Separation is never easy.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what side of deployment you find yourself living on. Being separated from those you care about is an aspect of military life nobody ever really adjusts to.
Sailors and soldiers who deploy leave home painfully aware that they face a heck of a long time away from their friends and loved ones.
What can the rest of us who remain behind do to help them through it? We can actually do a lot.
We can start by making it our personal responsibility to see that those leaving our social circles continue to be an active, important part of our lives when they must leave for faraway places.
I’d like to think that the majority of us do take good care of our friends when they are deployed. For instance, in discussions I’ve had recently with sailors seasoned by several overseas deployments, however, it seems we tend to fall short of the mark.
Even though we send them occasional email and snail mail letters, greeting cards and care packages, these efforts apparently aren’t enough.
“Friends assume that because we visit a few fun ports over there, we’re too busy to miss being with them back home,” one sailor who’s been to the Med three times told me. “They couldn’t be more wrong about that.”
A few, I’ve heard, do go to great lengths to keep their deployed friends in touch. They make up silly tests, send wacky gifts, take pictures everywhere they go. They even compose amusing ransom notes to let a deployed sailor know just how much they care.
Ransom notes? Yes, ransom notes. Consider the case of Alfredo - a wooden duck one sailor from the USS Theodore Roosevelt discovered was missing from his car just two days shy of deployment.
“I’d had that duck for years,” this first class machinist mate told me. “Then all of a sudden, it was gone and I went crazy.”
Alfredo the duck wasn’t really gone. He’d merely been affectionately abducted by three good Norfolk friends who’d wanted to make a cruise to the Med that much more memorable for a buddy who had to go.
Over the months, this particular sailor received anonymous Polaroids of his wooden duck enduring all sorts of torture at the hands of its abductors and ransom notes that had been written on rolls of cash register tape containing outrageous demands that were practically a mile long. His friends even sent him the bones from a duck dinner they’d eaten, just to keep the joke alive.
“But Alfredo was with them on the pier when we pulled back in six months later,” he said. “And I can honestly say, I really felt remembered during that cruise.”
Being remembered is a big concern to Joe, a close friend of mine. In fact, his worst fear is that those of us who are his friends here will, while he’s deployed with his Army unit to the Middle East, manage somehow to forget him.
Forget him?
Not a chance. We’ve already got a deliciously devious plan brewing to make sure he knows exactly how much he’s missed while he’s in Afghanistan.
