The Easy Part
I was never supposed to end up with a military man.
I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the world I knew, you didn’t associate with “worldly people,” let alone someone in the military. Military service meant participating in war, and war meant killing another human being. That was certainly something we were taught to stay away from.
Then, during my middle school and high school years, my family moved to Yorktown, Virginia, and suddenly I was living in the middle of the military world. There was a military base at the end of my street, and my neighbor was in the Air Force. Our school even made us take the ASVAB test, and military recruiters called our house. I remember my mother telling every recruiter that her children would never serve in the military and asking them to stop calling.
Looking back, I can only imagine how deeply the beliefs she had absorbed during her years as a Jehovah’s Witness shaped those conversations.
By the time I went to college in Newport News and Norfolk, Virginia, I was surrounded by military men. Everywhere college students went to socialize and party, there they were. And, in my young mind, they all looked alike, acted alike, and seemed to have the same intentions when it came to an attractive college girl. I avoided relationships with military men like the plague.
Imagine my surprise when I found myself falling in love with one.
The funny thing is, I didn’t even know David was in the military until after we’d been on a few dates. His hair wasn’t cut like a military man’s. His face was stubbly, thanks to a shaving profile. The night he walked into the pool hall where I worked, he wasn’t with military friends. He was with two civilian buddies.
One of his friends invited me to his birthday party. David himself held back, showing little interest in me, but quietly, at the end of the evening, he added his own invitation: “You should come to his birthday with me.”
There wasn’t a single military man in sight at that party. By the time I discovered that David was actually in the military, I was already hooked. Hopelessly in love. To make matters even more confusing, his schedule didn’t resemble the standard military schedule I had imagined, so I had no reason to suspect it.
Our relationship moved fast.
A month after we started dating, I moved into his apartment. Six months after we started dating, we bought a house together in Williamsburg, Virginia. The very next day after we moved all our earthly belongings into that house, he left on a training mission. That was my first real taste of the unique hardships of military life: being left alone in a new home, surrounded by boxes, trying to figure out how to turn a house into our home without my partner there to help me.
We survived that training deployment. I didn’t particularly enjoy having him gone, but it wasn’t something I couldn’t handle. I’d always been an independent person. I never needed a man around simply because I couldn’t manage on my own. If I wanted a man in my life, it was because I wanted him there, not because I needed him.
A few months later, it became clear that David would have to make a significant move or deploy for an extended period. First came orders for a security detail somewhere. Then came orders for a three-year tour in Hawaii.
Hawaii actually piqued my interest. That was somewhere I could go with him. But David, always focused on the mission and the long-term implications of our decisions, believed moving to Hawaii for three years—right after buying a house and while I was entering my final year of college—would set us back financially and professionally. So he traded those orders for a year-long deployment to the Middle East.
I was terrified. The thought of him going to a war zone was devastating. In the days leading up to his deployment, I experienced my first panic attack. All the chaos and back-and-forth with orders leading up to that deployment gave me my first real taste of military life. It would be challenging. It would be unpredictable. And it would require sacrifices I had never imagined making.
But when you fall in love with someone, you are willing to endure a lot just to be with them.
A week or two after David deployed, I was talking with a coworker about all the chaos leading up to his departure and the fact that he would be gone for an entire year. She looked at me and said something along the lines of, “That must be so hard. I couldn’t stand being apart from the man I love for a whole year.”
I looked at her and replied:
“This is the easy part.”
Looking back on my life and all the experiences I’ve had, I sometimes surprise myself with how much I seemed to understand at such a young age. The wisdom in that statement from my 23-year-old self still blows my mind to this day.
How could anyone think that being separated from your partner for an entire year, while that person was in a war zone no less, could possibly be the easy part?
But, boy, was I onto something.
In my mind, being alone was easy. I was perfectly capable of being by myself. I had a life of my own, things to do, a degree to finish, and a home to manage. Of course I missed David. Of course I worried about his safety. I had already experienced the fear of knowing he was going somewhere dangerous.
But I could handle the separation.
I also came to understand why deployment was so difficult for many other military spouses. Some people need the physical presence of their partner in ways I didn’t. The absence, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the waiting for a phone call or a message—those things can be agonizing. Even I admitted to my mother that if I were someone who needed a partner beside me to feel secure, I could see why some people stray when their partners are deployed.
But for me, and for our relationship, the deployment itself was the easiest part.
Because I knew something else was waiting on the other side.
I knew that the man who left for that war zone would return having experienced things I could never fully understand. I knew that war changes people, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone could go through those experiences and simply come home to resume life as if nothing had happened.
What I didn’t know was just how much those changes would affect our lives, how long their effects would last, or how difficult it could be to find our way through what came next.
I was 23 years old when I said those words to my coworker.
More than a decade after active-duty military life, I understand them in ways that young woman could never have imagined.
The deployment and active duty were the easy part.
I just didn’t yet understand the war that could begin after he came home and military service was over.
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