Military wife says farewell at airport.

My husband, an active-duty Navy pilot, left last week for a 12-month deployment in Baghdad. In anticipation of the long absence, I moved cross-country earlier this summer with our 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter, and we now live close to our extended family in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. In this Deployment Diary, I'll be chronicling the ups and downs we experience on the home front as we transition, again, into life without Daddy. Since my husband was home barely a year between his last deployment and this one, the highs are particularly high and the lows often bring us to our knees. As I write in my memoir, Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War, there's no typical military family; ours is both similar to and different from others in some important ways.

I saw my husband off yesterday—for the second time this summer. We had a long, tearful goodbye seven weeks ago, when he left our new home in the D.C. suburbs for a series of training bases to prepare for his 12-month deployment in Baghdad. We knew from experience that he would be granted no leave during the training, so we were sure we wouldn’t see each other again. But when his travel orders came through, we got a surprise: He would be flying through a nearby airport en route to Iraq, and the layover was long enough to arrange a mini-reunion.

I agonized about this, but ultimately decided not to bring our children along. They are 6 years old and 4 years old and have had so much trouble saying goodbye that we felt another parting would be unnecessarily painful for them. I enlisted my parents to baby-sit for the day and told the children I had a long “meeting” to go to. They never even knew their dad was in town. I don’t like lying to them, but I was convinced that I made the right decision once I saw the scene at the airport.

Scott usually wears a flight suit—he is an active-duty Navy pilot—but for this particular assignment he will be on the ground with a joint force, and he’s been issued Army uniforms. I was amused to see him walking toward me in camouflage combat gear, one in a crowd of dozens also on their way to overseas missions. (Of course, he could be wearing a garbage bag and I’d be thrilled to see him.) At baggage claim, still smiling and hugging, we retrieved his four giant duffel bags, packed with body armor, additional uniforms, and even more combat gear, along with a rifle and a pistol. We balanced everything on the Smart Carte on the way to the USO, and I volunteered to push. But I was so unused to the unwieldy weapon case, lying horizontally across the cart and padlocked in three separate places, that I banged into nearly everything and everyone on the way.

We finally reached the USO, relieved to unload Scott’s bags for daylong storage so that he and I could spend some time together. Usually on our USO visits, we are greeted warmly and immediately offered Internet access, Girl Scout cookies, tuna sandwiches, and free books. This time, a volunteer held out his hand like a traffic cop at an accident scene. “Stop right there,” he commanded. “We’re full.” In August, he barked, all the military kids fly back to school in Germany, and there was no room for our bags—or, apparently, for us. We just stared at him. We couldn’t believe we’d heard correctly. A deploying service member, turned away by the USO? But he would not budge. We turned the Smart Carte around and headed upstairs to ticketing, thinking that maybe Scott could go ahead and check in for the flight.

Tags: airport, deployment diary, Iraq, marriage, military wife

Alison Buckholtz is the author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War.

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