Reflective Essay- Military Madness

I wear one of his dog tags around my neck everyday as a reminder, not just of him but of how much he cares about me. It is a small piece of what consumes his time and takes him away from me for months on end. But it is my piece, my memento of his affection to keep me company while he is gone. Long distance relationships are hard to maintain and rarely survive as it is. Now imagine if the two of you are headed down opposing paths in life and do not necessarily support the other’s decision. This is what Tad and I go through on a daily basis.

When Tad and I first began dating I knew that he was in the National Guard and that he would ship out to BCT (Basic Combat Training) after we graduated from high school. I never really thought that it would have an effect on our relationship. Maybe this was because, at first, I had little faith that our relationship would last long enough for it to matter. I thought of it as just another one of the many pointless high school relationships that would end in six weeks or less.

There are days that I wish I knew then what I know now about being in a relationship with someone in the military; the amount of time you spend alone, the amount of undying and unwavering support you have to show and cannot expect in return, and how much of an effort it is to hold things together. When Tad and I first began dating I had no clue how much I would be alone. First there is BCT (Basic Combat Training) which is three months and next comes AIT (Advanced Individual Training)- his “crash course in anatomy” as he puts it that lasts five months. After this there is the ever looming chance of being deployed to Iraq for an undetermined period of time. The training alone is a total of eight months, which is more than one half of our entire relationship, even by the time he gets home. When he was home for exodus in between his training sessions, I asked him what he hated the most about the military and he quickly responded with, “The fact that it keeps me away from you so much.” This statement could not be truer. Throughout our relationship I have spent more time alone than with him.

There is a false sense of support that I have to show for him while he is not here that is never easy to do. I have to put on a happy face and be encouraging even when I do not want to. It is not that I do not support him 100% and wish the best for him, it is the fact that I do not support his reasons for joining the National Guard and neither does he on the hard days. He knows that I have a hard time accepting his reasons for enlisting, but still, I have to be the one to tell him that everything will be alright and that it will all work out when he calls and tells me that he is having a bad day and that he wishes he had never enlisted. Half of the time I have no clue what he is talking about because he uses military jargon that I do not understand. As time goes on I am finding that more and more of it makes sense to me, but it is so hard to tell him everything will be alright when I do not know what he is really talking about. On the flipside though, if I am having a bad day I get the occasional “That is unfortunate babe, I hope things get better”, but most of the time it is the cold “Do you have any idea how good you have it compared to what I am going through here?”. There are days when I cannot deal with it and just respond with an equally cold, “You chose this for yourself, no one made you do this,” then I feel horrible for saying it and have to revert to being falsely supportive. I think now I just sound like a broken record when he calls and things are not going well. My automatic response is, “That is too bad babe, things will get better, just hang in there, you are almost finished.”

Before my relationship with Tad, I would have never considered myself the type of person to get involved in a long distance relationship, let alone a long distance relationship with someone in the military. I always thought of long distance relationships as a downhill battle that only prolongs the inevitable demise of the relationship. I thought that one person would always put in more effort than the other and eventually they would just give up. Now I will admit it, there are days when I feel this way about my relationship with Tad, especially when he called one night and we were in a fight and he told me, “I know that you have put at least twenty-times more into our relationship than I have and I just hope that you do not give up on us. It is hard for me to be gone so much and deal with everything that I am dealing with and I do not know what I would do without you.” After he said that I began evaluating our relationship and everything I do for him and everything he does for me. This is when I learned how long distance relationships actually work sometimes. When you care enough about someone, and if your relationship is strong enough to endure all of the trials and tribulations of being separated from one another, then there is little that will damage it.

Being in a relationship with someone in the military is a daily battle to hold it all together. There are things that you have to get used to in order for it to work and so many things that you have to learn to tolerate. However, it is possible for it to all work out which is something that I never thought was possible until Tad.