In July Philip was in Missouri for a combat driving training. I usually feel like I am in the passenger's seat in them middle of an action movie for about three months after he gets back. This may or may not have been the summer where my husband got multiple speeding tickets for the first time in his life.
Philip came back to Virginia, unpacked and repacked his bags, and headed north on I-95 to spend August in NJ. We actually felt incredibly fortunate that the next stint of training got shortened from being a full two months to about six weeks. We felt especially spoiled and very grateful that the training was driving distance from DC, so I was able to drive up to visit him on weekends. We spent lots of time in Princeton and, of course, were happy to return (many times) to our NJ Chipotle of choice under what felt like much less stressful life circumstances than when I lived there in 2013-2014. My first weekend I sped up the Turnpike just in time to make a surprise visit to the hospital to see my colleagues from internship. I love those kinds of surprises.The reality of this deployment hit me in waves/stages. The first "okay, we're doing this" moment in which I felt the weight of what was ahead occurred as I walked through the door to our billeting room the first weekend I visited and was met with the sight of one of Philip's uniforms and body armor laying on the ground saturated with artificial blood from the exercises the previous week. Within two months of being back in DC following training we learned that one of the men who had been at training with Philip in NJ had been killed in action. The sad reality is that at this point much of the country has "moved on." Today someone remarked to me, "We aren't actually still in a war with Afghanistan, right?" Actually, yes. Yes, "we" are.
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