Introduction

Have you ever felt you had a story to tell? Something that may or may not touch another person’s life? Have you ever felt compelled to do something? Have you ever wanted to share something that you learned because you knew it would help other people? Or have you ever just needed to make sense of your life? The experiences I have written about in this book are something I could not keep to myself; I had to share them. I had to help people understand what it’s like to be the person left behind.

I grew up in a normal, middle-class household in St. Joseph, Michigan, with both my mother and father. Every day my dad went to work for the State of Michigan’s unem­ployment agency, working mostly eight to five and coming home every night in time for a family meal. When my brother and I were little, my mom worked out of our house making children’s clothes. She went back to college to get her master’s degree and became a teacher after we were both in school. My dad played basketball on Thursday nights during the winter. We took family trips to visit relatives in North Carolina and throughout Michigan and made the occasional trip to Six Flags. My family attended church together on Sundays, and we had lots of quality time as a family. I pictured my life being similar when I grew up and got married.

After high school, I went to Meredith College, a small women’s college in Raleigh, North Carolina, and met my future husband at a college church retreat in Monteagle, Tennessee. His patience and charm won me over, but there was one big hang-up—he was going to be an officer in the United States Army when he graduated from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in Charleston. The army was a foreign thing to me. I knew it would not be like a normal job, but I had no idea what I was in for.

Our first few months of marriage were fun. He was in school (OBC, the Officer’s Basic Course—the army uses lots of acronyms, most of which I learned by osmosis), and I started to think that maybe the army would be like a normal job. My life, I thought, would be like I’d always pictured it, with a husband who goes to work and comes home each night to eat dinner as a couple.

While Brandon was in school, our life was like I’d imagined. Then it came time to move to our first official duty station at Fort Hood, Texas. Life changed significantly when we entered the real army. While everyone’s experi­ences may be different, and experiences are always what you make of them, I had a hard time adjusting to my new life. We moved to Texas with me kicking and screaming. I didn’t like being so far away from the East Coast and all of our college friends and his family. To make matters worse, very soon after we arrived in Texas, Brandon’s job took him to Mississippi for a month. This was my first true taste of the army life. I had no say in what was going on with my life or with my husband, and I was all alone in a place I didn’t want to be in. I am not the first or the last army wife to feel that way, but I sure felt like I was all by myself at that time.

Over the next several years, I continued to feel like my life had spun out of control and somehow the army was to blame for all of it. I gained weight, I sprouted gray hairs (my twenty-seventh birthday present!), and I was just sort of mad at the world. Brandon and I continued to plug along as a married couple, but it wasn’t easy. And then came the most dreaded thing of all—orders for Brandon to go to Iraq for twelve to eighteen months! His deployment tested every ounce of my being and pushed our marriage nearly to the breaking point.

The chapters in this book are based on my experiences during my husband’s 365 days of deployment to Iraq with the First Calvary Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom II. You are welcome to laugh and cry along with me as I explore and share the experiences that have helped me become who I am. The insight I gained into life as a result of my husband’s deployment and my quest for happiness may touch your life and make it just that much more meaningful and worthy of living—really living.

If you have had experiences similar to mine, please don’t suffer alone or in silence. Talk to someone. Find yourself.

Chapter One

Anticipation

I never thought of anticipation as an ominous word. It can be used to describe feelings about upcoming vacations, Christmas, and any number of good things. For me, antici­pation became a life-altering, day-darkening, looming cloud that would not go away.

On September __, 200_, the day that changed every­thing, my husband had barely been in the army for one month, and we’d been married just under four. That day was the beginning of three years of anticipation. The bright and cheerful newlywed days were overshadowed by my terror at the thought of my husband having to go to war. Ratio­nally speaking, I knew he wasn’t going to go to war the next day, or even the next month, but it was there hovering in the distance, just waiting to swallow me up on the day the orders came and he had to leave.

I started distancing myself from him and thinking of a time when we could just be together without that thing (deployment, a dirty word) always with us, waiting to snatch our life up, scramble it, and possibly destroy it. My anticipa­tion helped to unravel my life with my husband years before the deployment actually occurred. The walls went up, and no matter what Brandon tried to do, I wasn’t letting him in. I wasn’t going to let him get close enough for me to truly need or rely on him.

I became pessimistic after spending most of my life being optimistic. I gained weight. I stopped doing some of the things I loved. I existed in my life, but I did not live it. I simply waited for his deployment to be announced, and life went on around me. My anticipation caused a lot of anger—I would lash out at Brandon, not because I didn’t love him, but because I just couldn’t handle all that I was feeling. As his departure came closer and closer, thoughts of my year alone nearly did me in.

Throughout the time he was gone, I experienced antici­pation in many forms, but none of them compared to the initial anxiety of his pending deployment. Before he came home for his R&R (rest and relaxation), the anticipation I felt was one filled with dread, worry, and uncertainty. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to come home and disrupt the life I had established by myself, and I knew I couldn’t pretend things were okay with our marriage. Then, once he came home for his two weeks of R&R, the anticipation of his leaving again was much the same as it had been on the day he first left. But the anticipation of his coming home to stay at the end of his deployment was back to the good old fash­ioned Christmas morning, “Yay, a present for me,” kind of anticipation. If I had to choose a form of that word to enjoy daily, it would be the “Christmas morning” anticipation. But through my experiences with Brandon’s deployment, I had to learn to understand and accept the other, not so fun, forms—those that wreaked havoc with me, my life, my family, and my outlook on the world. I never knew that such a normally cheery word could carry such a different meaning, but boy did I learn!

Chapter Two

Here it comes…

My husband’s orders were in hand. It was true. After years of waiting and watching friends deploy and come home, it was Brandon’s turn to go. That’s when the fights and crankiness began. On more than one occasion I shouted at him “Just go!” Of course I didn’t want him to go, but knowing it was out there and drawing nearer every day was swallowing me alive. The only way I found to express my frustration was to scream—not good, but that’s what I did.

As the day grew closer and closer, instead of enjoying our last moments together, we argued. Ah, the guilt. Here we were, getting nearer to our day of forced separation, and we were bickering about stupid things. We fought about the dogs, my watching TV, his playing on the computer, and how to pack his bags. Trying to make the most of our time together added stress to an already overwhelmingly stressful time. His deployment dates kept changing, the final one being the worst of all…he was leaving the day after my spring break started rather than in the middle of the break. The date had moved up! How many times can you enjoy your “last moments” when they keep getting either dragged out longer and longer or, worse, moved up?

I don’t think I can even begin to describe my anger, frus­tration, sadness, and helplessness as his deployment crept closer by the second. One moment I wanted to scream, the next I wanted to cry. I wanted to be alone to deal with my feelings, but I wanted to be with him. I really felt like I was losing my mind. I couldn’t focus on anything. I forgot things. But through it all I tried to maintain myself. I continued to work and go through each day. I don’t know if my students will say I was a good teacher during that time, because I don’t really remember it. Funny how your mind helps you block out some of your most difficult moments.

During that time, the hardest thing was trying to be strong for my husband. I knew that as the day was getting closer, he was getting more and more nervous and sad. I held it together for him because of a rule we’ve had since we got married: only one freak-out at a time—one of us has to be the sane one. I stayed strong because I thought that’s what he needed. By “strong” I mean that I didn’t cry or really say much to him about how I was feeling. That was totally out of character for me, because most of the time I talk about my feelings. I don’t like to keep anything in where it can eat me alive. I think if I had it to do over again (and I might in the future), I would let him know how I felt rather than putting on my bravest face.

Chapter Three

The long drive home…

The evening of Brandon’s deployment began with drop­ping his bags off at the truck at ten o’clock at night. This was followed by the issuing of his weapon and neither of us being allowed to leave the barracks area. We had four hours of time to sit and wait. Waiting for something awful to happen is about the worst feeling in the world—like you know someone is about to rip your heart out, and you have no strength to stop it from happening.

We sat in silence most of the time, numb and sad all at once. It was hard to look at his face, because if I did, I would see his tears. I knew seeing that would make me cry, and I couldn’t let that happen, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to stop.

After a torturous four hours of knowing the end was near, the soldiers had a formation to make sure everyone was accounted for and to check their carry-on bags to make sure they were the correct size. There I stood, all alone, struggling to see my husband in the crowd of men standing in rows and blocks and coming forward one by one to place their bag in the box on the ground at the front of the forma­tion. Five hundred people checking their carry-on bags took an almost intolerable amount of time away from the time we had left together. I wanted to jump out of my skin with frustration. I kept looking around, hoping I would see someone I knew so I would at least have someone to talk to, but there wasn’t anyone. I couldn’t control what was going on, and I couldn’t be with my husband. I just had to watch him from afar.

Following the bag-checking fiasco, Brandon and I were granted some more time together at the gym, where we would eventually have to say good-bye. Every time someone walked to the microphone to make an announcement, my heart sank. Over and over random announcements were made, but not the announcement telling everyone to say their final good-byes. Fighting back the tears that were threatening to spill in front of hundreds of strangers who were feeling the same despair and helplessness as me was overwhelming, and I felt like I was drowning. I had hit my breaking point. I looked at Brandon, and feeling that I just couldn’t take this long, drawn-out good-bye anymore, I asked him to walk me to the car.

Once we were at the car, I broke down in heaving sobs. I couldn’t even talk to say good-bye. We both cried and finally said good-bye. But then, as he started to walk inside to spend his last few minutes alone, I stopped him. Knowing that this time together, even though it felt rotten, might be our last (after all, he was going to war, not just an extended vacation), I couldn’t let him go. I went back into the gym and endured more cheerful band music (as if we were at a parade and not the most awful day of my life!). Brandon and I sat in the bleachers full of strangers and held each other. That’s all we could do; there were no more words to be spoken.

Finally at 3:30 in the morning—that’s right, 3:30 a.m.—the announcement was made for the soldiers to say their final good-byes and to line up. Brandon and I held hands and kissed good-bye. As the soldiers were lining up, I started my numb walk to the car.

While we were in the gym, a terrible fog had rolled in. I could barely see the road in front of me, and I could not see the sides of the road at all. Kind of fitting—like driving into a horror movie—and not the best way to set up my next year alone. A drive that should have found me safely in my bed in ten minutes took nearly twenty because I couldn’t safely drive any faster. I only found my way home because of a storage place with neon lights blazing through the fog across the street from my neighborhood. Everything was eerily quiet.

As I entered my house, it hit me. I was alone. Totally, completely, and utterly alone, and there was nothing I could do about it. Feeling like I couldn’t breathe, I sat down on my bed and tried to steady myself. I felt the overwhelming urge to talk to someone, anyone, to decompress and rant about the unbelievable night I had just experienced. I felt so many emotions that I thought I was going to explode, but who do you call at four in the morning? No one I knew. I think I probably could have called anyone and they would have grudgingly talked to me, but I would have added feeling rotten for waking them up to the plethora of emotions I was already experiencing. Instead I huddled up with my dog, cried, and tried to sleep.

If I had that night to do over, I would have said good-bye to Brandon at home, on my terms. I would not have tortured myself with saying good-bye for hours. That horrific experience almost did me in, and my year away from him hadn’t even started! Or if I were going to go with him to the gym to say good-bye, I would make sure there was someone there to drive me home and to be with me afterward so I wouldn’t have to deal with my feelings and Brandon’s deployment alone. With my yearlong battle just beginning, I was losing the war of emotions already. No one should have to be as brave as I tried to be that night.