June 5, 2005 changed all of that. I had just graduated from college and was staying at home with my parents for the summer. I walked down the stairs and heard the voice of my father on the telephone. I cannot remember the words that he said, but his tone held the significance of what had happened two days before in Afghanistan when a road-side bomb exploded, killing someone I knew. I slid down onto the carpeted staircase and sat still, not knowing what to think. A lifetime of C-130's taking off in your backyard and artillery rattling the chimes of the clock in the hall does not prepare you for the reality of what all of that was always here for… war.
It's nearly three years later, and, in my civilian life, I have very little knowledge of the real war… the one that is fought with guns and tanks and airplanes in places I'll likely never see. But I know much of the war that rages here in Fayetteville. It's a quiet war, and a war you hear very little about on the news. It usually takes the form of fifteen to eighteen months… just enough time to turn a father or a husband into either a hero or a stranger, sometimes both. The battle is waged by every wife and child left behind. It's a fight for life… the life of their family. Tragically, many don't make it, and while each month scores of troops return to this place and there is honor and celebration, and rightly so, upon their arrival, they often arrive home with their lives, and not much else. This town is littered with the remains of marriages, uncounted casualties of this war.
Indeed there are casualties of this war on the military family, but, just as there is tragedy, there is also victory. While Fayetteville may reek of the stench of marriages that rotted during periods of separation that the civilian world generally cannot begin to comprehend, it is also full of the sweetness of triumph. Sacrifice, support, faith, patience, endurance, trust, prayer, hope, honor and respect… these aren't just words we throw up on billboards around this town. These words are worked out every single day in the lives of the heroes left behind. It's by steady practice of these very things that victory is won. The victory that civilians see is a picture in the newspaper of a dad hugging his wife and new baby girl. The battle itself was fought for many months as doubt, fear, stress and loneliness made steady attacks that no one ever saw.
I mentioned that there are soldiers who return with their lives and little else awaits them, but what of the opposite scenario? What about those men, whose lives are taken in the war on the other side of the ocean, but who had the deepest devotion waiting for them here on this side? In the face of an attack of that kind, can victory still be won in the war in this town? Indeed it can. I am privileged to know women who never stood at Green Ramp with a poster that says “Welcome Home,” never felt the warmth of the embrace they anticipated for months. But it is these same women who I have also seen exemplify depths of respect that I have not found in any civilian marriage. Their victory, perhaps unknown even to them, is won by setting the example for those who look on, who can only admire their strength and seek to find something of their own that is worth honoring, respecting and loving to the same degree. To show others that love and respect surpass even life itself is perhaps the greatest victory of all.
I live in a city that is constantly at war. I do not fight it myself, but wince at the thought of the ignorance that exists merely 60 miles up the road, much less across the thousands of miles of freedom that make up this country. It's because of the war across the ocean that we are able to live in that ignorance, but it is my respect for the war that is fought in the homes of this town, that I will continue to tell of what I see, “until they all come home.”
