Our soldier son returns to Ft. Bragg today. He has been home since Dec. 4. He seems OK and well-rested.
Now we find out how the future will look. Will he be teed up for another deployment? Or will the 82nd return to its regular mission, being the nation's first responder? I suspect we won't know for a while.
At any rate, it's been great having him home. We had a nice Christmas Eve dinner and he was kind enough to hang out with his parents on New Year's Eve. Somehow, however, we finished the holidays without a family photo...and this would have been the year to do one.
The 3x4 map of Baghdad and the 2x3 map of Iraq was trundled off to storage. All the books on Iraq were hauled off to my office (out of sight, out of mind). The blue star banner has been taken down.
With the exception of a few newspaper clips that need to be put away and the 82nd Airborne flag, there are no longer any visible signs of what this household has been through the last two years.
The future for us? We will continue to monitor and pray for our friends who have soldiers in Iraq. That will never change.
But I suspect we will un-tether ourselves from the Internet and Blackberries to see what a normal life looks like.
3 comments:
A normal life ... yeah, sounds good.
DaD,
You deserve some relaxation.
I'm holding my breath for anothe six and a half months.
Luckily he'll be out of their during the elections.
I wouldn't be surprised to see violence ramp up leading up to and after them.
Sort of a thumbing of the nose.
Dad,
You are probably right with the surge ramping down and the elections taking place a short time later.
Jan,
I'm not sure a normal life is as easy it thinks. More on that later.
Post a Comment