What we left there.

A bunch of Ft. Stewart friends were all saying yesterday how they missed that place. I, of course, got in on that, too. None of us are there anymore. That's the way the Army is. You always leave. These people ran the gamut, though. Only one's husband is still Active Duty. They're at Ft. Polk now. Another one, her husband got out right after the brigade got back from what was Thak's 3rd tour (her husband's 2nd), and he's now deployed with the Texas National Guard. There was another girl whose husband was injured in an IED attack during that same deployment, and was medically retired. There were still others who have moved on in one way or another. Then there was me... Mine's a civilian contractor now.

The common thread is, we were all at Ft. Stewart when the biggest headline in the world fell right in our laps. It was us who woke up to Katie Couric hosting the morning news on our front lawn. It was our husbands who were in the brigade that those headlines affected. We weren't the glory seekers who claimed the credit. We were the ones who got it whether we wanted it or not. (Here's a hint. None of us wanted it.) Our husbands are the NCO's who lead the soldiers who took Baghdad back. We are the ones who got back what was left of them when the war had taken its share. We are very different people in a great many ways (although funny enough, we're all southern. I just realized that.) but in some very important ways, we are all the same. Our husbands did different jobs, grunts, gunners, mechanics, medics, you name it. We all did the same thing, though. We made it through the toughest 15 months the Army has dished out in our lifetime. Sometimes we got through on superstition (like my reading the Kuwaiti news reels every night before I went to bed), sometimes on pure strength, and sometimes we got through only on a wing and a prayer... and vodka. We got through, though, and we have seen each other at our absolute lowest, and our absolute proudest. We understand each other completely, because we were all shaped by the same thing, even though it took different forms with each. I am more of a skeptic than ever, while others are more patriotic than ever, and still others question for the first time. None of that matters, though.

The fact is also that we all miss Ft. Stewart, and we would all go back in a heartbeat. The girl whose husband is still Active Duty said that she went back last summer, and it wasn't great. In thinking back, Ft. Stewart was never great. It's in the middle of nowhere, the town outside the gates has only a Walmart, it has the smallest commissary I have ever seen, the housing market is impossible, the deployment schedule is the worst the Army has, and it smells funny. So why do we all miss Ft. Stewart?

I wager, it's because of what we left there. I'm not talking about my awesome crock pot that I left in my house on post when we moved either. No, I'm talking about something totally intangible that all of us left at Ft. Stewart, and that no matter how hard we try, we will never get back.

To understand this, you first need to understand what Ft. Stewart was like in 2004. I have a pretty good command of the English language in general, but I cannot find the words to truly do justice to the energy that surrounded Ft. Stewart prior to Thak's 2nd tour. We had just arrived there, and he had just been selected for the UAV program. Back then, they only took the best for that program. This was before there was an MOS for it that anybody could enlist for. No, they made that MOS based on Thak, and four of his peers, the five best generator mechanics in the Army. They sent them all to Arizona, trained them to work on the Army's new UAV system, and then sent them out to their units. Thak went to Ft. Stewart, and when we got there, the UAV unit was just setting up. It was all new. The unit didn't even exist on paper, and the work was still regarded as secretive. The entire town was hopping with the energy that comes of an entire division getting ready to deploy. Wives were preparing to move back home (this was during the days when easily 50% did that), soldiers were preparing to deploy, and if you went to Ranger Joe's on a Sunday, you couldn't find any E5 or E6 rank on the shelves, and you'd wait an hour for a haircut. The entire area was buzzing with activity, so much anticipation of what was to come. There was a lot of trepidation, too, of course. It was a war, after all. But there was a serious undercurrent of excitement. If you've ever watched the movie Pearl Harbor, think of the scene in the street where Red proposes to Betty. The energy in that part of the movie is exactly what Hinesville was like in 2004 and early 2005. Nobody hoped more, loved harder, or soaked up life nearly as zealously as we did right then.

Then they deployed. The tiny line of trees representing the troops lost during the 2003 deployment, grew to be several lines of trees. Thak was sent from his kushy assignment in Baghdad, to a remote location in a part of Iraq most people aren't familiar with if I tell them. He set records, had a hand in catching some really bad guys, and earned medals he probably would rather not tell you about. There were a lot of issues with that deployment, and when he got back, the electrical energy that had surrounded the post, was replaced by a lot of unrest.

Just when things started to settle out, and a sense of well-being returned, the president dropped a bomb on us. There would be a surge on Baghdad. Our guys woke up on orders, and were released early to come home and tell us the official news. We knew they would deploy again, just not that soon. That's when the media circus began, and it didn't stop for a year and a half. Our guys spent the next 3 months in the swamps and forests of south Georgia practicing their skills. There was no time to send them to the desert at National Training Center, so they brought trainers to us, and they did the pre-deployment train-up right in our own backyard... not that we saw them much at all. I was one of the lucky ones. Thak stayed at the airfield, and had some contact with me via email. Most weren't that lucky. Then after that was over, they let them take about a week's leave, and then they were gone, to the most volatile place on the planet.

For 15 months, mortars rained, IED's exploded, cars exploded, houses exploded, bullets flew, and bombs dropped. The camp Thak was staying at was nicknamed "The Shooting Gallery", because they got mortared so much. Multiple times in one week, his position was mortared while I was on the phone with him. Every time that happened, I heard the rounds hit before the phones went dead, so I knew it was a direct hit, and being a former soldier, I know that hits like that usually have kills. Then I would have to wonder, for 24 hours, whether or not Thak had survived the attack. (If you hear nothing within 24 hours, that's good news. They always get casualty notifications made within 24 hours, usually a lot less.) Every person who was with the unit at that point has similar stories. There is a lot more to tell also, but you get the idea. Thak ended that tour with a Bronze Star medal and a nasty case of PTSD. This, again, is not unique to us, although the former is far less common than the latter.

When the guys came home after the surge was over, the media circus continued. I wore a purple dress. I was pregnant with Orren, our R&R baby. Erin wore pink. We didn't care about the news cameras. We just scanned the crowd for Thak. We didn't see him, of course. All soldiers look pretty much the same in uniform, and Thak is rather short, so he gets lost in large formations more times than not. As we walked out of the gym where the homecoming ceremony was held, and the warm Georgia sun beat down on us, I noticed that Warrior's Walk, which had been just a small line of trees when we got there, and had grown to a few lines two tours ago, was now a forest of close to 500 trees. 500 trips the casualty notification officer had made around the area to notify some wife or relative of the news everybody dreads. I looked to my right, at Thak, and was grateful that he didn't have a tree there, but at the same time, wondered how we were so lucky, when 500 others were not.

Then life had to begin again. We had a baby to prepare for. We fought the housing office, and the housing office won, so we moved off post. Erin started Kindergarten just weeks after Thak got back home, so we had to prepare for that. A few months later, the orders came, and we left Ft. Stewart. We were glad to say goodbye to the deployments, and the death, and the injuries, and the fear. In part, I expected our new duty station to be as electrifying as Ft. Stewart had been when we first arrived there, but it wasn't. Everyone else had also come up on orders at about the same time (those who hadn't gotten out, that is), and they said exactly the same thing about their new duty stations. The energy wasn't there anymore.

I say the reason we all want to go back to Ft. Stewart is because we left our innocence there. When we arrived, we knew little of war, and even less of how long, drawn out, and ugly this one would turn out to be. We knew there were big things in store, and we were excited. Then the reality of it all came for us, and that bright-eyed, raring to go, crazy attitude was just as dead as the individuals the trees on the field represent. That is the first, and least obvious casualty of war. I don't know why we all want to go back to Ft. Stewart so bad. We won't find what we're looking for there, or anywhere else for that matter. What we will find, though, is the strength and wisdom that we gained doing something very difficult because we had no choice, and we will find that every single time we look in the mirror, or at one another. While we may want back what was lost so many years ago, what we have will stand in its place, whether we get back to Ft. Stewart or not.