Walk With Me: Our Story, Part XI

Many moons ago, I began writing “Our Story” and what started out to be a brief synopsis stretched itself into a serial. After Part X, I stopped writing for a few more moons. Part of that was because I was getting ready for T to come home from Afghanistan and was very busy. Then part of that was because T was home and I was even busier. And then I was just plain out of the routine.

So please pardon my long silence in this department and join me once again on Sundays as I pick up where I left off…

In early May of 2006, two soldiers from T’s unit were killed in action and a third was wounded. We were less than three months into a year-long deployment. I didn’t see how we were going to get through the next ten months with this heightened fear. But what choice did we have?

Read Our Story from the beginning.

The heightened fear began to increase tension and the increased tension began to spur drama back home. Rumors started to circulate: this person is having that problem with her soldier; that soldier is having this problem with his spouse. The FRG started to crumble and a promising group split and drifted, then reformed into smaller groups.
 
I will say that the drama was a good crash-course in all things military. Before all this happened, for instance, didn’t know an NCO from an ACU or whether I should salute the flag at dawn or fold my jammies at reveille. I had no idea that officers and enlisted weren’t supposed to fraternize or that some wives resented this. The day I found this out, I was horrified. I remember wondering if I was behaving inappropriately or in a way that would hurt T somehow. I longed to ask him.

But, of course, I had to wait for the next time he called me.

When I did finally get to talk to him, he patiently explained that at one time the fraternization rule did spill over to spouses, but that it was no longer applicable. I was so green that I asked whether he was uncomfortable with me talking to the wives of enlisted men.

“Baby,” he said, “talk to whoever you want to.”

Eventually, I stopped attending FRG meetings and gatherings altogether because I ended up feeling stressed, confused and left out. It certainly wasn’t worth driving five hours round-trip for a one-hour meeting that was more uncomfortable than sand in your skivvies.

Still, I had my friend K to fraternize with. K and I had grown up in the same neighborhood. We’d played kickball and flashlight tag with the other kids and listened on her front steps for the magical melodies of the ice cream man. In Junior High we’d alternated between best-friendship and fighting with astonishing regularity. We’d been together through everything from broken window panes to growing pains, but if you’d ever told me we’d be going through a deployment together I would’ve laughed in your face. The military was never an option for a pacifist like me.

Yet here we were, clinging to each other, almost as tightly as we clung to our cell phones each day. We listened to each other as intently as we listened for the instant chat buzzer to go off. And we were free to fraternize with each other.

And fraternize we did.

not my photo

In fact, we started fraternizing almost every weekend, starting on Thursdays some weeks. We sat around a campfire and fraternized. We fraternized after a run. We fraternized once her kids had gone to bed. We frat-, frat-, fraternized.

I don’t mean to imply that we became alcoholics. We didn’t. We weren’t secret drinkers and it didn’t interfere with our daily lives. Thankfully, it never got to that point for either of us. What we did do was take to using alcohol as a means to relieve stress and become happy for a while. It was not an ideal way to cope, but it sure was an easy one.

One night, shortly before the funeral of one of the soldiers who had been killed, I got drunk and angry. I was angry that I was thirty years old and had a boyfriend who wasn’t around – a boyfriend with whom I wasn’t sure things would work out. I was angry that I was forced to wait to find out. I was angry about the stress and the loneliness. Looking back now, though, I think mostly I was just plain terrified.

So, I sat down at K’s computer and started to type an email. I had no intention of sending it, but I needed to type it. The subject line was: BREAKING UP WITH YOU

I knew that was a cowardly thing to do to a soldier overseas, but, like I said, I had no intension of sending it. I don’t know that I even had any intention of writing it, but K looked over my shoulder and said, “You aren’t going to send that!”

That did it. A challenge! I was going to bluff her into thinking I was serious. I put T’s email address in the “To:” field and started typing out the poison of my hurt feelings, anger and fear. K’s sister Laurie Loo came over. She called my bluff, too. We started arguing, then we started laughing. I flailed my arms about. The keyboard jostled…

…and the screen went to a blank Hotmail page.

“Oh shit.” I said, stricken.

Walk With Me: Our Story, Part VIII

T and I met in October of 2005. We dated for two months. Then his National Guard unit deployed.

Read Our Story from the beginning.

One day in early January of 2006, I drove T up to the armory so that he could report in. While he was doing army stuff, I checked into the hotel where we would be staying for a couple of nights as the unit prepared to deploy.

In just a few days, T would be on a bus headed for Fort Dix where he would spend two months training to do convoy escort in Bagdad. Because nothing prepares you for desert conditions like New Jersey in February.

T is an escapist. When there is an unpleasant situation that he can’t change, he waits it out by burying himself in books, movies or computer games. The afternoon before he left, he sat in our hotel room playing a game on his laptop. We still had a few more hours together, but T had already checked out, so to speak.

I was sad, scared and already lonely. My stomach was in knots and I was furious with T for ignoring me. I didn’t understand his coping mechanism. All I could think was, Why am I even here? Had he just wanted someone to hang out with for a few months before he deployed and now that the deployment was here, we were finished?

We fought.

But we didn’t have time to make up. Instead, we shoved the fight aside. The next morning, before the sun had even risen, we said a tearful (on my part) good-bye. He slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and I watched my uniformed, booted soldier walk out the door.

The winter rolled slowly by. We had cell phones now and we talked at least once a day. I clung to that phone like a drowning woman to a life-preserver. I carried it everywhere and dropped whatever I was doing whenever it rang.

I don’t have that phone anymore, but even now, four years later, hearing that ringtone shoots a jolt of electricity through my body.

The unit was scheduled to leave for Iraq in early March. As February disappeared, we started hearing whispers of the possibility of a few days leave before the overseas departure. We made plans. The whispers changed. We rearranged plans. The whispers changed again.

Finally, we got the firm leave dates: 2-6 March 2006. T would have just five days. We decided not to waste time travelling.

We were going to The Big Apple!

Walk With Me: Our Story, Part VII

Welcome to Sunday Stories, hosted by The Annoyed Army Wife. If you haven’t seen her fabulous blog yet, please go check it out! While you’re there, link up and share a story of your own.

Read Our Story from the beginning.

After two weeks of complete separation, T borrowed a cell phone from one of the other guys and called me. One of the first things he told me was that he was getting cell phones for us as soon as he got back from training.

“Not being able to talk to you for two weeks really sucked.”

I agreed.

We talked about the Family Readiness event, which was the following day. This was a day of briefings, for both family members and soldiers, concerning finances, TriCare, deployment issues and other military matters. I was petrified at the very thought.

I must have been pretty transparent about it because T told me he’d pick me up the next morning so that we could ride up together. I tried to talk him out of it since he was already at the armory, about a ten-minute drive to the building where the event would take place. To come get me meant an almost three-hour drive south only to turn around and immediately spend almost three hours going north again. It also meant that since Family Readiness started at nine, he had to leave at three in the morning in order to pick me up at six a.m. sharp.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said with finality. I almost saluted into the phone.

The next morning T was on my doorstep. It was the first time I’d seen him in his ACUs and I thrilled with nervous excitement. He looked so military that I was a little awed. And in that split second, the uniform made everything real. It drove the deployment stake a little deeper into my already tender heart.

He kissed me and we got in the car for the long drive north.

That day was a blur of uniforms and scared-looking civilians. When I first walked into the building, I was overwhelmed by a sea of camouflage. T led me down the hall by the hand and we passed soldier after soldier.

“Hi, sir.” “Hello, sir.” “How’re you doing, sir?”

I suppressed a giggle. They called my goofy boyfriend “sir”. Tee hee!

Because T and I weren’t married, many of the briefings – such as finance and TriCare – didn’t apply to me. I didn’t need to get a military ID card. Mostly I just stood around feeling awkward.

Towards the end of the day, there was a large briefing in a drill room – a large, cement room with makeshift tables and chairs, and horrible acoustics. I could only hear about half of what was being said and most folks were talking rather than listening. There was a PowerPoint detailing some common deployment emotions. I don’t remember any of them. I just remember gripping T’s hand tightly.

Finally, we filed out into the parking lot. It had started to snow and the ground was already covered. We all shivered into our vehicles and waited for them to warm up. T got out to clean off the car while I huddled in the passenger seat.

That was a long, miserable ride home. I tried to sleep, but my feet were cold. The road conditions kept getting worse and T struggled to stay in his lane as tractor trailers motored by, throwing slush on his little Chevy Cavalier. Often he reached out of his window to snap the wipers against the windshield, removing the ice. I pressed my feet to the floorboards in an effort to stop the car from sliding around in the snowy ruts made by the other vehicles.

A three-hour ride turned into four and a half. T was exhausted from his two weeks of training and ten hours on the road. I was exhausted from my first encounter with the military. We were both half-frozen from the window being down so often.

When we finally, finally got back to my apartment, we staggered in and cranked up the heat. Then we each took a turn in the shower. Hot water had never felt so good and my hot water tank had never seemed so small. Afterwards, we snuggled in, drawing warmth and comfort from each other. I held him closer than I ever had before. I buried my head in his chest and tried not to think about him leaving.

Then, as we lay there together, T told me he loved me.

My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t say it back.

I could only reach up and touch his face as my tears fell silently.