I had this big idea to make buck-eye balls like my mom always has..but it was much more work than I expected. Katherine and Elsie helped me finish them up.

***This post belongs to a series of posts detailing life as a 22-year-old military wife, back in the beginning of the War on Terrorism. To read it from the beginning, start here. To read the  chapter before this one, click here.***

Christmas arrived.

I could ignore it in my sadness over not having Alan with me, or I could embrace it for the fact that it was still Christmas.

Truthfully, it was not a sad time anymore. I had Elsie, Kayla, Sarah, and Cloe to hang out with all the time. Life was mostly downright fun.

I hung lighted garland around my duplex front door, and my friends and I gathered for a Christmas meal together. We made buck-eye balls in the kitchen and drank raspberry wine and sparkling white grape juice. It was my first year to ever play Christmas hostess in my own home, though it was actually still weeks before Christmas. I had a ball decorating and using my fancy glasses.

Table all set for Christmas with my friends. Never pass on an opportunity to use the fancy glasses!!

Some people keep their beautiful wedding china and crystal in boxes or cabinets, but that’s never been me. I am a firm believer in pulling out your best things for company or special events. What’s the point of owning things that no one ever sees or uses? Give yourself the blessing of eating off your most beautiful plates and drinking out of the glasses with the platinum rims is what I say!

It’s true that friends are the family you make for yourself, and we had built for ourselves such a delightful family. I wouldn’t trade them for all the stability, security, and never-changing zip codes in the world!

Katherine, Sarah, and Cloe

Christmas dinner 2003 made me proud to be an Army wife.

There we were, not fretting about the safety of our husbands or letting jealousy get to us. We were not licking wounds and building up bitterness. Instead, we were laughing and cooking and encouraging one another. This was our own family away from home. You don’t hear much about military spouse “battle buddies”, but it IS very much a thing. It was THE thing that saw us through that long, potentially lonely year. Only it wasn’t so lonely because we had each other.

I don’t remember if we all exchanged gifts, but I do remember this one gift I received from Kayla that Christmas. She said she knew I liked to decorate with pretty things, so she bought me this blue and yellow sewing box that matched my guest room colors. It’s funny the things that you remember, but that’s the only gift I remember from that whole Christmas year. It made me feel special that she’d thought enough about me to buy me a gift, and also that she said she knew I liked pretty things.

Believe it or not, I actually DID sew that year too. I was the designated hemmer of our group. I can’t sew a stitch without a machine, but with the machine, I could read the directions and hem up everyone’s pants just fine. It did seem like all of my friends had short legs.

And so with this feeling of love and hopefulness and the recent victory of our husbands in catching Saddam Hussein providing the optimism, we all headed our separate ways to home for Christmas.

a photo of Alan on Christmas or sometime close to Christmas, in Iraq

Home for Christmas

I made the rounds to all of our family gatherings, both on my side of the family and on Alan’s side. It was the right thing to do. Things should proceed forth as normally as possible. Even if I was still new to Alan’s side, I would forge on and provide plenty of smiles and warmth because I was the closest thing anyone had to Alan that year.

When I was a child, Christmas was always a BIG deal. First, we’d go to Dad’s family’s gathering on Christmas Eve. All the extended family would be there at Grandaddy and Granny’s house.

Then on Christmas day, we’d either go to Maw-maw’s house, Maw-Maw was mom’s mom, or we’d go to Granny Hyde’s house. Granny Hyde was Maw-maw’s mom. Both Granny Hyde and Maw-Maw loved hosting Christmas, so it was arranged that they took turns.

Christmas with my cousin and her baby

But just a few years prior to the Christmas of 2003, both sides of my family experienced profound loss. We lost Maw-Maw in ’97 and Granddaddy (Dad’s dad) in ’98.

Maw-maw died on Christmas Eve, leaving this gaping black hole in the lives of every single one of us. I had spent one week every summer of my childhood at Maw-maw’s house. She was one of my heroes and a true kindred spirit. We all loved her. This is still the hardest loss I’ve ever experienced.

Most people know when to go, or they depart when they are old and their calling has been fulfilled. With Maw-maw it felt more sudden, and as though we were all robbed. No, it should not have been her time to go, and yet it was. She left early, and the disappointing feeling of loss from that cut so deeply that even in 2003, six years later, we still all keenly felt her absence.

Maw-maw was fine. She was with God, but we weren’t quite fine. But we are resilient people if we are nothing else, so we still made the best of it. We still came together and followed all our traditions.

It’s amazing how comforting Christmas traditions are and how much you miss them once they’ve gone. How I’d love to have just one of those Christmas gatherings back.

I enjoyed seeing my family. I always found it comforting to get to see family, and we did still have Granny, who was 90 by then, and we were thankful. Everyone missed Alan, but no one on my side of the family was accustomed to having Alan there yet. He’d only been to 1 family Christmas, so his absence wasn’t nearly as impactful as it was at Alan’s family Christmas.

Alan’s Family Christmas

As comforting as participating in my own family’s Christmas traditions was, going to Alan’s family Christmas was….emotional. It’s like walking out of a movie theatre of childhood memories and back into the reality of your life, with people who are aching.

Me, with Alan’s cousins and his sister

Probably most people didn’t realize how sad they were that Alan wasn’t there, and everyone put on a happy face and enjoyed Christmas. Alan’s family is also a clan of successful, resilient people. I’m telling you, we come from excellent stock.

But sometimes our pain leaks through when we don’t mean for it to. It’s there in their eyes or their quiet or the way their smile doesn’t quite meet their eye crinkles.

Alan’s family doesn’t begin Christmas celebrations until Christmas day. For Christmas lunch, all of Alan’s mother’s family gathers, even to this day, at Alan’s grandfather and grandmother’s house, and eats and opens presents. These grandparents had four children, and each of their children had at least two children, so it is a ginormous family gathering.

Everyone seemed jovial enough, considering, and asked how Alan was doing in Iraq. Aunt Ellen had even sent Alan his own little Christmas tree.

But around lunch, I started to notice their grief. Alan is a happy, hearty, talkative, laughing fellow, and his absence was extremely noticeable.

Alan’s grandfather said the prayer as usual before the meal, and his voice cracked. It wasn’t just a little crack. It was a heavy one, from a man who’d already lost a brother and who knows how many friends to the ravages of war.

By the end of Grandaddy Cunningham’s Christmas day blessing, there could not have been any dry eyes in the room.

The t.v. was going most of the day in the kitchen of Grandmother’s house because President George W. Bush showed up on a surprise visit to Baghdad and had lunch with the troops. Alan wasn’t actually in Baghdad, but it still made us feel more connected to him to see the President and the men and women in uniform eating with him. We knew they were all there in Iraq. They were having Christmas too, and it looked like everything was okay.

In the afternoon, once everyone had opened presents, I headed back to Alan’s parents’ house with his sister and his parents. We opened presents there that night, and in the morning we all took a 5 hour drive to a small town near Augusta, Georgia to be with Alan’s dad’s side of the family. They had a large extended family gathering too.

Pants! Thank you!

The biggest thing I remember about Christmas night was that we all wore our “ho ho hooah” 4th Infantry Division Christmas t-shirts while we opened presents. I also remember that Alan’s dad kept things light with some funny jokes. My favorite was when he opened a brand new pair of trousers and said, “Oh! Pants! Thank you!” and then proceeded to put the pants on his head and stick his arms in the pant legs.

We needed that laugh! I can still see it in my head!

Alan did get to call and talk to us all and wish us a merry Christmas. He did an amazing job of keeping upbeat.

Holding one another together

We all managed to have a pretty good time. Everyone was putting on a brave face for everyone else, and maybe it sounds stuffy, but the truth was it was helpful. We were all holding each other up from falling apart in this way. It worked. I can’t explain it to you, but it just works when humans get together and walk through life and hardship together.

Maybe it doesn’t even sound like hardship in the telling of it, and yet it was. I know that it was because I remember the point that I reached when I was done holding it together, and I just let myself fall all apart into a salty heap of tears. Sure, I’d shed a few tears over Christmas already, but then there comes that breaking point.

The airport.

That’s where I was when I let it all go. Christmas was finished. Visiting was done. I had been there for everyone. All that was required had been fulfilled. Now I had only to ride this airplane home, and Christmas would be over, and the new year would begin.

And this was one of my best new year’s yet because 2004 would bring Alan back home to us, and we could get started with regular life. We could finally be that newlywed couple that we’d been waiting to be.

I watched them all walking by, the soldiers in the airport, in uniform, going and coming on mid-tour leave, and there was news coverage of the sad military families apart for Christmas, and then there was this People magazine. I think it was People. It could have been anything, but that was the moment where the world started to spin.

Suddenly, I was acutely aware of sitting there all alone, and all of these articles and news stories might as well have been about me, and then I started to bawl. That’s always how it is with me. I can go on for ages and not think about any of my problems in a personal way. I can wear the stone face and be tough, until suddenly I’m not.

Unplugging the emotional stopper

I cried a river, quietly and trying not to make eye contact with anyone. Did anyone notice? Surely. No one bothered me, because that wasn’t what I needed anyway. What I needed was to get those tears out. It was time to unplug the emotional stopper.

Tears are just a part of the process. There’s a healing function in allowing yourself to feel, not wallow, but just be honest about your feelings, fill it up with tears, but then drain it before it soaks too much. Soaking is good for dirty dishes, but it’s not so good for self-pitying thoughts. Have your cry, then clean yourself up, and do something else.

When you know in your heart that you’ve done all the right things, there is a significant peace that comes with that. I had that peace. Sure, I’d made mistakes over the course of 2003, but at Christmas I had done what was right and good, and I felt as though I’d been an encouragement to both of our families.

Besides, this was 2004 just beginning, the year that would bring Alan home.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”  Proverbs 13:12

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The post The Real Army Wives Series: Merry Christmas To Iraq, 2003 appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Saddam was captured on the outskirts of Ad Dawr, where most of Saddam’s family lived. You will see Ad Dawr spelled different ways in different places.

*****This post is part of the Real Army Wives of Fort Hood series. A new chapter is published each Monday. (Well, I aim for Monday..) Click here to read last week’s chapter: The Only One Without Mid-Tour Leave*****

On the morning of December 13th, 2003,

I was awakened by a phone call from Alan’s parents. Remember, they watched the news constantly, while I only tuned in occasionally.

“Turn on the news, April!” Nonna urged.

I sat up in bed and turned on the little 19 inch that I kept in my room to watch Lifetime shows at night.

I found a news show, and there it was. The news was on every network and cable news channel there was. “Saddam captured by US forces!”

“That’s where Alan is!!” Nonna explained excitedly, “Ad Dwar!! He gets to be there for this!!”

“Oh, wow, you’re right. That’s a small town, so that’s EXACTLY where Alan is!!”

Everyone was so excited, especially since no one had had much hope. After all, it’d been 2 years since 9/11, and they had yet to find Osama bin Laden. If they couldn’t find bin Laden, maybe Saddam would prove just as difficult.

Thankfully, that proved to not be the case. Do you remember watching all of this on t.v.? Well, special forces soldiers came in and found and extricated the ex-king, but Alan’s unit, 4-42 Field Artillery was there to support them, so Cloe’s husband and Kayla’s husband were involved too. And really this victory belonged to all of 4th Infantry Division. This provided some much needed excitement and encouragement!!

Alan and other members of his unit went over to the hole and took photos the next day.

Saddam Hussein was discovered on December 13th, and for you youngsters, Saddam Hussein was the President of Iraq from 1979-2003. He was a notorious figure due to his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and genocide of groups of Kurds and Shiites.

editor’s note–Tikrit not Tikrmt. That was an autocorrect error as I retyped this letter since Alan’s actual letter was too faded to photograph.

These photos were all taken on December 15, 2003.

However, our camera was off a month, so the time stamp says 1/14/2004. But in 2004, the hole was cemented over to prevent it from becoming a monument.

Alan, standing by the air pipe to the Saddam hole

Saddam was hiding in a rural area, close to the Tigris River. He was living in a hut, with a trail that led through an orange grove to the river. The hole that we all saw on the news was his hiding hole. How much of the time he spent in the hole vs. the hut, I do not know.

Entry way to where Saddam hid out

The famous styrofoam covering. The rug that had covered the styrofoam is removed.

It was a very thick styrofoam lid.

We ran this photo in several publications in the U.S. following the capture.

Let’s take a tour of the famous hole and hut, shall we?

Going in

As you can see, the hole had an L type shape to it.

You can see the air pipe.

The hole was walled in concrete.

Doesn’t it seem like this bed shelf beside the hole would be a giveaway? But I suppose Saddam had many many friends and family members covering for him and taking care of him here.

The bedroom…..not very presidential, eh?

Not the ritziest part of town…a far cry from his palaces..

You can see where Alan labeled his bedroom and kitchen in Saddam’s hut.

a peek into the presidential hide-out kitchen, complete with bug spray and dusty shelves..

Note: This is how it looked AFTER being ransacked by American soldiers for intelligence gathering.

pathway through the orange orchard to the river

I asked Alan a few burning questions:

“How many times do you think you walked super close to the notorious Saddam Hussein and never even knew it?”

Maybe once.

“Did you ever go to that orange grove before?”

We’d been within 20 feet of it, but only once, and only a week before that. I’d never been to the back of the grove.

“Had you ever seen that shack?”

I had never noticed it.

path to Saddam

Looks like a beautiful pathway, doesn’t it?

!

Locals Protested.

This is Saddam’s hometown, so yeah, of course they came out to protest this event. This was the whole crowd. Alan said he went into his base, and saw soldiers gathering around the t.v.

“They are making this look like a huge protest of 100s of people on t.v., when really it’s like 50 people.”

The soldiers often became disenchanted with American media coverage of this war.

Alan said that just the day before he’d talked to this boy in front and given them school supplies. Now here was the boy protesting. Alan looked at the boy like, “What??” And he said the boy just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

All the school books were riddled with pictures of Saddam Hussein; he was a little less than humble! In hindsight, Alan said there were some older males in back that were putting the school teachers and students up to the trouble by tearing out pictures of him and just causing a raucous to just see how the Americans would handle it.  The armed guards in front of Alan were of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. These were newly trained males by allied forces such as Alan’s unit, to handle general security tasks alongside our troops and the new Iraqi government.

The timing of this capture was perfect. It gave us all a sense of progress and victory and hope going into Christmas, for everyone involved.

It was such a surreal thing to be closely involved in an event of international importance like this. I remember being very aware of the enormity of it all.

And what became of Saddam Hussein?

Well, he was tried by 5 Iraqi judges as part of a special tribunal. He was found guilty of the 1982 Dujail massacre, and he was sentenced to hanging. The hanging was carried out in December 2006, 3 years after his capture.

For more information on Saddam Hussein’s history and capture, you can read these articles which were also my sources.

Saddam Hussein Trial Fast Facts–CNN

Seeking Justice in Dujail–BBC

The post Inside the Saddam Hole, December 2003 appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Alan, at the Balad Airfield, with other soldiers, waiting to board a C-5 to Qatar.

****This post is part of a series titled The Real Army Wives of Fort Hood. Each Monday I post a new chapter. These are all true stories of my own experiences on the home-front as well as stories from my friends.****

Please excuse the horrendous photo quality of these pictures. They were taken in 02-04, and are not available to me digitally, so all I have is fuzzy photos of photos. My apologies!

Sometimes in life things simply don’t go your way, and there’s nothing to do but make the best of a tough situation. Sending my husband to war the very first year of our marriage felt like a series of tough breaks, let me tell ya!

Somewhere around the 6-month-mark of the deployment, word came down that SOME of the soldiers would be receiving a little thing called “mid-tour leave.”

Mid-Tour Leave is this amazing treat where a service member gets to leave their year-or-longer deployment to come home for TWO whole weeks.

When I first heard of this, I was full of hope and excitement. I had never imagined that Alan might get to come see me before the year was up. But wait. Some? How do they choose which ones get a break and which ones don’t?

Alan, proudly displaying a rat that he’d killed. Their building suffered quite the infestation of rodents.

My friends and I tried not to get our hopes up, but of course we all hoped and prayed that our husbands would indeed receive one of these mid-tour leaves. Sign us up for that right away!

Immediately, we started seeing soldiers come home on pass. We were excited to see them, and it filled us with even more anticipation of “What about me? Am I next?”

And right away, Alan began his campaign to keep me from getting my hopes up.

Alan had no intention of taking any pass. If there were a limited number of mid-tour leaves available, then Alan maintained that he would not touch one. No way was he taking a pass which may cost a younger soldier, with less rank, or a father who wanted to see their children, theirs.

“April, think about it. Some of these have children they haven’t seen in 6 months. And how would you feel if you saw my boss at home while I wasn’t getting to come home? We don’t want to make anyone feel like that.”

He was right. Eventually, I had to watch all of his bosses come home on leave while Alan stayed in the combat zone. No, it wasn’t a fantastic feeling.

That’s Alan. Always taking the high road. Yes, that’s one reason I married him, but how irritating was this now.

At first I fought it.

It was hard for me to convert to this unselfish way of thinking. Alan hardly had any rank, it seemed. He was a lieutenant. That’s as low as you can go in the officer ranks, but compared to the average, young enlisted men it was a different story.

Everyone had a hard job over there. It’s war. War is ugly, but the lower you are on the totem pole, the greater the likelihood of getting the worst job (in my opinion) of all…..burning out the outhouse waste. There’s actually a registry now of all soldiers exposed to that toxin.

I didn’t want to think about who wouldn’t get a pass if he did. I just wanted HIM to get one! He deserved it. They ALL deserved it. Oh! The insanity of it all!

But in the end, I was proud of Alan for declining to take a mid-tour leave. I accepted what he was doing as the right thing to do.

I stood by and watched as one by one, all of my friends’ husbands came home for their two-week pass. Jealousy threatened, I know it did.

Sure, I was jealous. Who wouldn’t be? But at the same time, I was happy for my friends. I was especially happy for the ones who were still having a harder time emotionally and for the fathers and children reunited.

Isn’t it funny how sometimes you have to work at being a good person? Ha! I sometimes had to work at it, but not too hard. It made me happy to see my friends happy, and yes, it made me sad too. I wasn’t sad that they got to see their husbands. I was only sad that I didn’t get to see mine. Why couldn’t we ALL get this privilege? I’m sure there was a good reason, though I don’t know what it was.

Ever the optimist, sometimes I’d allow myself to dream that one day he’d just show up at my door, on a surprise mid-tour leave. Surely he was just taking me for a ride. Really he was coming home just like everyone else.

But it never happened. 

Alan did eventually receive a pass, though it wasn’t nearly as awesome as going home for 2 weeks. Instead, they sent service members who did not receive a mid-tour leave like Alan on a 3 day pass to Qatar.

He got to relax for a few days without the stress of war, and that’s the most important thing, though 3 days doesn’t sound like much. It was definitely better than nothing.

I laughed because the kitty that I was fostering belonged to an Air Force officer who was deployed to Qatar. In this case, the Air Force’s deployment location was the Army’s vacation spot. ha!!

While Alan was in Qatar, he went shopping in a local mall there. He sent me photos from the Starbucks and such to show me how Westernized Qatar is.

That crazy man purchased a full burqa for me and Middle Eastern clothes for himself as well. He thought it would be so hilarious if we wore those to the mall in Killeen whenever he got home from the war and just watch people’s reactions. I told him no way. He was out of touch (literally) to think people in Texas in 2004 would find it funny for us to dress like that and go hang out at the mall.

Alan may be extra responsible and kind, but now you also know that he has a good sense of humor and enjoys shocking people. I, on the other hand, would rather never shock anyone.

As you can see from the women’s clothing around Alan and the other soldiers, Qatar is still a very strict Muslim society.

We weren’t the only ones to not receive mid-tour leave. We were just the only ones of my close friends, so it seemed like EVERYONE got one but us.

You can also see (in the photos above) that there were actually plenty of young soldiers who did not receive a mid-tour leave. I think there may have been some sort of lottery that Alan asked them to leave his name out of or something.

I’m thankful they gave at least some of the soldiers a mid-tour leave. Some is better than none, but it was a giant disappointment for all the ones denied that leave. I don’t know. Maybe Alan wasn’t all that disappointed, but I can guarantee you that many were.

Years later, when Alan went back to Iraq in 2008-2009, we DID receive a mid-tour leave, by then everyone did, and it was so sweet. We took the boys to Disney World, and it was such a blessing that helped Joshua (then age 3) to remember who his father was.

the Persian Gulf

Be sure to come back next week for the day Alan’s parents woke me up with BIG news from the war, involving Alan! Here’s a hint: It was December 13, 2003, and I have AMAZING photos of this event.

The post The Only One Without Mid-Tour Leave appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Cloe, Me, and Kayla in Houston

Friday, Oct. 17, 2003

Alan,
Hey! I’m in Houston, Texas! I’m sharing a room with Elsie.
We left Killeen around 3:30 this afternoon. It’s Cloe, Elsie, Kayla, and myself. We all rode down in Cloe’s little 2-door Civic! it was a tight squeeze, but we’re having a lot of fun.

We got here at night, so we haven’t gone anywhere yet. And don’t worry, we aren’t planning on spending much money at all. Tomorrow we’re going on a tour of homes, the mall, and an outdoor concert that’s free.

Cloe’s friend Rachel came over, and we all played board games, Cranium and Clue. You would enjoy Cranium, I think.
And guess who won Clue?? Me, of course! My Clue-winning streak is still alive.

Road trip!

I enjoyed talking to you SO much this morning. I did manage to go back to sleep too–and slept until 12. 🙂 I’ve been talking about cute things you said ALL day.

It meant so much to me that you support my going back to school. Thank you so much. I promise I’m not going to let you down! And we’ll still get to go on our cruise. We’ll cruise away. Just being together is going to be SO romantic!

***********

October and November were all about studying for the GRE, applying to my local university satellite campus, and making trips with family and friends. I went to Houston, Tuscaloosa, my parents’ house, and Destin.

First, there was the trip to Houston mentioned in the letter. I remember staying up past midnight just talking to Elsie after staying up to play board games, and the tour of homes the next day was amazing. It was a tour of these custom-built houses in a swanky area of Houston. Why is it so fun to look at enormous homes? I don’t know, but it is.

Can I be that skinny again, please?? Gracious.

But the thing I remember most was that we visited a church service with Cloe on Sunday morning. I think it was a little Presbyterian or Episcopal church, where Cloe’s father-in-law was the minister. During the “greeting” time, there were many congregants who hugged us and thanked us for our service to our country.

We had not realized this one major human need that we were all missing. We talked about it all the way back to Cloe’s house.

“Wasn’t it great how they hugged us?”

“Yes, but I had a really hard time not crying.”

“Oh, I totally had tears. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t realize how long it had been since someone touched me.”

“I know! Yes! Who knew touch was so important?”

“It is. I had no idea. We should all hug each other more often.”

“Yeah, it’s like you just want to go up to people and say, ‘Excuse me, will you hug me? I haven’t been touched in months, not even on the shoulder. Just touch my arm. That will do.”

There was lots of laughter and that bond of walking that same strange and lonely married-deployed-spouse-with-no-kids path together.

Elsie, Me, Kayla, and Cloe at Cloe’s parents’ house

I don’t think any of us had realized the importance of this need for physical touch in our lives until that church service, and I know for a fact none of those church members that morning had any idea how much their hugs had blessed us….a good thing to remember when you want to help a lonely person! Sometimes it’s just a simple hug that’s needed.

1Finally, brothers, rejoice! Aim for perfect harmony, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you. 12Greet one another with a holy kiss. 13All the saints send you greetings.…

 

2 Corinthians 13:12

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The post When They Touched Us appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

****This post is part of my series on Real Army Wives. This series follows my husband’s first deployment to Iraq in 2003, but it’s the story of the wives back home more so than the men at war. Click here for last week’s post, Alan’s Convoy Attack.*****

Mon., October 6, 2003

Alan,

I’ve had a week off now to think about what it is I should be doing. I really still want to be a physical therapist. The only reason I ever dropped it was because of all the science classes. So today I searched every college in a one hour radius of here, and there are NO physical therapy schools, not even any physical therapy assistant schools.

So that door is just closed to me. Now I simply don’t know what to do. And I’m unsure if I should look for part-time or full-time work. Plus, I’ve already planned long vacations for Thanksgiving and Christmas and payed for the plane tickets.

I don’t know what to do. What do you think? I’d really love to hear your thoughts. I love you, Alan.

I was talking to Elsie today too, and she said that the Army will pay for you to get a master’s degree. You just have to commit to more time in the Army. I want you to know that at this point I would be fine with that.

You are excellent at what you’re doing, and I know it makes you happy. And now I KNOW what it is like to have a job that you hate, so I think once you find something you enjoy, you should stick with that. I will always support you.

[clickToTweet tweet=”I know what it is to have a job that you hate. Once you find a job you enjoy, you should stick with that. #milspouse” quote=”‘I know what it is to have a job that you hate, so I think once you find something you enjoy, you should stick with that. I will always support you.'”]

It’s hard with writing. Sometimes you may read things one way, but really I was saying it another. There’s no sure-fire tone of voice in writing. So let me just say this: This letter is written in a completely, gentle, thoughtful, tired kind of voice. I am a person who at this moment is just wondering what direction to go in.

It must be awesome to know what you want to do and be doing it. I wish I were as lucky as you. Oh, now I’m making myself cry…

Sarah’s husband Zack is landing in Killeen TONIGHT, in the next few hours. She’s all excited and anxious, of course. She wanted Cloe and me to go with her, but when she found out he’s getting in so late, she told us not to worry about it.

Sarah’s husband was finished with his service obligation and was on his way home. How we would miss her!

I guess my world is about to REALLY change. I’m going to miss Sarah. They’re moving in December too. I guess it’s like when Reston (Lt. Arizona) left you. Reston’s wife is supposed to find out today if they’re sending him home or not. I wonder if she found out, and if he’s coming home or not.

I broke the computer desk Saturday. I was having trouble buying a flight ticket, and I was feeling all rushed because I was supposed to be at Elsie’s to go to the hockey game. Everyone was waiting for me, but the American Airlines site kept messing up, so I was angry, and I slammed my fist down on the desk, and the shelf below just popped right out…..Sorry.

I miss you: firm, steady, calm, responsible, you. I need you.

I hate being a lazy bum like this. I hate how everybody asks me what I’m going to do.

I hate that you’re allergic to cats, and that I will have to give up Kitty.

Everything just isn’t what it I thought it should be.

And I’m going to have to wait 6 more months to see you again. How I wish you could just be here tonight. I wish you could be on that plane with Zack.

In a perfect world, huh? But of course, this is not a perfect world.

But Lord willing, one day you will be back. One day I will wake up before lunch time. One day I’ll be doing something I enjoy. One day.

I love you, Alan. You’re my husband. Talking to you is the highlight of my week.

I love you,

April

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Melancholy

Melancholy is not my typical state at all, but I do suppose that’s where I was when I wrote that letter.

Finding yourself at a fork in the road when you have no idea which way to go is not my favorite. It can be an exciting phase when you stop to consider the seemingly endless possibilities, but it didn’t feel that way to me.

I felt lost in the desert all over again, stuck in the middle of Texas with no plan whatsoever.

Doors all around me were closed, but I can tell you I am not one to sit around in the waiting place, content to just be. No, that isn’t me at all.

Restlessness is a feeling I cannot tolerate. That’s how I began my traveling phase.

This was 2003, well before the days of iPhones, but we did have Google Maps on our personal computers. I charted myself a course, mostly on I-10, got myself a good night’s sleep and set off for Alabama in my royal blue Pontiac Grand Am.

My parents would be so surprised when I showed up at their door unannounced!

I did call my brother, a college student at Troy at the time who lived at home with my parents, just so someone in the world knew where I was, but I swore him to secrecy.

I pulled into my parents’ driveway around 2am. I’d called Mom a couple hours prior to arriving to insure safe entry. Ha! But Dad didn’t know I was there until he got up in the morning. That was such a fun surprise!

There in Alabama, I enjoyed just being with my family. I slept in my little twin bed, in the bedroom I’d shared with my sister for most of my life. The familiar old surroundings of home and family were healthy for me. It was a good time to put my recent failure behind me and come up with a new plan for the future.

I actually spent most of the rest of 2003 on the road. Instead of staying with family through the holidays, I drove back to Texas a week later. Then I took a trip to Houston to Cloe’s parents’ house, along with Elsie, Kayla, and Cloe. After that, there was a trip to Florida with Jennings. I had Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with both families, and I’ll have to save more about all those trips for another chapter.

I think where we run to in times of trouble or uncertainty says a lot about us.

For me, I guess I was running home to my mom. Ha! But sometimes that is absolutely the BEST course of action, isn’t it? I hope my children will know they can run to my house as a refuge too.

And you’ll be happy to know that I actually did come up with a plan, quite of my own accord. I decided to take the GRE and go back to school, to a local satellite branch of Tarleton State University. I enrolled in the graduate school to pursue a counseling certificate.

Did I want to be a counselor?

Eh…not really, and certainly not right away, but I was considering it. I felt deeply that I was too young to be counseling people. But I WAS excited about going back to school and getting back into the psychology field. My bachelor’s degree was in psychology, and I figured I could figure out my path as I went along.

Sometimes you have to jump right in and try it to figure out if a thing is for you or not!

Life as a military spouse is just like that. There weren’t many online graduate programs that I knew of, so I was doing the best I could with what I could find.

“When we are so wedded to what we think should be happening or what we want to happen, we don’t see what IS happening.”

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The post The Fork in the Road appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

****This post is part of the series Real Army Wives on storiesofourboys.com. This series chronicles the story of our first deployment, back in 2003.****

Once Alan had been gone for 6 months, and we were finally able to communicate regularly, we found that we began to bicker–even from continents away. We were having newlywed problems, whether we were together or not.

Alan was anxious to move us forward towards our goals in the U.S., yet he was stuck in a combat zone, feeling powerless to affect change. He wanted me to go out and buy a $70,000 house. Plus, he thought I should move us in there by myself so we could start building equity……I was like, “Heck no, I won’t go..”

I wanted him to call more. He gave me the actual reasons he couldn’t.

I was disappointed that he hadn’t had a family member send me an anniversary gift.

Granted, my expectations were HIGH, and he was never one to sugar-coat a single thing…..so we had issues….

an Iraqi flag Alan sent me in a package

On October, 1, 2003, I wrote him out this list, half-joking, half-serious, to lay out all of my expectations and avoid further arguments…

So here’s a guide for you– to save your marriage and prevent further fights.

{Alan may not have enjoyed reading this, but at least he knew how to not upset me going forward, which made for a better marriage relationship.}

Keep this in mind if your spouse deploys! It may help you! And you may even be able to say it with less sass than I did, and it would sound downright sweet…

#1. Call me every chance you get, BUT if you decide not to because….

a.) You think it’s not a good time.

b.) You don’t want to wait in line.

c.) You’re cheap.

OR

d.) You want to let other people call their families…

Fine, but you NEVER should tell me these excuses. Keep them to yourself. Don’t tell me you purposefully didn’t call! Especially for the above excuses which DO NOT help.

#2. Mid-Tour Leave– Yes, of course you want to take it.

ALL you care about is seeing your wife ASAP. You would do anything to get to see her. It doesn’t matter that you have to go back to Iraq. Even for a day with me, you’d do anything.

#3.) Pictures: Never return pictures I send to you.

How would you feel if you mailed me a picture of yourself that you thought was good-looking, and I just mailed it right back to you? HELLLOOOO!

#4.) Please record all tapes to me when your roommate is not in the room.

….This was very much a 2003 problem. We recorded each other cassette tapes. Nowadays this advice would apply more to phone calls.

For at least half of the tape, please be alone. Otherwise, you are way too official and business like, and there’s nothing mushy on the whole tape. Yuck. I hate getting business tapes about money, etc.  I just want you to be absorbed in me the person, not me the dependent.

#5.) All holiday and special occasions should be accompanied by a gift OR flowers.

Being apart does not take away your responsibility to make me feel special. For example, everyone else’s husbands arranged for them to get flowers on their anniversaries and/or birthdays. Don’t give me that crap about you can’t because you can.

Here’s how:

1- You arrange it when you have internet access.

2- Otherwise, you write a family member (i.e. parents) and ask them to send me something specific and reimburse them with a check. You have checks.

#6.) What qualifies as a holiday?

Anniversary, Birthday, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day

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That’s all I can think of right now….I know you probably feel a little offended that I made you this list, but I’m just sparing us future fights by alerting you to my expectations of you as my husband.

I hope this doesn’t sound harsh. I’m not trying to sound harsh. I just don’t want to have to cry all the way to Sea World like I did the other weekend because there are some things you simply don’t understand.

Now I do realize that I’ve been guilty of the same thing, so see, I’m working on it.

My tapes have since been VERY sweet and the last one was even rated R. {Note to self, destroy all tapes.} Plus, I have increased your packages and refrained from reacting quickly to things that you say that I hope you don’t mean.

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No long deployment is going to happen without some disagreements. We all just have to do our best to be understanding and give each other the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, I think this list was a big help, especially since it was the FIRST year of our marriage!

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Preparing for the Worst

We all supposedly knew going into this that they wouldn’t all come home, but I never dwelt on that bit of information. Call it a defense mechanism, I don’t know. Being happy is important to me. I couldn’t let worries over things that may not even happen steal my joy.

Alan’s mother and I used to discuss what we would do if we found out before the other that Alan had died. I certainly did not cherish the thought of telling a single one of Alan’s family members that sort of news.

I knew that if Alan died, a casualty officer would be dispatched to my house to give me the bad news in person.

However, what I now know is that IF your spouse dies in war, there are usually multiple people in uniform that show up at your door. Not only that, but they have to arrive at your door at exactly the same time as they arrive at the door of the soldier’s parents.

So the good news is you should never have to tell your mother-in-law that her son has died. That’s not your job. They do that for you. That’s a relief and something I didn’t realize until I befriended a war widow many years later.

Meanwhile, there is the news.

If you watch the news regularly, they will tell you how many have died and where, and if you know where your loved one is serving (as we did), there is added anxiety until you find out for certain who it was.

Alan’s parents were more devoted to the news than I was, so they clued me in to lots of things that year, both good and bad.

Thurs., Sept. 18, 2003

Alan,

I’m SO sleepy. It’s 10:30 already. I got BAD news from your parents today. 3 men were killed and 2 more wounded in a shooting VERY close to Tikrit. We’re really worried. I just have this HAUNTING feeling.

I’m so afraid. I can’t help it. I won’t feel secure until I hear your voice, and that will be a while because I JUST talked to you like 3 nights ago.

Man, Alan, I love you so much. I don’t even want to think of “what if.” It scares me so much. I don’t ever want to lose you!

Fri., Sept. 19, 2003

Alan,

Hey! Well! Only 1 more week of teaching! I went to a 4-42 coffee tonight at the Irish Pub at the mall. It went well. It was another sad one though because there were 3 more deaths and 2 wounded yesterday. But of course, you know that.

That was really hard to talk about. Did you know any of them? Were you nearby there? All I know is that it was a team in support of 1-10 Cav, from HHB.

Other things were difficult too. Holly Marsh got switched to the 4th ID unexpectedly, and will be deploying within a month, leaving their 15-month-old to a relative for roughly six months. [editor’s note: Holly Marsh’s husband was deployed already with Alan’s unit. That left their baby without a parent at home.] Plus, her family’s house was destroyed in Hurricane Isabella that struck the east coast this week.

[Holly was devastated. Yes, her mind raced to find a way to stay home with her baby, but what could be done? This is another of the harsh realities military families face.]

I stayed up after the meeting talking to Sarah and Kayla about what I learned at the meeting. Plus, Sarah said that one of those soldier’s wives is expecting a baby soon. How awful is that? I was okay until they said that, and then I was a mess.

I was so relieved to know you’re okay.

I love you,

April

Those of 4-42 who gave all. Photo courtesy of Rachel Jack.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the men honored the friends they lost and were all prevented from calling home until the families were properly notified. And the mission went on.

Monday, Sept. 22, 2003   9:05pm

April,

Hey! Today was the memorial service honoring the three soldiers of ours who were killed.

Then, at almost 10 this morning we had our first try at a city council meeting and, well….let’s just say we learned a lot about how we’ll do the next meeting!

They’re talking about moving us to the Brigade Support Area (BSA) which is this really big camp that’s just a bunch of tents in a bunch of fine sand we call “moon dust.” It wouldn’t be fun. Here we have hard shelter, paved areas, and a routine, you know? We’ll supposedly know if we’ll move or not by October 1st.

I hope we get to Tikrit some time soon and are able to use the phones. It feels like it’s been so long since we’ve talked on the phone, but when we went up last Friday, we were restricted from using them because of those guys getting killed and their families had to first be notified.

Those $40 Thurya phone cards are sometimes difficult to find. I’m looking though! I love you. I miss you it seems every moment.

Missing You,

Alan

Oh, and if you’re wondering, they thankfully did not move Alan to the “moon dust” area mentioned in the letter above. He continued to live in his rat-infested building with electricity, in Ad Dwar, where there were many, many adventures left to be had. We were only halfway through this deployment.

The families of those who make the ultimate sacrifice for our country are our heroes. As a part of the military community, our hearts break for them, and we always know that we could be next. Just talking about it leaves me with a heavy feeling.

Don’t live in fear that your service member could be next. It won’t help.

Just live with gratitude, being thankful for what they have done for us.  And be generous with their families, not jealous, when they may sometimes need your or your husband’s help. Hold them in honor always.

I can’t wait to tell you about the rest of our adventures. Come back next Monday for the next chapter!

The post The First 3 Casualties From Our First Deployment appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.