Monday, November 21, 2005

Ten years ago today

This morning, on my daily walk, I was musing that I measure my married life not in years, but in deployments. I remember most events of the past decade in terms of where my husband was at the time.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord which set out to end the civil war in Bosnia. Shortly thereafter, my husband deployed to Bosnia as part of the first Implementation Force (IFOR). It was my first experience with a deployment, and I thought the sky was falling. (Insert rueful laugh here.) We were living in Vicenza, Italy at the time, and thanks to some immigration snafu's and the complexities of being a Canadian citizen living on an American base in Europe, I was unemployed. The fact that I had a valid Louisiana RN license was irrelevant - I couldn't even work at the Burger King. There are worse places to be unemployed than Italy, but let me remind you that the sky was falling! I struggled to find my new niche and felt very sorry for myself as I celebrated Christmas, New Year's, and our first anniversary alone and worried for my husband's safety.

The world is, of course, a very different place now. Bosnia remains peaceful, though poor. While I am moving towards resuscitating my nursing career, my days are so packed with volunteer work and the minutiae of managing the family's activities, that I wonder how I will find time for one of those job thingies. A six month peacekeeping tour in Bosnia would seem like a respite compared to the back-to-back-to-back year-long missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the holidays approach, there will be empty seats at many tables. Two thousand and ninety-six will never be filled again. Please do not forget these families, for whom the sky truly did fall.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well said

RBC

Anonymous said...

Yes, well said indeed.