Lucky/Cursed

I have just this minute found out that my husband Rob, in Kuwait with his Army Reserve unit, has had his deployment extended. He thought he'd be home for Thanksgiving. Now we're hoping for the first day of spring.

Chief among other feelings that I have at the moment is anger.

It's a cold/hot feeling, one that I've become familiar with over the past seven months but wasn't accustomed to before. I'd never before felt the tickle of a scream at the back of my throat as I watched the nightly news, never used to walk around carrying sometimes a pinprick of anger, sometimes a huge blazing ball.

The anger is the outward expression of an internal moral conflict that is continually going on in my mind, pulling me in two directions. One is that this is part of the greater good of serving your country. The other is that the Army is being so unfair it defies logic.

I am angry because of the politics of it all. The fact that Rob feels like he's being used as a placeholder while our country figures out what to do next. The word is that low morale in the Reserves is going to lead to a mass exodus of Reservists as soon as their time is up.

There is also the sense of unfairness about our individual situation. Rob joined the Reserves as part of a ROTC scholarship, for which he owed eight years of service. That period was up last May. But in January, he received a call at work-his civilian job-saying he had been "involuntarily transferred" from his home unit to a different unit that needed a civil engineer. A unit that would be sent to the Middle East.

Rob was upset, but didn't whine or complain. He is a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, and he would do what his country asked of him. But he has emailed me many times that he shakes his head and gives a little bitter smile when he hears people crow about the "all-volunteer Army." His orders actually have the word "involuntarily" on them!

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