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. :)
