Occasionally when I look around at Dh’s comrades when they are out together, I realize that for some of them, apart from the military they have nothing in common. It’s really true, for many of them there is an age difference, sometimes of 10 or more years. Differences in family situations, some married with kids, some divorced without, everything in between. They have diverse interests, everything from Warhammer and MMORPGs to hunting and camping for days without electronics. Different faiths, different choices, different opinions. Their personalities can occasionally clash pretty loudly. I mean, there’s even Toronto Maple Leaf fans mixed in with Bruins fans and no one understands the Roughrider fans. The truth is, for many of those relationships the only common factor is their time served together. That bond is even stronger when you throw in some time in a tent in Kabul, or a FOB in Kandahar. Or both. One of the most amazing things to me about the military is that those experiences together can be all that’s needed. Especially among combat troops, they overshadow the differences and cement relationships stronger than any other simply by the fact that they’ve experienced a time when they counted on each other for survival. Now that I think of it, that’s not simple at all. But it’s amazing to watch from the outside. It’s also, I think, why in the military community it’s more common to hear the word brother than friend. Brother implies family. You don’t choose your family, they are chosen for you. You might not even like you family, but you don’t always have to. You are still there for family, anytime they call…
Dh and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day. To be fair, we don’t do most holidays. Or anniversaries, really. I guess it comes from him not being home all that often, after a while the days stopped being that important. When we first got married we could barely afford milk so we never got much used to giving big gifts, even after we could afford things. I told him to forgo an engagement ring so we could buy a bed. When you get married as teenagers I think sometimes practicality overrules grand gestures. So this Valentine’s Day it never even occured to me to buy Dh a gift, I can’t remember the last time we did that. This week though, someone asked me what I could give him, if I could get him something Sunday. I said I’d probably give him a weekend home, since he’s away on course. But then they said something strange… They said I’m a storyteller, and they asked if I’d ever given Dh a story. I laughed at first, because let’s be honest. Dh puts up with my writing because he loves me and every time he meets someone new at work that looks at him funny before saying “hey… I’ve seen you on the internet…” or the Brigade Commander walks over to chat with him about my blog… lets just say while some guys who like attention might look at it like a perk, to Dh it’s more of a sacrifice of love. But after I thought about it for a few days I decided that this week, with love on everyone…
Many years ago I stood with a few other spouses and I watched the bus drive off with our husbands for a combat deployment. I wasn’t naive as they thought, I had heard the whispers and rumors. Dh and I were 20, married less than a year. I was pregnant. He had no idea when he was coming back. Combine this with the reality that I was married to a soldier and everyone knows military marriages never end well… no one thought we had a chance. And when he came home that time, more than half a year later, dusty, battle worn and a whole lot more grown up, if not much older, than he had been when he left, we did struggle. We hurt each other. We had a baby and new home and we tried for a while but then we stopped trying because it was hard and we thought it would be easy. Somewhere in there he brought up the idea of leaving for selection for another unit and I told him he was welcome to do it. Single. We struggled, but somehow and by the grace of God, by the next tour I was still there. But the hard truth is that when I was saying goodbye that second time, those other wives I had stood with before? They weren’t there anymore. Their loss was weirdly hard for me, like it represented a collective failure of our community, an omen, an eventuality. And now after more than 16 years and 4 deployments, I can almost count on one hand the spouses I knew then that are still around now. Dh and I, we have no magic in us. There’s plenty of couples who are the same…
