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.

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There is life after teaching.

With the decision made to not ever, ever be a teacher again, I adjusted quite well to my life of new-found freedom. My house became a hub of activity again. We Army wife buddies were always eating at each other’s houses and watching movies and even planning trips.

We had our own little clique. In fact, we spent so much time together that sometimes we did have jealousy and little gripes spring up, but they were never anything big. Usually, someone simply didn’t like something someone else said, or someone got mad because they weren’t included in a fun trip.

We took day trips to San Antonio to go outlet mall shopping, and one of the girls was pretty mad at us for not inviting her to the first one. That sort of thing happened, but in the end we all knew that we needed each other, and in general, we had a ton of fun.

It was around the day of the San Antonio trip that Alan called me with sad news from war.

On September 26th, Alan and his roommate, 1LT Arizona, worked out together as usual, and Alan went around to every company in his unit putting together enough up-armored humvees to make a safe trip up to Bayji. For some reason, he met with a great deal of resistance in acquiring the heavy-duty humvees, but if you know Alan, you know that persistence is one of his greatest strengths. Therefore, he DID acquire his humvees after all.

You see, that day Alan was the designated Officer in Charge for the 3-truck convoy, and he intended to keep his men safe.

(Now when I say men, I literally mean men. His entire unit was a field artillery unit, which is a combat branch. In those days that meant that the entire unit was male.)

On the way back from Bayji, Alan, who was in the lead vehicle, heard an EXPLOSION, and looking in his rear view mirror, he saw the last vehicle with all the doors open and smoke coming from it.

Alan’s captain yelled over their radios, “Go! Go! Go! Get out of here!”

However, while Alan was outranked, he was still the designated OIC, and he had no intention of leaving his friends behind. So Alan commanded them to turn around, establish a security perimeter, and get the men from the third humvee, which had obviously been hit by an IED.

Thankfully, Alan had insisted upon those up-armored humvees, so everyone lived!!

The four men in that vehicle were all injured, though, of course. They were all friends of Alan’s. One of the injured men was Alan’s battle buddy and roommate, 1LT Arizona.

Shortly thereafter, Alan and his captain butted heads on how to handle this situation. The captain was desperate to get the whole convoy back to the home base in Ad Dawr.

The problem was that Alan assessed that the injured men seemed to be in need of more urgent medical attention than the captain did and their unit’s assigned medical officer was back home in the states on leave. Alan did not want to risk making them wait out the long trip back only to have a medic evaluate them, require evacuation by helicopter right back to here…all the while worsening potentially time-sensitive injuries. Alan had to convince the captain to take them to the nearby unit’s medical clinic and get them seen right away.

Again, Alan had to override the captain. “No sir, we’re going to get them care now.”

Done. Don’t worry. This wasn’t insubordination, this was Alan pointing out the hard right because this incurred additional tasks such as them finding a place to sleep the night on the local forward operating base, or “FOB”, send word back to Ad Dawr why the humvees (one of which was damaged) weren’t going to support the next needed mission by being delayed…and other various reasons…but it was the right thing to do based on the situation at the moment.

It was a good thing they did. Lt. Arizona’s ear drum was busted. The men were all in need of medical attention. Two of them had to remain in a field hospital.

Lt. Arizona actually ended up having to go home for a month or so before he returned to the war.

Several of the men, including Alan, received medals for their bravery that day.

The captain actually put Alan in for a much greater reward than he ended up receiving, but either way I was so proud of him.

There’s no such thing as sending your husband to war repeatedly and nothing ever happening. Alan was serving in the hometown of Saddam Hussein. There were plenty of enemies all around, but that was, thankfully, the last time Alan’s own convoy got attacked.

I’d always had this feeling that Alan would come home without a scratch, and he DID, so long as you don’t count the damage the desert did to his eyeglasses! This convoy attack news shook us all up and challenged that assumption of safety quite well. I didn’t even learn about the incident until several days after it happened.

It’s a helpless feeling, being the family back home waiting. What could I possibly do to help, way back there in Texas? Nothing– but keep up a positive attitude and do a great deal of trusting. I had to trust God, trust the Army leaders, trust Alan, basically just trust that everything would be okay.

Click here to read the next chapter: Fork in the Road

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