Wyatt D

The Time my Dad Went to War

The year was 2009 and I was ten years old it was the morning that my father was leaving for war. He had already been on training for the past two weeks out in the desserts of Colorado. He was back for only one week before being shipped out to Kuwait then Iraq. He was a Doctor with the 10^th CSH (Combat Support Hospital).  The hospital was located in Bagdad, the capital of Iraq. This is where he would be spending the next six months treating wounded soldiers and Iraqis.  

It was a clear morning as we drove to the Raleigh international. Since he was not part of a combat unit he would be flying to Kuwait on a civilian airplane and to Bagdad through the military. As we neared the airport the feeling of dread came over me and I could not believe what was about to happen. When we arrived and dropped him off there was tear shed and when we finally said our goodbyes I knew that it was going to be the longest six months of my life. The final word to me before he left were “You’re the man of the house know”. That stuck with me ever since. The car ride home was quite. My mother and I were the only ones that understood what was happening.

The next couple of days were spent trying to get use to the fact that he was gone and would not be home for a while. I had dreams that he was home only to wake up and realize that it was only a dream. Those days were the second hardest of the deployment. First being when he came home. Those days after he left had lots of tears it was strange how life just went on. We had a lot of adjusting that we needed to do. My family was a pretty large family, my two brothers my mother and me. We all played different sports at different time at different places. Trying to keep up with all of them was hard. We were all homeschooled at the time and to tell you the truth my mother and I fought a lot. I would not want to do my school work and we would get into fights over it and she would just brake down and give us the day off while she called my father.

As the weeks turned into months we started to get used to not having my father around. I still had the dreams that he was home but they became less and less frequent. I had this picture of my father holding me when I was a baby and the picture frame had word around it I can’t remember but I read them to myself every night before going to bed. We were able to skipe with my father and call him but it was still a hard six months. The six months my father was on deployment happened to be over Christmas. We drove out to Illinois to my mother’s parents. The drive took us fifteen hours and was hard but we managed. During this time the whole family was always fighting. That Christmas was so much different than any other Christmases that I have ever had. As a family it brought us closer together.

During the middle of the deployment was when I broke my arm. We were at bush gardens with some friends and it was the middle of our vacation. I was playing on some concrete hippopotamuses and fell off one of them. It took us two days before we were able to get x-rays. We waited for the end of our vacation before we got a cast on because we knew all the people back at the hospital (Womack hospital). This is where it all became a large blur. Since it was the middle I kind of got used to my father not being around and so life went back to normal. The one thing I do remember was that one day when my mother was on the phone and I was walking down the stairs she started to scream and cry. Me not knowing that if you family member had died in the war they will send people to see you. I thought that my father was killed but later found out that it was my mother’s grandfather who had died.

The support that we had in a military town was huge. We lived at fort Bragg, the home of the Special Forces. We knew hundreds of people that had been on deployments. And they all would make meals for us. We would have people take my brothers and me while my mother would spend time to herself.  The People There were really kind and always lifting my family’s spirits up.

The last couple of months were killer. We could not wait for him to come home. We were counting down the days and waiting and hoping that he would get home safely. Near the last couple of weeks I kind of started to lose track of time and forgot that he was almost home. And the days started to become more and more the same and I started to forget. Then one morning when I was going down the stairs my mother said that we were going to pick my aunt up from the airport. We left to go to the airport two hours early so we could eat out. After we arrived my mother was in high spirits I could not tell why, she seemed too happy for it to be my aunt. While we were waiting we played this game where we would try to guess what the other person was trying to be. Five minutes before the plane landed my mother started to get quite and looking at the clock constantly. It was my turn in the game and I saw the plain in the taxi way and was waiting for my aunt to step out onto the terminal. The plane started unloading and my father walked out into the airport. I looked at him and just stood there for five second wondering how he could be here, (He was not supposed to be home for another week). Then I ran as fast as I could to give him a hug all I could remember was him hugging my brothers, mother, and me. As I looked around at the other passengers, they were all crying as we reunited.

The weeks after the deployment were hard my father was not the same person he was when he left. He was stronger and more muscular he had a shorter tolerance for our stupidity and was always sleeping. It took him a couple of years before he could really start to fully recover. A couple of months after his deployment when we went to see Act of Valor every time there was an explosion he would start to jump on the ground, (he was mortared every night in Iraq). The whole experience was a hard time but in the end what he did in Iraq save hundreds of soldiers, civilians and even some terrorist’s life’s. No matter how hard it was back home it was even harder in Iraq. It was so important that he went and saved other people’s lives so that they could live.