I cried when my husband received his orders to Korea. and I begged him not to go. I was twenty two years old, and new to the business of being an Army wife. He was twenty four, a newly promoted First Lieutenant, and it would be our first separated tour. He wouldn’t see me or our two small children for sixteen months. “I have to go,” he explained patiently. “Even if I wanted to get out of the Army – and I don’t – I couldn’t leave until after this tour of duty.” And he said, for the first time, what I was to hear him say often, over the years, “We just have to keep marching.”
The Korean War started when I was sixteen. As a typical teen ager, my great worry at first was whether the war would spoil my Sweet Sixteen party. Of course, the reality slowly dawned. We learned names like Inchon and Pusan. When the handsome boy who lived across the alley was maimed at the Chosin Reservoir, the full impact struck me. Soldiers and Marines who had only recently returned from world War II were being recalled to fight again at places we’d never heard of. “Those that were there will never forget! Those who were not will never know,” President Ronald Reagan said.
My young husband and I were lucky, of course. By the time he landed in Seoul, the actual fighting was over, and the discussions had descended to squabbles over the size of the negotiating table and the height of the flag staffs. So he wasn’t in danger, perhaps, but he certainly was gone.
It’s sort of a joke among military wives that something awful always happens at the start of a separated deployment. Either the dog runs away or the car stalls or the furnace
quits. The first day Roger was gone, our eighteen month old son fell down the stairs at my mothers house and required emergency surgery. Luckily little guys bounce back fast. In between caring for him and his sister, I managed to write every day but I never mentioned our son’s accident . What would be the use? It took four to six weeks for a letter to reach Roger. By that time, our boy would be well. I’d receive no mail for weeks sometime and then it would come all at once; letters and tapes on old fashioned reel to reel tapes. I still have every one. I don’t think either of us ever missed a day. No email, no phone calls in those days.
Military wives generally form the habit of not sharing big problems with the absent spouse. We work it through – and we keep marching.
A generation later, my daughter in law, as a Navy wife, kept what she called a Whine Journal. She wrote in it everything that went wrong while my son was at sea; how angry and frustrated she felt, and then when that was finished she’d close the book firmly, and write her husband the usual cheerful letter. She just kept marching.
I learned by watching what it means to be a soldier’s soldier. Often the phone rings in the middle of the night with news of some crisis
or some young soldier in trouble. The soldier’s soldier throws on his clothes and is out the door before his sleeping wife can say, “What is it.” The welfare of the troops comes first.
Every time. By the way, every officer knows from the day he is commissioned that he is forbidden to speak in public or to the press about his Commander in Chief or his policies.
His wife knows it too. Because he’s the Commander in Chief, that’s why.
So for fifty seven years, I’ve been a military wife, widow, and mother and here’s the message I need to leave with you. You can say all you want about how how the President is ruining the country. That’s your right. I can vigorously disagree with you. That’s my right. But I’ve had the opportunity over the years to live in a few of those countries where a sinister knock on the door in the middle of the night is a reality. It gives new meaning to the too familiar phrase, Freedom isn’t Free. In a very real sense
Freedom is a toll road and the toll is paid by our military and their families.
They’ll just keep marching. What will you do?
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