Knee Deep in the Hooah It Will Remain… Happy New Year!
Another year has come and gone. Another year of life that was lived, sometimes by the seat of my pants, and sometimes in a time warp where a minute felt like a month. My life has been turned upside down, inside out and backside outward by this thing called the Army. I have felt ankle deep, waist deep and neck deep in the Hooah! at times. I think that knee deep is still a pretty good measure for where I tend to fall on the average day.
We have faced deployment, extended deployment, movement in the battlefield, no communication from either soldier for a while, wounds, injuries, leave times, chaptering out, and rehabbing to go back in.
My life has changed beyond what was recognizable to me. If you had told me last Christmas and New Years that I would be living the life I am living right now, I would have scoffed and secretly thought “you obviously know nothing about me!” Well, I am here on the opposite end of arrogance, and I am tired, just about broke, humbled and not finished just yet.
In January of last year Bryan had made a definite decision to join the military. It was also in January that the President announced the change in strategy in Iraq. I got a call from Mike that very night an hour before the Address. He told me that if the President announces a surge that his deployment would be moved up by few months, and he would be headed over sooner than we had anticipated. The President said the words, and the troops gathered their gear, shipped their equipment and headed over to the sandbox within 10 weeks from the night the speech was uttered.
It was in February that Bryan started taking his physical fitness tests to qualify for an age waiver. He was already up and running every morning by 0400 while I slept. We began to prepare our home to go back on the market after a long period of trying to sell it just a year before. Noah, my middle son, moved out into his own apartment so that he could be established enough to stay here in town when we would move later to catch up with Bryan at whatever base we landed at. Noah was starting his third semester of college and didn’t want to leave. I was resolved that Noah would live in his small apartment, Bryan would go off to Ft. Benning, Mike would head out to Iraq and I would be stuck in a house that would not sell. That’s not how it all played out.
In March Mike came home for a final visit before deployment. Right after his visit the house went on the market, and I started to slowly understand what mothers go through when they have a son who deploys to a combat zone. My son is in the Infantry. I know enough about the Infantry to know he would be seeing a lot of action in Iraq. He was headed to Baghdad. It was at this time that I broke out in my first full blown case of shingles. Let the nerves begin!
In April I got a call on Mike’s 22nd Birthday. It was him! He had just landed in Kuwait. I missed the first call, and I literally wanted to scream. I could not believe that he called me for the first time in his deployment and I missed it! It wasn’t too much later that he was able to call again, and I wished him a happy birthday. I started my blog on that day. We had a chuckle because it was just a year earlier on his 21st that a Drill Instructor whispered in his ear during breakfast chow “no drinky-drinky for you soldier!” He was in the middle of a field exercise that day for his AIT training to be an Infantryman. Well, there was no drinky-drinky for him in Kuwait either outside of a really horrible tasting near-beer. We were hoping his 23rd would be different, but the chances of his deployment being over by then is next to none. He is not due home until the middle of the year next year. Fifteen months after he starts is the deal for now. It was in April that I started to pack up my home because the miracle of miracles happened and it actually sold after a few short weeks on the market.
May came and went, and we closed on our home the very day that Bryan kissed me good-bye and left for basic combat training. The night he left the baby woke up with a fever and a lot of pain in her ear. I woke up every hour with her that night. I woke up realizing that no matter how tired I was the next day that it was on my shoulders now to deal with it all, and deal with it I did. Some days better than others, but I did what needed to be done. I braved recurrent ear infections, Nate starting a new school, moving my household with my husband gone, and dealing with the stress of having my son in a combat zone and no communication with my husband during his time in BCT.
The next few months are literally a blur. I moved again, unpacked my home and tried to make the new place feel familiar for Emma and Nate. I got used to Armyease and phone conversations with cyborgs as I tried to figure out DEERS and benefits. I planned a trip to Benning to see Bryan, chatted with Mike on AIM at least a few nights a week, and was there to chat with him when he needed to decompress after his first serious encounter on the battlefield. Through this time and to the current I dropped 45 pounds off of my frame, ran my first 5K and started to feel strong again. After Bryan’s graduation in July he started OCS, and we went from complete silence to being able to talk again. Bryan really loved OCS and all of the great experiences he was living. Neither of us could have been braced for what would happen six weeks into it. Around the same time Mike was moved from Baghdad to a more volatile region in Iraq. We lost contact for quite a while.
In September I braced for the sadness and the memories that hit on September 11th each year. I posted about my own memories on that day. I made a lot of new friends through my blog, and I got a phone call from Iraq informing me that Mike would be getting a purple heart. His wound was very minor, but everything is magnified times a thousand when it happens on the battlefield — at least for a mother it is. One week to the day of Mike’s call home regarding his injury I found out by mistake that my husband had broke his hip and was in surgery. I had received no phone call to inform me of any of it. I got an email offering me sympathy and support from a fellow Candidate’s fiance late that evening. She was simply reaching out and had thought that I would have been informed already, but I had no clue of what had happened earlier that morning. I had just found out that my husband’s hopes and dreams had just been put on hold – for how long, none of us could know.
Since then we have tumbled in and out of what we are going to do. Mike is still deployed and will remain so until the middle of the year. Bryan is home and has temporarily chaptered out so that he can rehabilitate his hip. He is still open to serving, but right now he is considering a direct commission that was offered to him much earlier in the year. We don’t know if it is still an offer or not. I am at a loss on some days. There are some days when I remember the efforts of writing every day to encourage myself, encourage others and send encouragement to my guys, and then some days I want to scream. Some days I look at the sacrifices and think of how it is all worth it, and then other days I can’t figure out what we gave up so much for.
I sit here today in a beautiful home that I am grateful to stay in, but it is not my home. Our accounts have slowly been dwindling and my husband is in need of physical therapy and has never received a minute of any medical rehab for his injury. Have we fallen through the cracks in the Army, or is my husband considered a throw-away soldier since he was injured during his time in TraDoc? I want him to go back in if that is what he wants, but to be honest I feel gun shy at this point. At least with a civilian employer there is a certain amount of accountability when you are hurt on the job.
I was reliving some of the irony of things in my mind the other day. I remember when Bryan was still on crutches and stuck at HHC while he was chaptering out. He was getting all of his issued equipment together and he was really determined to hobble up the small PX so that he could find a canteen lid. He said the one he had got dented during a field exercise and he couldn’t turn it in that way. He could not turn in a dented canteen lid, but the Army sent him home with an 8-inch scar, a metal plate in his hip, no compensation, a limp and no physical therapy. Ironic isn’t it? At least the lid got replaced.
Will I remain an Army wife? I don’t know. I am going to be very supportive and promise to brave the future if we remain an Army family. We are waiting to see what the Lord allows for our future in the Army, but regardless of what the future brings our way we will brave it as a family and together. I am sure I will remain an Army mom. Mike seems pretty determined to go green to gold, and he has the intelligence and drive to do it. We’ll see how he is doing after his 15-month deployment. If I am exhausted after this year I can only imagine the toll this long deployment will have on him. Fortunately he is more crusty around the edges than I am, and he is much stronger than I had ever imagined he could be.
From where I sit I have to say one thing is for certain in this Army life… there is no boredom and you learn to appreciate things on a level that you never would have known in the civilian life. I feel blessed that I could experience so much in such a short time, but I am praying that 2008 is a year filled with more work and less recovery time. I am praying that when I am writing my year in review next year that I have Mike home with us resting and my husband will be busy doing whatever work he finds himself knee deep into. Me? I will be here writing, loving my family, making my home a safe place filled with love and prayer.
I have been very blessed to “meet” so many of you who read this blog. I am still in shock sometimes that I have made so many new friends, and so many of you feel like family members (like the sweet “bratty” one *wink* ) . You all have walked with me through some of the most tumultuous times of my year. Thank you for your comments (even though Halo Scan has suppressed the old comments in blogger… I can still see them and I DO read them from time to time!). Thank you all so much for your words of encouragement, your words of correction and your words of wisdom through all of this.
Happy New Year to you all!
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