Please Don't Tell Me

Often, I think our military spouses forget that we worry. We cope so well, generally speaking, that they tell us many details about things that we would rather not hear.

Tonight, I bring you some of them:

*  We had to stop training for a bit because someone mixed in live bullets with the training rounds.

*  Our flight was delayed because parts kept breaking.

*  Our flight got canceled because of too many mortar attacks.

*  There is a $15k bounty (US dollars) on dog handlers.  $20k if they got the dog, too.

*  Oh, that noise...it's just mortars coming in.

*  In-depth details about how a fellow soldier was injured...especially during R&R, after which that wife's soldier returned to battle.

*  Didn't I tell you that our MRAP hit an IED?

*  When we first got there, we didn't have showers for 45 days.  ("As the woman who washes his socks after ONE day...yeah, I don't even like to think about that!")

*  When asked why the flight suit smelled odd, he said they had to land in a freshly fertilized field due to smoke and oil in the cockpit.

*  Going to be late tonight...  Soldier thought hand sanitizer would make him drunk, not poisoned.

*   Absent-mindedly showing photos "This is my vehicle after we hit an IED".  An IED the spouse didn't know about.

*  Me and the PLT Sgt had a sniper bullet go right between us!

*  On the phone-- BOOM  "Love you, gotta go".  Then nothing for several days.


I was told I shouldn't ask for these stories, that they violate OPSEC (Operations Security).  I was told that these should be kept secret, between a husband and a wife.  I was told that I was a troll, an internet person who was just trying to stir up trouble.

None of these is necessarily true.  They weren't private admissions, they certainly don't violate OPSEC, and I am no troll.

After hearing these comments, I really had to think about what I set out to do by asking the question "what has your Soldier told you, that you'd prefer to not have heard?"   My goal, truthfully, was to bring a little bit of humor to something that isn't funny.  The humor isn't in the stories themselves, although one woman wrote about her very pale, very tall soldier running in only a teeny towel while bullets flew.  (The mental image of that makes me laugh.)  The humor is in the offhand "oh, yeah, I thought I told you" way we hear most of these things.  The humor is in the guileless presentation of something that, to a soldier, is a fact of life.

Thanks for reading, if you got this far.  I love comments, and feedback, and followers.  :)