Deployments change you

Deployments change you... no matter what you experience during the deployment. 

Recently, I was looking through pictures and I came across a picture of my cousin and I.  Our units were in Kuwait at the same time waiting to move forward to Iraq.  He was a young PFC and I was a newly promoted SPC.  As we stood outside the DFAC in Kuwait, there were big smiles in the picture, happy to have family 'close' by.  In a few short days, his unit would move forward to a FOB just south of Baghdad.  A few days after that, I would move forward with my unit to a FOB north of Baghdad.  Neither of us really knew what the next fifteen months was going to bring. 

Shortly after arriving in Iraq, I started receiving letters from my cousin.  We began communicating back and forth through letters and soon those became a very important outlet for both of us.  Over the course of our letters, you could see the change.  They had started out as just a 'how are you doing?' type of check in.  As time went on, they became very blunt, to the point and unedited on what was going on, things that had been seen and the struggles sometimes raging within.

During the first eight months, as he had gone out on multiple patrols, there had been IEDs and he had found himself in the back of a MEDEVAC helicopter more than once.  As a blackhawk doorgunner, my love for the aircraft was already there, but it was in that time that my love for the MEDEVAC mission developed.  After his third flight, my unit gave me a day off to go and visit him.  That in itself was a God send for him, for me and for our families back home. 

For a soldier, it's easy to hide from family how they are really are, especially when they are in a deployed location.  We don't want our families worrying more than they already are.  For them, seeing pictures of us together with smiles on our faces again made all the difference. 

Over the course of the last seven months of deployment, we would have the opportunity to travel back and forth to visit each other a few more times.  Each of those visits were a change to sit back and relax for a few minutes despite everything going on around us. 

About a month after redeploying, we had a chance to visit each other once again.  We were both very different people than we had been before that deployment.  Although prior to our pre-deployment leave, it had been since we were little kids that we had seen each other, over those fifteen months we had been a lifeline for each other. 

We still live in two different states, are both our of the military after going through Medical Evaluations Boards.  We are both married, him with one little boy and I now have two little boys.  It's been a couple years since we have seen each other, but the bond that we forged in those months is something that will never go away.  That bond that someone else has an understanding of the path we have walked in some of the more difficult times of our lives.