« click here for more Sarah Smiley
By SARAH SMILEY
What's Smiley Still Doing In Pensacola?
Dustin had been home from work for several hours one day this February when he suddenly made the following off-handed remark: “Oh, did I tell you that they addedFirst, “they” always means “the military” in statements such as this. And I put “options” in quotations because the word wrongly implies that we have any perceivable control over the situation – which I am about to prove.
We had been waiting for months to find out about Dustin’s next set of orders. We have been in
I’ve lived the last two years waiting for the other shoe – er, flight boot – to drop, either with Dustin being sent on an IA (officially, “Individual Augmentation”) to Iraq or orders to Guam. I was always careful to write about our exact location lest the powers-that-be finally realize we had become so comfortable here in
We’ve had it so good for so long, we knew our time was about to come. The military likes to keep its people in a constant state of alternating between “this stinks” and “aren’t we lucky?” I think it’s part of their retention plan, but sometimes it feels more like playing the slot machines in Vegas.
It was a long, stressful period waiting for the list of places where Dustin could be sent, especially because we knew it literally could be any place that includes a
By February, I thought our list still was in the rough stages and had not been given to the detailer. So when Dustin mentioned Bangor, Me., being a last-minute option, I said, “Before you turn in the list, let’s look at it one more time together and make sure we are still in agreement.”
Dustin said, “Um, yeah, well… I kind of already turned in the list today.”
“You what? Before or after you heard about
When I thought about
“Don’t worry, I put Bangor number seven out of seven, so there’s very little chance we’ll be sent there,” he said.
On April Fool’s Day – how fitting! – Dustin came home, pulled up a chair and said, “I think you should sit down for this.”
“We’re going to the west coast again, aren’t we?”
Dustin twisted up his face and smiled apologetically. “The boys have always wanted to see snow, right?” he said.
Yep, we’re going to
“You’re going to be awfully cold in
However, after a lot of crying and wondering if this could provide reasonable grounds for divorce, I have come to a stage of acceptance – yes, even some excitement about the adventures that await us in
Uncle Sam probably is enjoying a good laugh at this. Or maybe Dustin’s detailer.
# # #
Sarah Smiley is the wife of a Navy pilot and daughter of a retired Navy pilot. She is the author of “Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife” (Penguin/NAL), and her syndicated column “Shore Duty” appears weekly in military and civilian newspapers across the country. Read more about Sarah at her website, www.sarahsmiley.com.
MILITARY
