, and considered himself mentally stronger too, better able to control his emotions. His earnestness seemed to evaporate, replaced by a new hardness.

When Brian and Maria married, with five children between them, having a baby was not a remote consideration. But in the year after Joey died, they yearned for something to break the stillness. The idea seemed crazy at first, and they worried that people would think they were trying to replace their son, but they decided to stop using birth control for a few months and let God or fate decide. Maria was 42. Soon, she had a positive pregnancy test, followed by an ultrasound that showed a tiny beating heart.

On Feb. 10, 2017, decked out in a surgical gown for the C-section, Brian played “The Star-Spangled Banner” on his phone as Jaxon Joseph Eisch was born.

Basic training suited Isaac. He was in good shape, and it brought back childhood memories of seeing his father, the drill sergeant, yelling at new recruits. At the graduation ceremony at Fort Jackson in September 2016, Brian, Maria and Jordan watched from the stands as Isaac and the other new soldiers emerged in the distance from behind a cloud of smoke. They marched in formation through a field while a rock song on the sound system blared: “It’s time to strap our boots on. This is a perfect day to die.” The crowd roared. “We are the ones who will never be broken,” the lyrics went on. “With our final breath, we’ll fight to the death. We are soldiers!”

But in time, Isaac began to struggle. He had trouble focusing on his work as a parachute rigger, trouble making friends and lots of trouble in his love life. He wanted so much to be the kind of soldier his father had been, but some days he couldn’t manage to get out of bed. For the first time in his life, he felt emotionally distant from his father.

Isaac also believed he had broken his commitment to Joey, who he was sure would have been the more successful son. He regretted not signing up for the infantry, and he longed to go to war.

He didn’t know why he felt depressed.

“Maybe a result of my mother leaving?” Isaac wondered. “Maybe a result of my dad getting shot, getting deployed? I don’t know. Joey? I don’t know. It just hit.”

In June 2017, Brian and Maria moved with Jordan and baby Jaxon to be closer to his family in Wisconsin. Driving by Joey’s accident site every day had become too painful. They needed a fresh start.

Maria worked at a bank, and Brian became the lead parent. Jaxon was a balm, if an exhausting one. The boy gave his father a new purpose.

But as Jaxon grew into a toddler, Brian couldn’t play with him as much as he wanted. Despite another surgery to remove more bone and a painful bundle of nerves from his stump, the leg still throbbed.

During fishing season, his life felt knitted together. He had become an increasingly adept bass fisherman, and he thrived on the competition and camaraderie. In some ways, it reminded him of his Army days.

The rest of the year, he struggled.

In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down the country, Brian drove 16 hours to Fayetteville, N.C., to load up the truck with as many of Isaac’s belongings as would fit.

Isaac was leaving the Army. After months of warnings and failed attempts to redeem himself, he had accepted a general discharge. The worst part was disappointing his father.

But Brian, once so firm in his drill-sergeant-dad rules about the children moving out of the house after graduation, welcomed Isaac back and helped him get a job at a local plastics factory.

“I thought he was going to completely disown me,” Isaac said, “but it was the exact opposite.”

Being back home meant they could visit Joey’s grave together in Wisconsin. Brian and Isaac cleaned and waxed the headstone while Jaxon played. Isaac wore an old shirt of Joey’s that read “Hold my trophy while I kiss your girlfriend.” He had been at the wrestling tournament where Joey bought it as a joke. And they had laughed together at wearing a shirt about winning a wrestling trophy when Joey almost always lost.

On a cool evening in June, Jaxon sprinted around the yard with a water gun while Brian marched after him, calling, “Here we go, two by two” — an old tune from his military days. Even though he could manage only one lap around the Walmart without discomfort, a new prosthetic was his best yet.

Isaac sat by the fire, nursing a whiskey and cream soda. He had been up and down since leaving the Army. Already he had gotten a raise at the factory and saved up almost enough to rent a place of his own. But sometimes he was overwhelmed with anxiety and sadness. As he weighed the possibilities for his future, he took comfort in one thing: Despite his discharge, an officer had told him he could seek to re-enlist.