Growing up, I had never known anyone in the military. I didn’t have a long line of army veterans or those in active service in my family. In fact, I knew nothing about the topic.
Recently, I was brought back to my childhood days when a friend of mine contacted me after nearly a decade of losing touch. We were best friends in third grade, until his family moved away to Florida. Hearing from him brought back the excitement of being a child again. It was as if we had never stopped talking and we just picked right back up where we left off nearly 10 years ago.
I slowly learned he was in the army, living on base in the south, preparing for his position in the airborne division. Hearing about his everyday training and work was invigorating and scary. I learned what he went through and what he is going through. I slowly developed the same friendship I had with him years ago. I was excited to have a good friend back, but did not realize the struggle it would be to maintain that relationship, since he was in the army.
When you are friends with someone in the army, you learn of the scary tasks they have to do. Talking to him, I asked if he was ever scared of things like shooting a gun, jumping out of planes, or dying. He strongly replied no and said he does it to protect the ones he loves. He doesn’t fear or show fear. It can be challenging, when trying to emotionally connect with people in the army, but at the end of the day, he inspires me to live life to the fullest and never be scared of what will happen.
In the beginning, he did his best when it came to texting and FaceTime, but the consistency didn’t last. One day, they may be working twelve-hour shifts, twenty-four hour shifts or even out in the field for training. Their work takes them away from the everyday luxuries we have, such as texting, calling and using social media. I hear from him as often as he can stay in touch. It gets hard, and I end up missing him. The likelihood of traveling down there to visit is very slim as well. Affording a plane ticket and a place to stay becomes a challenge. I am a full-time college student, and he is a full-time man in the military. He works every day with some weekends off or goes home to Florida to visit his family, while my life is based here in Boston. If I could get up right now to visit him, I would. If he could get on a plane to visit, he would. However, they have restrictions. He is on recall, meaning he has to be within an hour of base in case he needs to be called in. His job is his life.
The fear of deployment is something that is very real. I never understood it before, until my best friend was at risk of being deployed. As a member of the Global Response Task Force, if a war or attack breaks out anywhere and requires troops to deploy, his division is trained to be deployed within 18 hours. With everything going on in Syria and with ISIS lately, that is what I fear most. I fear he will be deployed because of the chaos in our world, and I will not have heard from him or even had the opportunity to see him before that. But as I fear that for him, being deployed is something he and the rest of his division wants. They want to serve their country and fight for the ones they love. I admire that more than words can express. However, as the news played the horrors of the Paris attacks a few weeks ago, I sat on my floor in tears, worried that I would lose my best friend again, but this time to a war I can’t control.
I have such an immense respect for the families at home, waiting for their loved ones to return from war. My greatest wish is that I will be reunited, in person, with my best friend. We live in a crazy, scary world, but I am honored to say that I have a friend in the military fighting for our safety.