Losing my much-ness

This morning I had to drop Tyler off at the airport. He's heading to Mongolia for two weeks and by the time he gets back, I'll be at Fort Dix for combat skills training. It really sucked and kind of ruined my day. It hasn't quite set in yet that I really won't see him for the rest of the year.


I was crying when I drove away, took the wrong exit and got on the freeway going the opposite direction that I needed to be.


But I had to laugh thinking about how far we'd come in the past two years.


I thought about the first time I saw Tyler. We were at Fort Meade, Md., and I was doing the combat camera portion of my class where we went out to a remote area of the base, slept in tents and treated it like a deployed environment.


The first thing we had to do, after we rucked a few miles in to the woods, was "invade an Iraqi village and search the citizens."


Often times,  after troops would arrive to Ft. Meade, they wouldn't pick up class right away. So they were sort of stuck in limbo. Tyler was a M.A.T. (Marine awaiting training) so he volunteered to play an Iraqi villager in our field training exercise.


So our class split up in to teams and prepared to ambush the village. We snuck through the bushes and ran through the clearings one at a time until we were all grouped and poised to run, screaming at the camp with our M-16s.


We rounded up the "villagers", which was really about six Marines, and put them on their faces at gun point. They all pretended to not understand english or a word we were saying as we yelled at them. Cute.


Once we had them on the ground, one person stood with their weapon pointed directly at the Marine while another one of us patted them down.


I stuck the muzzle of my M-16 in Tyler's face and yelled at him not to move.


Divine intervention occurred that day.


After we searched them, our instructors told us that we were to, "make friends with the Iraqis. Offer them food, medical attention or anything else they might need."


I jabbed Tyler in the gut with my M-16 and asked him if he was hungry.


The rest as they say, is history.


I have a couple photos from our "raid" that day. We were still learning to run and take pictures simultaneously, so no ones photos turned out spectacular. But I do have one of  Tyler face down in the gravel. The photo also includes a dear friend of mine, who Tyler and I are also stationed with here in Hawaii, Reece Lodder.


Lodder was also tasked to deploy to Afghanistan this year with 3/3, a Marine infantry unit.


After some long reflection that lasted the entire day, everything has sunken in a little bit more. I'm a little more excited each day to go and it gets a little easier to leave. After all, being stationed apart for more than a year makes us old salty veterans at saying, "bye babe, see you soon."