December 31, 2008

ANOTHER GOODBYE

So today I have to say goodbye to my husband again. It's just for the weekend -- he's flying home alone to see his family -- but I hate the idea of saying goodbye again so soon, of eating and sleeping alone, all that. Ugh, and I get to do it again next month when he goes to SERE school.

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December 19, 2008

HE'S HOME

I got a call that they were arriving early, so I raced out of the house at 4:25. Guess what? More delays. We just got home, at 10:45.

Longest.
Week.
Ever.

But the look on my husband's face when Charlie tackled him in the kitchen was priceless.

On Tuesday, my husband apparently told his roommate in Iraq, "Do you know what this is?" His buddy said, "Your uniform?" My husband said, "The uniform my wife's gonna peel off of me tonight."

Yeah, three days later, he's still wearing that exact same uniform. Ewww.

We solved the mystery of where he's been all week. The story is too horrible and annoying to repeat.

But it doesn't matter anymore.

He's home.

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A MYSTERY

When my husband finally gets home, we will have a big mystery solved. The Mystery of Where He's Been All Week. Because I have no idea.

I keep calling people to give them updates -- my mom, his mom, friends -- and they want to know what's going on. They keep asking me questions that I simply don't know the answer to. They want me to speculate; I have learned it does no good to speculate about the Army. All I know is the one-line sentence I keep getting from the FRG: "We are meeting at the company area at ___ o'clock." Period.

I have no idea where he has been. I don't know if he was flying commercial or military. I don't know what he's been eating, what he's been wearing (he sure didn't have an extra week's worth of clothes in his ruck), where he's been sleeping. I don't know why none of the soldiers in the company have called home. I don't know if my husband has been getting this same hurry-up-and-wait treatment. I don't know if the delays have been due to weather or plane malfunction or what.

I wonder if he is hungry. I wonder if he gets on planes and gets back off of them, or if he's been sitting in the same room the whole week. I wonder if he's getting enough sleep, if he has a book to read, or if he has been as jittery as I've been.

I wonder if he's wondering what I've been thinking all week.

I can't wait to see him and give him a big hug. And I hope to solve the mystery in the car on the way home!

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UPDATE

With no new info this morning, I came down with a case of the screwits. I put no effort into looking nice: didn't shower, just threw on some clothes and went out to run my errands. And the morning was not going well. Fifteen minutes in line behind some guy buying a coat with no price tag using a tax-exempt number. Went to the military pharmacy -- 10 minutes to find a parking space -- and found 40 people in line ahead of me. Nevermind. And then the phone rang.

My husband is crossing the Atlantic as we speak.

Several people told me not to believe any info I have until it comes from my husband's mouth. Well, that's all fine and dandy except none of us in the unit have heard from our husbands since Monday. The only info we have is the official stuff. So I will head to pick up my husband at the designated time tonight and just hope that it's right. And that it doesn't change again.

It's not like things can get any worse, right?

Oh yeah, and I have to go back to work in the morning. I am trying to get out of that one.

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December 18, 2008

GETTING TO THE POINT WHERE IT'S POSSIBLE I MIGHT CRY

No news is good news, right?

So I got in the shower, shaved my legs, put on nice-smelling lotion, got out fancy underpants, and was just putting on the outfit I was going to pick my husband up in when the 1SG's wife called and said they did not get on the flight, that they have been completely scratched from the flight list, and that now we don't even know which day they are coming home, much less a time.

I was supposed to pick him up three hours from now.

This really, really sucks.

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December 17, 2008

DELAYED AGAIN!

We had a new ETA for late tonight, so I ran some errands today and started getting excited. I came home to a new message on my machine saying that this timeline is also not happening anymore. The husband is stuck in Europe, waiting on his next leg of the journey. Maybe tomorrow will be our lucky day. Right? This is excruciating.

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December 15, 2008

SO CLOSE

Aw, crap.
I just KNEW it was too good to be true.
Just got word that the husband's return has been delayed.

Man.....now there's no excuse for not washing the dog or cleaning the carpet.

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December 10, 2008

SOON

My husband has moved on, from where he was to where he will be. He is still In Country, but he is making progress towards home.

I keep finding myself doing the opposite of what I did with the tortillas earlier this year: every time I hear a deadline, I rejoice that it's after my husband's return. My husband gets home before our milk expires. He gets home before the movie I rented is due. He gets home soon.

God willing and the Creek don't rise, as they say around here.

(And in answer to the couple of questions I've gotten about what actually constitutes a "single digit midget': less than 10 days.)

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December 05, 2008

THIS IS THE END

I had my FRG meeting tonight. The ladies were nice. I love our Rear D commander.

And we have a return date.

The end was so much harder for me last time. Last time, my husband was one of the last people home. I watched all my friends and neighbors welcome their husbands home three weeks before I did. That was rough. Last time my husband came home with a whole brigade, so there were ceremonies and fanfare. This time it's just a handful of families, and since all my friends are imaginary, it doesn't matter like it did last time. I honestly haven't been thinking about it. Even when Sis B's husband came home yesterday, it still didn't feel like my turn was coming up.

Even when I heard the dates and started talking about the return process -- where to pick him up, what he will need to do afterwards, when block leave starts -- it didn't really sink in.

But since I was on post, I had decided to make a stop at the Class Six: the husband has put in his booze request. And as I circled the store shopping, I started thinking that soon we would be drinking that booze together.

And then shit just got real: I am a few days away from being a single digit midget.

Couldn't wipe the grin off my face in that Class Six.

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November 22, 2008

VI DAY

soldier-and-flag_VID.jpg

I sent an email to my husband asking him what his thoughts were on Victory in Iraq Day. He hasn't gotten back to me, so I don't have his opinion on the matter yet.

But Michael Yon's opinion counts for a lot in my book, and the fact that he left Iraq and headed to Afghanistan, saying, "The war is over and we won," well, I think that means something.

Check out Gateway Pundit's graphs, and definitely head to Zombie Time.

So today I quote from Bill Whittle's Victory:

"America bring democracy, whiskey and sexy!" said that unknown Iraqi man. This is not a trivial statement. He is saying that for the first time in thirty years, he will have his own chance for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I thought his English was dead-on.

I hope these people stagger out into the sunlight of real freedom with a willingness to do those two simple things that seem to work so well: work hard, and trust each other. I think they will. They started civilization. They have earned, and well deserve, the chance to enjoy the fruits of it once again.

I hope they will resist the temptation to let oil revenues steer their future. It is not, in fact, a blessing. They are about to start to reap the benefits of the wealth of their nation. I hope they have the wisdom to channel that wealth into their people, into their education, their technical and artistic skill that was once so well represented in the cradle of law and good government. I hope for world-renowned universities in Baghdad and in An-Nasiriyah, producing respected scholars and scientists. I hope for productive farms in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, feeding the millions of the entire region, just as there were thousands of years ago. I hope for high-tech factories in Basra and Tikrit, textile mills in Kirkuk and cell-phone design firms in Mosul. And above all I hope they have the courage to read and study history, and to implement a system that looks something like the ones that allow these daily miracles in the West.

I hope that some day they might be able to forgive us the pain we had to cause them to get rid of that devil, that threat, and his evil toys. Many already do. I hope, and believe, that many more will do so in the years to come. We are still so very, very early in this long and difficult process. But perhaps, some day, they will be able to see that not only Iraqis died for a free Iraq. Americans died. Britons died. Australians and Poles and many others put their lives on the line as well. It would be arrogant and vile to expect gratitude, but I do hope, I deeply hope, that they will be able to understand why we did what we did and how much it cost us, in those poor, shattered homes across America and Great Britain.

And I have one final wish, which I know seems very unlikely, but which I will share anyway.

I fervently hope that someday, perhaps decades from now, Iraq will have a really top-notch soccer team. I hope that one day, they will get to the final round of the World Cup, and when they do, I hope it is Team USA they play for the championship.

I hope that the Americans play a tough, aggressive, masterful game, that they use all of the speed and skill and power at their command. And then I want to sit there watching TV as an old man, and watch the faces on the Iraqi people when the game is over, because I want to see that the most relieved and joyous they can conceive of being, is the day that tiny Iraq got out on that soccer field and kicked our ass.

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November 11, 2008

VETERAN'S DAY

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We are soldiers.
We are soldiers in the United States Army.
We are trained to be all we can be.

We fight for the freedom of many citizens of the United States.
We are all ready to meet our fates.

We all volunteer to defend the red, white and blue.
Not only the flag, but for the citizens of our great country too.

Since our country's birth for all these years,
we have been trained to be the best on Earth.

Many times we have went to war.
We will be involved in many more.

Generation by generation soldiers continue to enlist.
Some of us will got to war and definitely be missed.

Some soldiers will return and some won't.
Those who do not, we won't forget and we hope you don't.

Many of us are going to Iraq.
Some of us won't be coming back.

We have loved ones we are leaving behind.
They will always be in our prayers, hearts and mind.

If we don't make it home safely at the end of the war,
just remember we died defending the beliefs of those of many more.

---PFC Gunnar Becker, 22 Jan 1985--15 Jan 2005

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October 28, 2008

MEMORIAL

This deployment has been easy. Regular contact, a cushy job, and a short-ish tour. So easy, in fact, that when the phone rang unexpectedly at 4 AM last month, there was no thought in my mind that something had happened to my husband. I have managed to avoid much anticipatory grief this time around.

But we lost a team leader in Afghanistan.

I attended the memorial service today. I had never met this soldier and neither had my husband, but I think we would've liked him. Actually, I know we would've liked him based on one thing that was mentioned during the service: his nickname for his wife was Sparta 6.

When you sit there in a memorial service, and you look at all the photos of the soldier and hear the eulogies, you can't help but imagine what people would say about your own husband. How would they describe him? What photos capture who he is? Would a fellow soldier swallow back tears while speaking about my husband?

I had managed to avoid thinking about my husband's mortality too much this time around. But today was a reminder that he will be leaving again next year, likely as a team leader. He will be back in the thick of things.

You know, it does horrible things to your heart to sit back on the homefront and watch other people's husbands die...

UPDATE:

The Bandaids On Our Hearts

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September 07, 2008

SPOUSEBUZZ LIVE

I'm just not ready for this conversation;
I do much better on a take-home test...
  -- Jude

SpouseBUZZ Live went well this weekend. As usual, I hate everything that comes out of my mouth. But I'm probably just overreacting.

Recaps:
Liveblog of Panel I
Liveblog of Panel II

I had fun, I stayed up way too late both nights, and there wasn't nearly enough time.

Oh, and there was a knitter clicking away in the crowd. I almost broke my neck leaping over chairs and bags to run to her.

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August 28, 2008

HOORAY!

I got to see my favorite mug in the whole wide world last night, for the first time in 3 1/2 months.

dimples3.jpg

My man can dimple.
And he thinks he's Rick James, which cracks me up.

I told him that, up against that white wall, he looked like he was making a martyrdom video. Which prompted him to tie a sock around his head and start waving a book in the air. The man is hilarious.

Oh, and "show me your dimples" was followed by "show me your boobies." Snort.

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July 20, 2008

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF

There's just too much to say about this article, and most of what I want to say will make me sound mean. I'll limit myself to a few points: As wars lengthen, toll on military families mounts

If the burden sounds heavier than what families bore in the longest wars of the 20th century — World War II and Vietnam — that's because it is, at least in some ways. What makes today's wars distinctive is the deployment pattern — two, three, sometimes four overseas stints of 12 or 15 months. In the past, that kind of schedule was virtually unheard of.

Honestly, I'd rather my husband do all the time he's done in Iraq than do one tour in either WWII or Vietnam. I can't help but think of Easy Company from Band of Brothers. They were only deployed for a year, but that year included D-Day, Market Garden, and Bastogne. No way. I'll take two years in Iraq over that one year in Europe anyday.

"Infidelity is huge on both sides — a wife is lonely, she looks for attention and finds it easier to cheat," she said. "It does make even the most sound marriages second-guess."

Um, no it doesn't. Speak for yourself, honey.

"Deployments don't help in strengthening a marriage, but they do not have to kill marriages," [Col. Ronald Crews, one of several chaplains called from the reserves to help with family counseling] said. "That's a choice a couple has to make."

Again, speak for yourself, Chaplain. I know a few wives who've said that deployment strengthened their relationship; CVG even called deployment "couples therapy." I really disagree that separation can't strengthen you.

When my husband left, I posted "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" on my site. To me, that is the perfect deployment poem. My husband is the roaming foot of the compass, and I the fixed foot that hearkens after him. Our love is the "gold to aery thinness beat" and we don't need "eyes, lips, and hands" to remind us that we're still in love. And our relationship is just as strong, even though deployment "doth remove those things which elemented it."

I don't need my husband in my house to know that I love him. I also don't need him here to know that I oughtn't cheat on him, or to strengthen the bond that exists between us.

But then again, we don't have "dull sublunary lovers' love."

[article via LMT]

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July 08, 2008

DEPLOYMENT UPDATE

My husband's been gone for two months now. I asked him yesterday how this deployment compares to the last one. I wondered if, even though this one is shorter, it might drag because the adrenaline level isn't nearly as high. But he said that it's definitely not dragging; there's always something hanging over his head, and 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, isn't long enough to get it all done. We joke that this is his life,

roz.jpg

because all he does is remind people to turn their paperwork in. Heh.

I told him that from my end, this time feels really different. Last time we had 18 phonecalls in 13 months, and during one of them, at the height of Najaf, he was so overworked that he fell asleep on the phone! But now we get to talk quite frequently. I don't worry about him being in danger at all; I only worry that he's bored or lonely. It just feels like a really long business trip this time, or like he's gone alone to an Army school. It's almost embarrassing how easy and safe it feels this time. Other wives will see what I mean when I reveal that I don't even take my cell phone with me a lot of the time. It's just too easy this time.

However, the husband seems to be impressing his unit so much that they've remarked that they want to make much better use of him next time. He may even get to go on that super awesome deployment that he wanted to go on this time. So I guess this deployment can be easy and embarrassing, and next fall he can do more exciting stuff again.

Ours is definitely a Donut of Hope this time around.

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July 07, 2008

COOL

This is a huge deal, right?

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" - the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment - was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
[...]
The deal culminated more than a year of intense diplomatic and military initiatives - kept hushed in fear of ambushes or attacks once the convoys were under way: first carrying 3,500 barrels by road to Baghdad, then on 37 military flights to the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia and finally aboard a U.S.-flagged ship for a 8,500-mile trip to Montreal.

It's not the Joe Wilson/Bush Lied yellowcake, but it's still a big deal that it was there and that they secreted it out, right? I mean, what a feat! I love hearing about these secret missions after the fact.

(Via Instapundit via Conservative Grapevine)

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June 08, 2008

THE EMOTIONAL VS THE SCHOLARLY

I didn't read the full text of The McCain Doctrines when it came out, so I read it this morning. And this part just struck me:

A LOT OF McCAIN’S fellow veterans in Washington seem confounded by what they see as his obvious failure to absorb the lessons of Vietnam. Jack Murtha, the Pennsylvania congressman and decorated Vietnam vet who became an early and outspoken critic of the war, told me that watching Iraq unfold convinced him, for the first time, that American troops could never have prevailed in Vietnam, no matter how long they stayed. “These kinds of wars cannot be won militarily,” he said flatly. Another Democratic congressman with a Purple Heart, Mike Thompson of California, told me that promises of victory in Iraq sounded painfully familiar. “When I was in Vietnam, the members of Congress knew that we weren’t going to be there forever, that we would have to redeploy, and in the time between when they knew that and when we redeployed, a lot of boys were injured and killed,” Thompson said. “I think Senator McCain has been an outstanding public servant, but I think he’s wrong on this.”

In McCain’s mind, however, there is a different kind of symmetry linking Vietnam and Iraq. Talking to him about it, you come to understand that he has, indeed, applied lessons from the first war to the second — but they are the lessons that he learned not in combat or in the Hanoi Hilton but in the pages of the books he read at the National War College in the 1970s. To McCain, the first four years of the Iraq war, as prosecuted by the Bush administration, seem strikingly similar to the years in Vietnam before Creighton Abrams arrived on the scene.

I think it's pretty darned amazing that he can set aside his emotional attachment to Vietnam and look at it scholarly and theoretically. And after I read this segment, I did notice that it seems people like Kerry,Murtha, etc. still feel the emotions of Vietnam while John McCain has tried to study it, like one would study ancient military battles.

I just thought that was really interesting.

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May 18, 2008

LEARNING THE WRONG LESSON

I heard a joke the other day. It seems that Bush and the Pope were fishing when the Pope's hat flew off. One of the secret service agents was getting ready to dive into the water to retrieve the hat when Bush stopped him. Bush calmly got out of the boat, walked on the water and retrieved the Pope's hat. The Pope was inpressed. The next day's headline in the NYT was "Bush Can't Swim."

Remember when they ran this headline: "As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch"? Now that's spin. There's something remarkable about being able to take something so positive and twist it into a negative.

Apparently they just did it to McCain too. I am speechless:

There is a feeling among some of McCainÂ’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCainÂ’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCainÂ’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

McCain doesn't understand Vietnam because he spent the whole time being beaten and locked up in a tiger cage instead of celebrating Christmas in Cambodia with a magical hat.

You have to be effing kidding me.

Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory [...] But some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.

Oh gosh, John McCain learned the wrong things in Vietnam. See, we all had this life changing experience that was supposed to make us hate war and hate the US. But John McCain won't play by the rules. He was too busy being locked up with people who took their oaths seriously, who bolstered each other and knew that their countrymen were looking for them and would rescue them someday. He was too busy refusing the Vietcong's offer to release him. And he was too busy saluting the flag, a makeshift flag that Mike Christian sewed out of handkerchiefs, despite the massive beating he got for doing it.

Poor John McCain...he learned to love his country during Vietnam instead of hating it.

What a stupid man.

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May 12, 2008

NO, REALLY, I'M FINE

So my husband's single friend came over for dinner tonight, and he asked how I was doing, both with the deployment and with the baby situation. And during the course of chatting, I mentioned the miscarriage, and I also asked him if I could put him down on my list of people to call should I have to endure a casualty notification.

He started to panic and said that we'd better change the subject. I couldn't figure out why, until he said, "I'm afraid you're going to start crying and I don't really know how to handle that."

I laughed and said I hope he doesn't think I'm that fragile. I told him that I haven't cried even once since my husband left and that I'm really feeling quite good and normal.

I'm not sure he believed me.

Really, I'm fine. I'm like creepy fine. I keep waiting for the shoe to drop, but I don't feel sad at all. I'm sure at some point I will get a little weepy, especially if hormones start kicking in, but I don't feel bad at all right now.

But apparently it took me two weeks to cry last time, so I guess I have another seven days.

But also like last time, I just don't suffer.

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