Reddit Prisoner Escape Army Story Funny
Like most Americans, I love "The Star-Spangled Banner." I love to imagine Francis Scott Key straining his eyes that whole long night of 1814, watching Baltimore's Fort McHenry getting blown to bits by British warships. He knows the British are the larger force, that they have just burned and looted Washington, DC, that troops at other American forts have turned tail and run without a shot fired. inspiration But rather than cringe with fear as more than 1,500 cannonballs are let loose, Francis Scott Key is filled with optimism each time he catches a glimpse of that flag. He saw a resilient beauty, a refusal of those soldiers to surrender, a determination to make it through that fiery night, and he wove it into the lyrics of a song that we still sing today, hands on our hearts, eyes tearing up.
As an army spouse who has sent her soldier off for three yearlong deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, I've had to squint through some long nights, but over and over again I too find unexpected moments of tenacity and hope in this time of war. I've seen a military community come together when the soldiers deploy, spouses rallying around the birth of a baby, taking turns bringing meals to the new mother's house each night, these near strangers becoming fast friends who leave baby blankets, diapers and teddy bears at her door. And I've seen the same spouses fill a memorial service to standing-room-only after a tragedy has struck overseas, packing the rows behind the new widow with their presence, willing her to remain upright like that embattled flag.
On a searing afternoon in late July 2008, a handful of army wives from my husband's unit gathered at a small house in Fort Hood, Texas, for a wedding. The bride wore a white satin dress with embroidered flowers along the bodice and held a bouquet of pale roses in her hand. Dress and flowers aside, this wedding was different. This was a wedding "by proxy"—the groom was with all of our husbands in Iraq, his bride here in Fort Hood, and they were connected by a tenuous, static-ridden cell phone line that kept dropping the call.
There were only two men in attendance. One was the preacher, a decidedly unmilitary fellow with a goatee and a long ponytail down his back. The other was the Rear Detachment Commander, a young captain who was one of the few soldiers left at the 2-7 Cavalry Battalion Headquarters; he was the officer in charge of coordinating the movement of soldiers, machinery and supplies from Fort Hood to the Forward Operating Base in Iraq. He was also the officer the spouses called when they heard about a bombing on the news, the person they went to if they needed an Army Emergency Relief Loan or a Red Cross message sent to their soldier. The baby-faced captain didn't have many days off during that yearlong deployment, but he was spending his Saturday with us, had even brought a gift, awkwardly tugging at his polo shirt as if he would have been more comfortable in his army uniform, in his office, rather than surrounded by us wives in our summer dresses, with our festively wrapped wedding gifts and our plates of food, sweating in the Texas heat.
The groom was in the Maysan Province of Iraq, in an Olympic-size soccer stadium long ago looted and stripped, a stadium that now housed 160 American soldiers, with one hose that provided running water, and one satellite phone that provided a means for calling home. Three o'clock in the afternoon in Texas meant 11 o'clock at night in Iraq, and he wore his camouflage uniform, no tuxedo or boutonnière or sparkling cider for him. Every time the connection was lost, he had to painstakingly dial the long list of digits again. His only wedding gift was that he didn't have to go on a mission that night, just had to be there with the phone, calling his girl.
The bride and groom had tried to get married before the deployment, but when they applied for a marriage license they found out that due to a paperwork error, a previous and shortlived marriage had not been dissolved. By the time the bureaucratic hurdles had been cleared, the groom had been in Iraq for months. But they would not be deterred by a deployment and did not want to wait until he returned. So we spouses accompanied the bride on long trips back and forth to the courthouse in Austin, and the Rear D Commander sent the emails and made the calls that synchronized the ceremony with the soldier's chain of command in Iraq. An army wife stood as the soldier's proxy and passed the temperamental phone between the bride and preacher. We spouses hushed our children and listened to the young woman exchange vows with a voice over the telephone. We needed to hear the I dos, the promise, the certainty and future of it, a joined life winding out from those words and somehow encompassing us all.
After the vows, the absent "You may now kiss the bride" hanging unsaid in the air, the new wife said goodbye to her soldier. We gathered spouses clapped our hands and hugged the bride in her long white dress. We took pictures, and busied ourselves setting out the food we had brought, the chips and spinach dip and finger sandwiches, letting our children dismantle the cupcakes stacked in an attempt at a wedding cake. We were all smiling so hard that our cheeks ached. Then the Rear Detachment Commander sat down on the couch and the wives pretended not to notice how eagerly our children clamored to play with him, to climb over or wrestle or just sit next to this man, all these kids who hadn't played with a dad in so long.
When the sun set, children cranky, babies with full diapers and drooping eyelids, the spouses hesitated at the door, no one wanting to be the first to leave. We were all going home to husbandless houses, but the idea of the bride spending her wedding night by herself, taking off that white dress and putting it on a hanger, crawling into an empty bed, was more lonely than any of us could bear. But she was brimming with happiness, hugging all of us and thanking us for coming, thanking us for being there for her—smiling as if she had had the biggest, grandest wedding Texas could offer. And we knew that this was still a momentous day, that her life was united with that of the man she loved, and it somehow gave her a sense that he was safer for it, a whispered presence that everything would be OK, that even if he wasn't physically next to her, she wasn't really alone.
I have kept in touch with the bride even though my family and I left Fort Hood for a new army post shortly after the soldiers returned from Iraq. She and her husband made it through that deployment, and they weathered a terrible family tragedy later that year. Right now her soldier is deployed for a second time and she is again alone. I occasionally look at her pictures on Facebook, and she is always wide-smiled and beautiful, full of hope.
I wasn't surprised recently to see snapshots of her attending the Fire Department Academy, scaling a building outlined in flame, or, best of all, a picture of her gripping the gushing fire hose with a line of firefighters behind her, all of them working together and holding on. I think to myself that this woman who found a way to marry a soldier 7,000 miles away, who smiled as she faced her wedding night without a groom, who never complained but just hugged each of us fellow army wives with gratitude, this woman has nothing to fear in fire.
Maybe her secret is that she knows, ultimately, she isn't alone. There is her soldier, of course, who thinks of her. But she also knows that she can depend on her fellow army spouses, on our overly enthusiastic smiles and relief at hearing those completed vows, on our clinging and worried hugs when we said goodbye. It makes me think of every military spouse out there, the families of the 146,000 service members deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the families of the thousands of other servicemen and -women stationed around the world, who wait at home, who brace themselves, who stubbornly try to make it until the dawn's early light. The spouses and families who stand next to one another day in and day out, humming that "Star-Spangled Banner" just loud enough to let one another know that we are all in this together.
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Source: https://www.womansday.com/life/real-women/a5725/real-life-being-an-army-spouse-118760/
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