When They Don't Wake Up

I wish I could begin this post with the past week's play-by-play in The Big Apple with Shana.


Instead, I will start that on Wednesday.

I woke up this morning to several emails and text messages from friends and family who were concerned about Neal and asking if I had talked to him. I hadn't read the news yet but I dug my laptop out of the suitcase swiftly...panicked and anxious. 5 dead after a rocket attack in central Iraq. The news story was wired out of Baghdad. Oh God. I paced the house and breathed deeply until my phone rang. It was Neal and he was his typical relaxed, jovial self. We talked about my last day in New York and the flight home. We discussed our upcoming R&R and what he had been doing all day. And I thanked God a hundred times over for those 45 minutes.

I started this blog because so many readers were asking for a peak into our lives...to have the opportunity to know a Soldier and his family and the ups and downs during a deployment. As I sit in the dark of my living room, typing this and digesting 3 hotdog buns, a dressing of balsamic vinegar and olive oil and several brownies (because eating feelings is so much more productive than actually feeling them), I am reminded of why deployments are not the same as a 12-month holiday to the desert. CNN and Fox News are pushing the story that Iraq is a ghost town...that there are a few thousand troops left and they are just there for training and advisory purposes. Any deployment to Iraq is a year of paid vacation. The attack on Camp Victory proves otherwise. Those Soldiers were in their quarters, their "CHU"...they were sleeping. They were mortared in their beds. They never had a chance. It's not about letting your guard down for a second or making the wrong decision...they were in the middle of our most basic human need. To attack someone while he is asleep is cowardly and unforgivable. And it makes my stomach turn to think that it even happened...much less that Camp Victory is a major base just north of Baghdad and of Neal.

I just ask that you will stop sometime today and say a prayer for the families of those Soldiers. When we know their names, then we will also know that each one has been visited by the casualty officer...the Angel of Death. And unless we have walked in those shoes, we can never know how devastating it can be. May God bless our troops and the U.S.A.

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