Home is the Sailor from the Sea: the Hunter From the Hill

This is my neice Dana making noodles with her host mother during her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan. Following her service in the Peace Corps, she became a military officer and has just returned from Central Asia again where she completed a very different tour of duty in Afghanistan.

There has been so much news on the Afghan front these past few months—skirmishes at Afghan’s border with Pakistan, policemen running amok and shooting Allied soldiers, heroes going home for the last time—my family and I have been on edge about our family member serving there. Lt. Dana (we don’t use her last name here) has been at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan since July and though we’ve been proud of her service we’ve been worried every single day for her safety.

Today she arrived back in the U.S.A. Though her mother and I were there to see her off and watch her plane push back in July, she didn’t want us there today. She wants to have a few days on her own to get back into all the wonderful and mundane activities of American life: get her cell phone turned back on, get a jump for her dead car battery, pick up her dog, Tupelo, and order pizza delivered to her front door. Ah the wonders of the normal world.

She’s been living in a place where there were frequent services on base for fallen heroes. Where she often heard rounds fired in anger just outside the walls of the compound. Where she worked eighteen hour days knowing each thing she did might mean safety or danger for a comrade. The fact that she had to put reconstituted goat’s milk on her cereal, and that the latrines were without frills paled in comparison to the life and death decisions she had to make. She lived in a world of almost constant night, working eighteen hour days on Zulu time. Where intelligence agents kept their eye on her as she worked out at the gym and where rare moments of laughter came watching American cartoons translated into Farsi and captioned in fractured English.

It has continued to trouble me that we send our young men and women into harm’s way overseas without making any sacrifice of our own at home. What has anyone in America done to support these young people who are working to keep us safe from another September 11th? I would like to see our next president stand up and give each and every one of us a responsibility that will in some way serve as a reminder of what these volunteers are doing.

But for today I can celebrate. Our officer has come home safe and sound. God bless her, and God bless this great nation.