Love and War

Probably one of the happiest days of my youth was when I found out that I didn’t have to celebrate or even acknowledge The-Fake-&-Smarmy-Holiday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. This was long before K was in my life, so it has nothing to do with any missteps on either of our parts. In fact, when I told him he was permanently off the hook for that particular day, a happier man you’ve never seen. I suspect that was one of the reasons we’re together. Ironic, no?

Over the years when I have told people what I celebrate instead of St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the reactions run the gamut from confusion and disbelief to high-fives. I didn’t choose to celebrate this event just to thumb my nose at the marketing machine that has turned people into love-struck loonies with expectations that defy rational thought—that was just an added benefit. I chose this particular anniversary because the man it honors embodies so many of the qualities I admire in humans. So without further ado, I wish you all a very Happy Winfield Scott Hancock’s 186th Birthday!

Since I was in middle school, I have been a student of the Civil War. I’ve always found that war to be the most fascinating and heart-wrenching conflict and I used to spend a fair amount of my time reading about it, going to lectures, and visiting battlefields. I suspect my great attachment to soldiers was born during these years. And now as a wife of a soldier, I have a greater appreciation for what soldier’s families must have gone through. We have it so much better today with our cell phones and the internet. Everything is as immediate as it possibly could be for how geographically separate we are. For so many centuries, communication between soldiers and their families was all but non-existent. Sometimes the only way they knew their loved one was dead was because he simply didn’t come home again. I know how good I have it and I never take it for granted. This life is not easy, but it certainly could be a hell of a lot worse and I believe that people need to keep that in mind as they bitch and moan about so many of the hardships we deal with. But I digress…

Who is Winfield Scott Hancock?

General Hancock was born February 14, 1824 in Norristown, PA. Hancock served as a young lieutenant under his namesake, General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War in 1847. He remained career Army and served in Missouri (where he met his wife Almira), Florida during the Seminole wars, and California just as the Civil War broke out . He was the father of a son and a daughter, both of whom predeceased him. He was also a closet artist, amature scientist and botanist, wrote the occasional poem, and swore with vigor and colorful turn of phrase. General Hancock rose to fame and glory during the American Civil War fighting for the Union commanding the 2nd Corps. He was nicknamed “Hancock the Superb” for his courage, composure, and effectiveness during battle. He was wounded at Gettysburg while urging his men from horseback to hold their lines during Pickett’s infamous charge. He turned down the offer to Command the Army of the Potomac and remained 2nd Corps Commander until his wound forced him to give up field command toward the end of the war. Here is what General Ulysses S. Grant had to say about Winfield Scott Hancock:

“Hancock stands the most conspicuous figure of all the general officers who did not exercise a separate command.  He commanded a corps longer than any other one, and his name was never mentioned as having committed in battle a blunder for which he was responsible.  He was a man of very conspicuous personal appearance.  Tall, well-formed and, at the time of which I now write, young and fresh-looking, he presented an appearance which would have attracted the attention of an army as he passed.  His genial disposition made him friends, and his personal courage and his presence with his command in the thickest of the fight won for him the confidence of troops serving under him.  No matter how hard the fight, the 2d Corps always felt that their commander was looking after them.”

After the Civil War, Hancock remained in the Army and ran for President in 1880 losing in one of the closest presidential races ever to James Garfield. One of his last duties before his own death on Feb. 9, 1886 was to oversee the funeral for former General and President Grant. Hancock died penniless because he would often give former 2nd Corps veterans money if they came to him needing help. His wife wrote a book about his life to support herself in her later years (the first-edition copy I have is one of my prized possessions). Hancock led his life with integrity and his love and devotion for his fellow soldier and country is far more impressive than paper hearts and gooey chocolates. So if I’m going to have to pretend this day is about love, then I’d rather hold him up as an example of what it truly means to love something or someone than anything retail advertisers could come up with.

Now on to a quick update about my own soldier: I heard from K the other night and he is well but missing home already. Their training is moving along and he’s doing prep work for their mission that he’s anxious to get started doing. His internet right now is spotty, so I’m not sure how many updates we’ll have for a little while. Just wanted to let everyone know all is still well.

Enjoy your day whether you spend it eating conversation hearts, petting tigers (Happy Chinese New Year!), or saluting a soldier you love!

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Reflections on a day

I truly want this blog to help me not get mired down in all schlock and drama that a deployment can incite. It’s all too easy to get caught up in pity parties and worry fests, or bang your head against the wall with everything that ends up on your plate. Staying positive takes some effort–especially for me. I’m a bit cynical to start with–a regular Aunt Slappy in the making. After all the work I’ve put into changing my mind set over the last year, I don’t want to lose it. I was amazed though how easy it was to slide right back into a slow boil…like I was some sort of anger addict.

Yesterday my daughter asked me if we could get online and look at pictures from 9/11 because they had been talking about it at school. I told her it would have to wait for another time…another day when I could say the words without giving away just how much it still hurts and angers me to even contemplate that day and all it changed. Eight years later and I still find it so hard to see those images and remember the absolute helplessness I felt and the horror at all that loss of potential in the thousands who perished. I honestly don’t know how best to explain what it was like to a 9-year old without causing her to have nightmares. We are still living the effects of 9/11 today in our house. I would not be keeping this blog if we weren’t.

I watched the events of that Tuesday unfold from the safety of my computer with the scenes broadcasting via cnn.com in surreal bitmapped video contrasted with crisp digital photos. It took but a few images to feel detached from both reality and humanity. I had been to the WTC numerous times, I had lived in NYC for a summer during an internship–this couldn’t be real. Why would someone do such a horrible thing? Those poor trapped people. I could vaguely imagine how frantic and desperate they must have been to escape, but I know I wasn’t close to the reality of the situation. What would I have done? How would I have handled myself? It was too much. The first conversation outside of my co-workers who were all so subdued for a change, was with my husband. He had just recently taken on a full time position with an infantry company in the National Guard after many years in the regular Army and a brief stint as a civilian. K. was born to be a soldier and I knew exactly what the attacks meant to our life once it was revealed that terrorists were the instrument of this atrocity. Our conversation was fairly brief and went something like this:

“How long do you think it’ll be for you to get called up?”

“Dunno. Certainly not a matter of if so much as when.”

There was a lot of uncertainty for us from that point on. I knew we wouldn’t have an answer that day or probably even that week, but that was the day the perpetual waiting began. We waited for the deployment, we waited for the deployment to be over, we waited to readjust to life after deployment, and now we wait for the next deployment and all it will bring. We try to live life as best we can in the meantime, but there’s always some other consideration, some possibility that will keep us from moving forward the way we wanted to, the way we hoped. There are always contingency plans in our house.

We spent the rest of the afternoon of 9/11 back and forth on the phone with family: tracking down K.’s three brothers who worked in NYC, my oldest cousin who worked in one of the buildings right near the WTC, getting an eyewitness account from my Aunt who saw the plane that hit the Pentagon go right over the school where she taught. We were so very very lucky. Everyone was present and eventually accounted for and each with their own harrowing story.

Many of my coworkers left work early. Our Boston office was evacuated just in case, but my office was in no danger and it was up to us to stay or go. I stayed for a while because it was easy to hide in my cubicle and stay in my own head contemplating what it all meant until the daycare where my daughter stayed called to let me know they were closing up early. Everything else that day was just going through the motions and blankness. And a nagging fear for what the next day would bring.

The next day brought so many tears. Tragic stories about the victims were being shared across the internet and news stations–they were just regular people doing their thing. Going to work and making a living just like me. Regular people who were not coming home to their families, their pets, their friends and neighbors. Wednesdays were my work from home day with my daughter to try to save some money. R. was just over a year old, babbling and toddling around, happily playing in a room full of toys  and only occasionally looking at me with big blue eyes, bemused as I hugged her in between watching the news while trying not to cry in front of her too much. I felt sorry for the things she was going to miss out on now that the world was not as safe as it had been two days before. More than that, I wondered how many more big changes were going to alter her life until it was something that no longer resembled the dreams I had for my child?

K. ended up deploying just over 3 years later, doing a year-long tour in Iraq. R. was three and a half and our son was just around 4 months old (and would have only been 2 months old if he had not made an early appearance) when K. left. We knew a deployment was getting closer and had heard some rumors as to when, but with our son being premature and hospital-bound for over a month after birth, I was trying to deal with one thing at a time. Thankfully that’s mostly how things happened. Monkey was home by Thanksgiving and K.’s orders came in right around Christmas. I was due to go back to work just as he was leaving a month after that. It was impossible to fully enjoy maternity leave when I was scrambling to prepare for something I could not have been prepared for at all. I remember that time before K. left as being frenetic trying to squeeze in a life together as much as his training and days of paperwork would allow. It was a wake up call for me to be sure. My carefully planned life was about to be unraveled.

Control freaks such as myself traditionally do not enjoy losing said control, naturally, but that’s pretty much what happened as a result of 9/11. I accepted that the Army owned my husband, but then it owned me too and I was none too pleased. I could accept that it was his duty to put himself in harm’s way and my duty to support him, but it didn’t make it any easier for me when my daughter was distraught on a regular basis because her Daddy wasn’t home to tuck her in, nor did it make either of us feel better when our baby didn’t really even know who K. was after a year away.  And after K. got home and life was not remotely normal, and in fact, sucked more than when he was gone, I wondered how much more I was going to sacrifice because some people did not like our presence on this planet. And then I gave up just a little more and snapped. I looked at myself and felt like a spoiled brat. My anger and resentment was getting me nowhere and offering me nothing. It’s really no way to live and it’s not the life lesson I want my kids to learn either.

As I said: the anger, it festers in here and can become all-consuming if left unchecked. Working on becoming more Zen about life and rolling with its punches and seeking out opportunity where before I would see hard labor and tough times has been a long road for me, and I’m hardly at the end of my journey. I doubt I ever will be. I don’t want to backslide into that constant resentment and anger. I hope that someday soon I can talk about 9/11 with my daughter and not feel that heavy weight in my chest that I associate with anger and frustration. I’m not there quite yet. I can see now, though, that there are upsides to what happened as a result of 9/11. I am closer with my children than I would have if I had stayed in the corporate world. I am stronger and not afraid of being on my own. I have learned how to adjust and adapt. I have learned how to work around my limitations. I’m still working on rebuilding my compassion and sympathy for the human race (which is greatly helped by not watching or reading the news on a daily basis) but I have hope.

Today while K. was at drill, I snuggled with my two kids and my two dogs and listened to the rain. I forgot the laundry, the vacuuming, and the dishes. It was nice to just be. There is no better upside than that.

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Why now?

Five or so years ago my family went through my husband’s first deployment. At the time he left, my son was a premature infant of 4 months, my daughter was three, my dog was crazy, and I was holding down a full time job that could not afford to be flexible with me. I also helped out with the family support group for my husband’s unit and was the head of his platoon’s phone chain. I learned many a lesson during that year, and when I found out another deployment would be in my future, I decided that in order to keep my sanity as well as my humanity, some changes would be in order. The first deployment resulted in my being broken on a few levels. I worked too much, I couldn’t balance everything the way I thought I could, and there were a group of wives from the unit who decided it was their mission to make the rest of us stuffer more than we already were because apparently they were suffering more. If I slept more than 4 hours a night, it was a miracle. On top of all that, I tried to keep the family together and keep my husband part of our life even though he was so far from home.

I was lucky last time to have support from so many people–neighbors, family, co-workers, and a few of the other wives who were not crazy. Unfortunately, I was not able to focus on much of the positive. I was lucky to be able to focus on anything, honestly. I had taken on way too much. And in the end, I felt like I had failed. I should have seen that I had done the best I could, but being a type-A perfectionist, that wasn’t remotely how I felt. I can’t truthfully say that I have recovered completely from the last deployment–there’s a lot of baggage from that trip that’s still unpacked. But I am determined to have a very different experience this time.

Since the last deployment, I’ve taken a couple of years to prepare for the inevitable next deployment, do a fair amount of introspection about what I want from myself, and facilitate some changes both large and small. I left my career in publishing to start my own business , we moved to a new home, and I have spent the last year or so learning how to not be so angry and to see change as opportunity instead of an obstacle. While I am technically the owner of a graphic design company, I spend most of my time with my kids, and in particular, helping my son progress past some developmental delays. I will admit that this is not the life I envisioned for myself when I was younger–which has caused me quite a bit of emotional conflict–but I am working hard to find a new path and be happy about it and not have so much frustration at its difference from my former vision. Like any life, it has it’s ups and downs, but when you have the extra added stress of being part of a deployment during war time, it really exaggerates everything. Especially the crappy stuff.

Currently we are in the pre-deployment phase which is packed full of trying to spend family time together and getting things set up and fixed and on track so that every day life moves as smoothly and as normally as possible for us over the next 14 months. We’ve got just a little over a month before my husband leaves for his first round of training prior to shipping out. There’s a lot to be done in a short time and I’ll be keeping track of that here. The point of this blog, though, is not to have a bitchfest, or complain about my woes. What I want this blog to be, and what I intend to make it, is a record of the good things that help me get through this time–before, during, and after the deployment. I want it to show that you can get through a difficult time and still keep it together and maybe even come out with a greater appreciation for life.

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