I just finished reading Heid Squire Krafts book Rule Number 2. You can find it at Amazon or BN.com, if you’re interested. Even though this is my first deployment and is in now way the same as Dr Kraft’s deployment near Fallujah, I can relate to a couple of things she wrote about.
First, and probably the most humorous, is the Legend of the Camel Spider. Not only do I live in absolute terror of ever stumbling across this thing, but her chapters about the legend of it are absolutely true. You’d think these things could get as big as a dog from the way soldiers talk about it. One soldier in the S2 spoke about being chased by one last deployment. Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to seeing one and I’m pretty sure my husband is going to go out of his way to show me one at the first opportunity.
The second part I really relate to. Dr Kraft talks about disconnecting from her family, from her kids. She writes about not crying about them and being unable to be both mom and deployed soldier (my term not hers). She had to make a choice and for the time she spent in the war zone, she chose to focus on being a wartime doc. When she got home, she had trouble reconnecting with her patients and with her family.
I have to say, even though my homecoming is a long way off, I worry about reconnecting with my kids. I’m also worried about how being over here in this environment is going to change my relationship with my husband. Things aren’t business as usual over here, no matter how much I might wish them to be or might joke about them being just that.
Things change, people change and war changes people a lot. Dr Kraft’s book takes one woman’s journey through a pretty horrible time during this war and brings her home again. Most of us won’t go through what she went through, many of us will go through something worse. We’ll just have to see what the outcome is for each of us, as individuals, don’t you think?
