Friends...

I love my job. I love what I do and what it stands for. But being in the military has its definite disadvantages too. I’m not talking about the constant deployments, the combat duty, crappy hours, and ridiculously low pay…particularly for the enlisted force. No I’m talking about the social aspects. It’s hard to make friends when you move every 2-3 years…not to mention the absences for various deployments and TDYs.

So when you make new friends, they tend to fall in categories:
1) Military friends—the people who are at your new duty station…they are like family, but they leave or you leave or one or the other is TDY…you get the idea…you take care of each other, but you don’t do much socializing with one another.
2) For now friends—the folks you meet along the way that make the constant moving easier to bear. They might not be your new BFF, but they are fun to hang out with and make you feel like one of the gang.
3) Then there are the forever kind of friends—the ones that will fly in from 1500 miles away to watch you graduate from college after 15 years. The ones you cry with when life’s tragedies take you down. The ones they write songs about. They could be military or civilian, people you meet at church or at the bar…they could come into your life for a deployment and stay for a lifetime, or they could be they for but a brief period but impact you forever.

This last kind, they’re the rare ones. For me, there are only a handful, but I know that if I was ever in a bind, they would be there. This last year has been tough on me and mine…and the next is looking to be just as tough though for different reasons. We’ve made some new friends here…the kind that are forever, and for that reason, among others, I know that while I’m gone for a year…a year that will likely feel like 5…I know that my husband and my kids are going to be ok. So to the friends I’ve made along the way…some who’ve been around for years and some for only months…I say Thank You. It’s not enough, I know, but from an American who will in mere weeks be serving far away…it comes from the heart.