Welcome back to the world. We missed you.

We just talked to a longtime friend of ours who's serving on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border right now. He told us amazing news! He is divorcing his awful wife!!! Normally, someone getting divorced is not a joyous occasion, but this time, it's different. She was awful. I was at the wedding. I watched this guy flush his life down the toilet, then we all (and by we, I mean all his college friends and most of his relatives) watched him gradually disappear off the face of the earth. Occasionally, he'd sneak out a phone call or an email to one of us, and since we were stationed together for several years, following that, Thak and I would run into him around post every week or so, and if he was alone, we'd stop and talk until his phone rang and it was her. Then he had to go. She was evil. Pure evil. Thak tried to warn him. I tried to warn him. At the wedding, his mother asked Thak one last time to try to talk some sense into him. He's really stubborn, though, (not a bad trait in his line of work, really) and this was one lesson he just had to learn for himself.

I lost even more respect for her over the way this came about, but in a way, I'm glad she showed her true crazy colors just as brightly as she did because that's the only way he'd ever see them. Now that he sees what the rest of us have always seen, he's glad to be done with her, and is spending his days getting his affairs in order so that he can divorce her as quickly as possible when he goes home.

He's also going for full custody of his kids. I hope he gets it. He wouldn't be the first. In Thak's old platoon, there were like half a dozen single dads who had sole custody. People will award custody to soldiers these days, so hopefully that's what happens here. I wouldn't want that bitch raising my kids if I were him either. Thank goodness both of them look just like him, and nothing at all like her.

The best thing of all is that he's himself again. He was lost for so long, and now he's back. Welcome back to the world, friend. We missed you so much for the past 4 years.