Last night, there was nothing on TV so Mark and I watched The Da Vinci Code 'cause we were both pretty bored. I think I went to bed around 11. When I woke up, I got out of bed and got on facebook [don't judge] and realized I missed a pretty big national event: OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS KILLED. My initial reaction was "It is about time." I am happy, yes, but that celebration that I see on tv was not really what I was feeling. My mind just went to all of the sacrifices made for that one man to be killed. How it seems like SO long ago when we first went to war...
I know everyone remembers where they were on 9/11 and I'm not going to share the whole story, but when I first heard about the towers going down I immediately wept. My weeping was selfish- it was not for the fact that so many lives were lost, but was instead because I knew we would be going to war and as a 17 year-old, I was distraught because my boyfriend {and future husband}had become a Marine 4 months prior.
However, it wasn't until 3 years later in 2004, when Mark and I had been married for 5 months, that my Marine was told he was going to Afghanistan. I remember when I got married at such a young age, my parents asked me what I would do if Mark was deployed. He was stationed in Hawaii and I knew NO ONE except for the young Marine friends that Mark worked with and they weren't exactly guys I would be starting a Bible Study with anytime soon. I confidently reassured him that Mark was an Active Marine who's job didn't really require him to be over there and he wouldn't be deployed. Well, God had other plans and so after being married only a few months, Mark left me {his 19 year-old bride} to go to Afghanistan. I was so scared, but my faith in the Lord sustained me and I was also so proud that my husband was one of the few men willing to make an ultimate sacrifice for his country.
His deployment was so difficult, but to be honest, looking back, I can't even compare it to what so many other military wives go through. We didn't have any kids at the time and I still think about seeing his bus drive away to go to the airport and a very young wife with a newborn baby standing there because her husband was also on the bus. I was blubbering like an idiot and some of the wives with MULTIPLE children had to come comfort me, who had the luxury of only having to care for myself. For many of the women, they had lost count over the years of how many times they had said goodbye. They had 2 or 3 kids at home and it was part of the job of being a Marine Corps wife. While driving to the commissary (grocery store), I often saw buses driving away and wives and kids saying goodbye. It was almost routine during those years and there were no news cameras filming it because in Hawaii, there are military bases every few miles, so I'm sure the news stations couldn't even keep up. I had just one deployment overseas while I know so many families go through multiple deployments and are still making sacrifices. I think that the war has gone on so long, that people just become forgetful that there are still men and women overseas and even after the war is over, there will still be men and women who go on deployment because that is their job and it breaks my heart how we as a nation and I personally almost become numb to it and it takes something like Bin Laden's death for the patriotism to return. Mark rarely mentions it, but I know there are numerous Marines he served with who have lost their lives in Afghanistan or Iraq over the years which bring me to tears thinking about it.
I wanted to share some pictures of Mark while he was in Afghanistan. He took photos while he was there and since I was a crazy scrapper at that time, I surprised him with an "Afghanistan" scrapbook. It kind of hurt my feelings that he didn't really want to look at it and didn't ohh and aww over the details in the scrapbooking. How dumb did I feel after he finally admitted that he didn't really want to be reminded of being there even if there was fancy paper and I included Marine Corps stickers. BUT, a few years later, our dog ATE his cruise book (the 3/3 Marines were given a book of pictures from their deployment) and he agreed that he was glad he had some photos.
He had to crawl around in the mail room to see if he ever had any packages sent to him.
The picture on the bottom right is one of my favorites of Mr. Halsey. He said he was waiting for a haircut.
When he returned home... a great day
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