Things Could Be Worse

I'm about to post some more highly opinionated not-so-fun stuff again. Bare with me here - I just want to get this off my chest - I promise I'll get drunk tomorrow and write about the alien tapped groundhog that is attempting to take over the world from my backyard hose faucet.

Opinionistas wrote another provocative post today about the brevity of life, especially for those in high stress jobs, and the way in which her work world deals with it.

Now to just get this out of the way - I work for an amazing company that offers emotional, financial and physical support in a million ways to a million employees around the world. More. And I also work in a big division who have made it a point to hire people based on heart as well as skill and experience. The company and the people are all supportive of everyone they work with and for. It's like being in a family - with a dress code.

However, that is only part of my life. Every morning I wake up knowing full well how lucky I am to have one more day with my husband home. I drive by a gate guarded by 18 year olds holding M-16's twice daily - I know how tenuous my homelife is.

It was brought home with a vengeance last week, which makes the post by Opinionista so much more timely.

A few years ago my husband was serving on a Carrier that was part of the Pacific fleet. He went on two deployments (one that lasted extra long because of OIF). Between deployments he did almost a year worth of work-ups (training deployments) in less than 14 months. While he was gone I was part of the wives club...which held meetings and tried to support one another as we all tried to cope with a family life missing 50% of the family.

People may not know this, or choose not to acknowledge this, but before the "War in Iraq", Iraq was at war with us. They shot at us every single day. My husband spent most of his first deployment writing to me about the shock of walking past body bags on his way to eat. Not only did people get hurt and killed from wayward bullets and anti-aircraft fire, but from work related incidents. People falling off the side of the boat and never being found, aircraft crashes, machinery faults, all sorts of things. And of course stress - being in the military is the highest stress job you will ever find, and they work in the most dangerous areas too - even in peacetime.

When my husband was on the ship it was commonplace for me to show up to a meeting and realize that people I knew were missing because they were no longer wives but widows. It was also not uncommon to find myself baby-sitting kids who were left unattended in our all-military apartment because their mothers just had to get away. That was the worst - you start wondering if she'll come back, if she'll be able to face all the pain and the work that she has ahead of her now, or if these children would lose more than just their fathers. Sometimes they did, sometimes it was just too much.

Now that we have shore duty, I haven't been in that environment. Most of the other spouses I know haven't even gone through a ship duty with their spouse. Life feels okay, sometimes you can even forget that threat looming out in the void called "combat".

Last week though a very close friend who I had not talked to since living in California emailed. Her boyfriend, another friend of mine, is dead and she's just got out of the hospital after a bad breakdown. She is 21 and has two kids, both his. Her rent is too high now and she doesn't have a place to live, she doesn't have a job and she's staring down the beginning of a completely frightening existence. And she's not going to get a lot of help - she's not military anymore - not really, she wasn't to begin with since they were waiting to get married -after- he came home. She said she already feels like a third rate citizen, as opposed to the second rate status spouses get, even worse if you're just a "girlfriend" (a status I know all too well myself). No church, no family, no military, heck, no 800 number to call. Boy did that hit me like a ton of bricks - there are just far too many people dealing with tragedy.

But...she'll be okay...because she has too. His buddies who had to watch him die will be alright because they have too. The people who knew him and her and loved them both will be alright because we have too. If anything the one thing we'll learn from this is that life is very short and very hard and there will be no support from the people we work for. All we have is our own strength and hopefully the extra others can spare.

My boss, an executive and an Army veteran, told me something that ran through my head, in addition to all my other thought, as I read about the horrors of a dead colleague in a law firm. It must be horrible to deal with that loss and still go to work everyday and take on all that stress - but as he put it "There is a roof over my head and no one is shooting at me - this is a pretty damn good life."