They Say He is Coming Home

The Army says that Sean’s unit is coming home–they are leaving on November 10–so they say.

I haven’t talked to many people about it, and I haven’t changed my plans for going to Washington DC to protest at the Pentagon on November 9th, meet with other military families on the 10th, put flags on the mall for every fallen solider on the 11th, and to come home to Montana on the 12th.

I don’t talk about it, because I can’t believe it. I am too afraid to believe that they will not turn him around, and keep him there. I am too afraid to believe that he will be ok- that he will not get hurt or die in the last week before he is to come home. I too am afraid to hope.

They don’t really mean he can come home- they mean he can go to Texas- and while I grant that Texas is much better than Iraq, it is not home. He can not return to his life with me. Before he can come home to me, even on leave, he has to go to reintegration training.

They will tell him, “Don’t beat your wife, don’t kick your dogs, don’t try to take all the bills and responsibilities from her too fast, don’t try to move back into your old place in her life go slow. try to listen to what she says”. The problem is, they never wanted him to listen to what I said.

What they won’t tell him is how to deal with the horrible grief I feel over the wreck of our marriage. How to deal with my absolute conviction that everything he has done over there has worsened things for our country. What to do about the feeling I have that I can not go to see him come home, because I do not believe in the fairy tale that it was all for a “noble cause” and I can’t wait with the other families on post for the troops to come home, waving a flag that our president has defiled. They have no place for such as me. They can not tell him what to do with the results of a war that will never leave our marriage. They have no answers for concerns such as this. No advice to give.

He had no idea, no idea, what all of it would mean. I tried so hard to tell him, what being gone all this time would do, what being in war would mean, what the changes he would have to make would do. and he saw none of it and I was so right. I remember what we used to be, and I know, it will NEVER, ever, be that way again. I can hear the changes in his voice, I saw them when he came home on leave. I will never have my husband home. This is not the man I once loved.

TAMMARA~85,441 can be reached through The Homefront Diaries.