FirmhandKY
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How to leave a soldier
Sunday, Jan 31, 2010 21:01 EST
By Courtney Cook
You'd be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can't argue with you. He doesn't have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, "This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it," it's that much easier. The letter won't even come as a shock.
And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He'll write it -- because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what's best for them even though you're leaving him -- and you'll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You're just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who's sweating it out in the desert?
There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn't care who gets the couch.
...
Desert Storm ended just 11 days after the birth of our son, but within weeks John and I were facing a wrenching tragedy. My husband's brother, a U.S. Navy pilot, was killed in a training accident leaving behind my new sister-in-law, and their daughter and baby son. My husband had to drop out of training to be at his own brother's funeral. I spent most of the memorial service watching my dead brother-in-law's children play in the nursery. I was still learning how to breast-feed.
...
We decided enough was enough. John would go on reserve status.
...
Then came 9/11. My husband, like so many others, saw the attacks as a call to action. He went back on active duty and volunteered for a tour in Egypt. Our children were old enough to miss their father now. I put a calendar up in the kitchen so we could check off the days, took them both for cupcakes to cheer them up as we walked home from kindergarten. A part of me was proud of how brave we were all being. The other part was weary with being brave. I took a job at an independent bookstore and started spending time with the young, funny, book-reading guys I met there. When John came back things were awkward. I couldn't stop myself from being angry, couldn't help feeling abandoned.
...
Meanwhile I was just 30 years old, working with teenage students, surfing all of their exuberant, sexy, rowdy energy. I was teaching the great literary love stories in class, and coaching Ultimate Frisbee in the exhilarating spring air. On weekends my book-reading friends from the bookstore stopped by. We made dinners together, spent evenings talking and laughing. I liked it that we had so many things to talk about. I liked it that they were near.
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I am married to a lithe, blue-eyed Marxist whose dissertation was on U.S. imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a man who participated in war protests in Santa Cruz, Calif., during the winter I lived at Fort Knox. He has two children of his own -- bright, intense redheads, close in age to mine. I live with him in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, and when we can, we commute together to work. On weekends if we are not at a museum or movie together, we are at home right up next to each other.
Yet I didn't escape what it feels like to love a soldier.
Last July my son, the baby that was born to television coverage of Operation Desert Storm, said goodbye to his high school friends, shaved his head and enrolled in the United States Naval Academy. I am deeply proud of him, but it was my ex-husband who stood with my son on Induction Day. I could not bear to be there, could not watch the child of my body step away from the safe, civilian world I'd tried to so desperately to create for myself and him.
I think my thread title sums it up pretty well.
Firm
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