When someone you love is deployed, you do your best to put your fears out of your mind. You take things as they come, you do what needs to be done, and you very quickly get good at not thinking too much about other things. Most of the time you can keep most of your mind away from things like IEDs, and ambushes, and sectarian violence. With daily phone contact and email, it can be easy to think of the deployment as nothing more than a long, long business trip. You can keep that up for day after day, as the long deployment slowly - glacially - moves along. You can keep that up for day after day, but only if you are lucky. But not forever. If you can work hard enough, you can get the fear to lie dormant, sleeping, in the back of your mind. Keeping it that way is the trick.
As you go through the days, part of your mind keeps a quiet watch out for certain things. Mostly, these are things in the news. Some stories, like the ones about a general increase in violence, give the sleeping fear a little nudge - just enough to remind you that it's there. Other stories - like the ones about some unit getting extended in the sandbox for another few months - give you a hard shake. And then there are some stories - two soldiers killed when their helicopter crashes near Al Amok - that make the fear jump to life and grab your heart with both hands.
That's part of the life of the modern military spouse. During the deployment, there's always a part of your brain that scans the background for the really important stories. You know your loved one's area of operations. You know the major cities. You know the unit, you know the types of missions that go on, and there's a part of your brain that instantly compares all of the new stories with that knowledge base. It's a necessary filter, because if you had to consciously figure out whether or not you needed to worry about each individual death, you'd go nuts. Instead, most of the deaths can go past in an almost-blur. A marine dead here, two soldiers there, but you don't start to worry until you hear a report of deaths in one of those areas, doing one of those missions.
That's when you start to really check the news, and when you try to squeeze every possible detail from the few that are available. Only two dead in the crash, and no reports of injuries? OK, that's probably an OH-58D, and she doesn't fly in those. OK, it's her brigade, but it says that the soldiers were with Task Force Yankee, and she's with Task Force Zebra. Usually, anyway. Of course, sometimes...
And then the waiting starts.
First, you wait for an email or a phone call. When those don't come, you know (if you didn't already) that whatever has happened does involve your loved one's unit. The military does it's best to make sure that notifications take place properly. They definitely don't want bad news to be delivered by accident, or inappropriately, or just by the absence of a phone call, so communications get shut down. Nobody calls or emails home, and everybody at home gets a democratic share of the fear.
Then you get to wait for the notifications to take place. You keep an eye or an ear on the door, whether you want to or not. You hope that the friends you listed on the preference sheet aren't getting any calls. You know the notification hours, and you know that the more time that passes without someone dropping by, the better things look. But you still wait.
And while you wait you hope. You hope that whatever happened didn't happen to someone you love. You know that really means that you are hoping that it happened to someone that someone else loves, and that there's a good chance you'll know those people. You just hope that you'll be lucky enough to be left with a sense of guilt-tinged relief in a day or two.
And when night comes, you lie in bed listening to the quiet noises in the house, and you think. You hope, and you worry, and you think. I don't know what others think about, but I always wind up thinking about why. I think about why this is happening. And about why I don't really know why it's happening. I wonder how we got to this point, and I wonder if the fools who got us here know how it happened. I've given up on wondering if they know how to get out of the mess they've gotten us into. I'm confident that they don't, and I'm confident that we're not going to get out of it anytime soon. Which moves things from anger right back to hope. You hope that you'll get past this current period of fear, and through the deployment. And then you hope that your loved one will find a way to keep from getting deployed again. You know, of course, that someone is going to get deployed, and that some family is going to have to deal with the separation, waiting, and fear, but you hope that it's someone else's. And you get to feel mildly guilty for that, too.
Hope and fear. Thought and wonder. Anger and guilt. That's this war as I see it, and that's the kind of night I'm having tonight.
UPDATE: I just got an email from my wife, so I get the guilt-tinged relief. This time.
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With me now, it's just some friends. Thirty-eight years ago it was my father. Thinking about my friends recently, I ran the numbers. They are less likely now to be injured or killed in a given time period than they were in Viet Nam. My father made it back. I forget the exact numbers but it was less than 1%/year for Iraq, more than 1%/year in Viet Nam. And in Iraq, the ratio of KIA to injured is lower.
And none of this means a damned thing in the end. Either my friends will make it back whole or they won't. And it'll be no comfort that they had a better chance than my father and his generation if they don't. And that's just my friends. I can't imagine being in your shoes, or my mother's. I hear your stories, but I'm one step removed. I wish each and every one of our men and women home safely, but in the end I feel impotent in the face of war. My thoughts are with you.
When we were little kids, I used to share a bedroom and bunk beds with TQA. True story. He's my big brother. And, when we were (I want to say) 10 and 8 years old, respectively, we got a new kitten, who my mom named Rose Maybud.
Anyway, Rose Maybud was a curious cat. And I had the bottom bunk, and there was this gap between the head of my mattress and the wooden slats that formed the sides of the bed. For a few nights early in Rose Maybud's time, she became very feisty, and would crouch underneath this gap and, when my head came into view, she would bat at it. With those weird glowy dark cat eyes, too. Scared the bejeezus out of me, and I didn't sleep.
My brother helped calm my fears by offering to share the upper bunk with me a couple of nights, and then we switched spots, just for a couple of days, until I got over my fears.
This is so much bigger. But there's a part of me that's somewhat sure that I could help make it better just by being there, and wishing that I could do that.
Lots of love, big brother.
Cousin, once again, you've articulated a state of mind to crystal clarity. When you start to think about this big world and the random in the actions of its inhabitants, it can make your head spin.
All you can do is watch, hope, and pray that we make it out the other end.
My thoughts are with you daily, and with those Over There.
-e
Thank you for sharing that. It is exactly the kind of direct, personal revelation about the Iraq war that the Bush regime has tried so hard to hide from the bulk of the American people, and that is so necessary for those of us without our own relationships with people over there to experience vicariously as part of our political consciousness.