Annual Training

I miss my Sweetie.

Seems a little ridiculous after two deployments.

But there you have it.

Always in the Back of my Mind

We marked a year since the end of the last deployment earlier this month. The time has gone with a swiftness that surprises me. People ask me if Dan is home "for good" now, or if he'll have to go again, and for a year I have been explaining that his unit is already scheduled for the next deployment but that it's insert-vague-time-frame away, and we're sort of hoping he'll be in his next school by then, anyway. I knew it was coming, but it didn't seem real. But sometime in July, I counted up on my fingers and realized: it's not in the distant future anymore.

All the usual caveats apply. We still don't know about the school, we don't have any hard and fast information from his unit, the time-frame we do have isn't that close, and the ops tempo is much faster for so many other families.

But the next deployment has jumped categories in my mind. It's not omnipresent in my thoughts, by any means, but sometimes I hold him a little tighter, not just because I'm glad he's home, but because I don't want him to go.

Marking the Day

I'm a few days late in posting this. And I realize that it doesn't change much in the day-to-day in Iraq. But I remember the day we went in in living color--the solemnity, the weight. I want to remember this day, too.

More on Wikileaks

From Armed and Curious.

Time to Write Your Senator & Representatives (Again)

So the Defense Business Board is making noises about cutting military retirement benefits in order to tighten the DOD's budget (Stars and Stripes, via AirForceWife). My first reaction is, take the skin off someone else's back.

In the National Guard and Reserve, you can retire at twenty years, but the benefits don't kick in until you reach retirement age. When my dad retired from the Air Force after twenty-six years--many of them as a more-than-full-time Reservist--he got another job. When Dan retires in nine years or so, he'll have to keep working. That was part of the deal, and we knew it going in. We're just hoping the benefits are still there when he turns sixty-five.

But AirForceWife nicely sums up some of the problems for active duty folks with deferring, for example, health-care benefits, and with raising the years of service needed to quality for retirement. Another problem--for all of us--is what happens to recruitment and retention with a change in benefits. Less than two percent of Americans are carrying the weight of our national defense. The fewer people in the military, the heavier the burden on those who remain.

Budget cuts are badly needed, and they have to come from somewhere. But it seems to me that the military carries enough on behalf of the rest of the country already. Let the government tighten its belt somewhere else.

St. Paul's

The most important part of our trip to New York City, for me, was St. Paul's Chapel. It's the oldest church building in NYC. It's where George Washington worshiped during the two years that New York was the US capitol. And its graveyard butts up against Ground Zero.

St. Paul's Graveyard

Ground Zero itself is a huge construction zone, hidden by a big blue fence. They're re-erecting the World Trade Center buildings, except for the Twin Towers. So even though we drove down the street beside it, in many ways St. Paul's was the closest I got to Ground Zero. 

Ground Zero

On September 11th, the windows were blown out of the buildings on either side of the chapel, but it was protected by a huge tree on the church grounds, and undamaged. In the days and weeks after 9-11, the fence around the church was literally covered in flags, messages, pictures, flowers, and the like. Volunteers turned the building into a resting place for rescue workers, lining the walls with cots, and making sure there were clean sheets and a stuffed animal to greet the tired workers when they came off shift from the pit.

One of those cots was still there. Sections of fence, covered with memorials, were there. There was a cross welded out of rubble, and a mountain of unit patches from rescue workers around the world. There was a fireman's coat and boots, draped on a scarred wooden pew--scarred by the heavy coats and tool belts of the firemen when they would sit down to rest between shifts. 

It was incredibly moving to be there.

Bittersweet

Tonight I had my high-school best friends and their families over for dinner. We lit a fire in the fire pit out back and cooked hot dogs over it. We ate potato salad and fresh fruit, and our kids chased each other and climbed trees and dug a big hole in the yard. Some of us hadn't seen each other in four years. Three families have babies that the rest of us hadn't met. We talked and laughed, caught up on the present and gave each other a hard time about the past.

It was a perfect evening.

And now they've gone home, and I'm sitting here with a lump in my throat because I know it's going to be a long time before we're all together again.

And because my baby wasn't there.