The danger in getting involved

 Since we moved to the Fort Carson area, I have mostly kept my distance from family groups and just getting involved in general in anything that required lots of human interaction.  After years of volunteering, I honestly was tired and worn out.  

I still volunteered but it was a little more distant and intentionally staying disconnected from the elements where I volunteered.  Then nine months ago I was asked by a friend from church to make a key fob in memory of a fallen K9 for her daughter, who is a deputy in the local sheriffs department.

It wasn't long before I was receiving more messages about those fobs, as well as a little bit of a startle when another deputy messaged my business page asking for me to call him.  As a friend of the handler of the fallen K9, this deputy was verifying the intentions behind the unintentional fundraiser.  

Fast forward and in the last nine months, I've found myself connected to our local officers in a different way than I ever have been.  From being invited into a group for local law enforcement families to getting to know some of the officers and families, I have seen a glimpse into the lives of those who wear the badge and the families that stand behind them.  

In that same time frame, our community has seen the loss of K9 Jinx, Deputy Andrew Peery and just this week, Officer Julian Becerra.  The community has mourned these losses for the community servants and heroes that they were, but as the outside community - we can sympathize for that Blue Line family, but we will never fully understand the pain they endure in those losses.

This is much the same as the outside viewpoint of the military life, but the difference is that these individuals sacrificed right here in the communities where their families live.  As the events for each of these losses have unfolded, I see those interviewed on the news, those who had an interaction with that individual, but on the backside - it's different.  

The fact is that nine months ago, I should have just stitched some things and moved on, but I had a door opened to a community that I have seen the true blue meaning of family, the joy in the everyday, the pain of not feeling a community supporting you even when you send your loved one out to protect it everyday, the heart of endless caring this 'family' has and heartbreaking devastation of losing someone. 

Today my boys and I wore blue, today we sat behind a police cruiser that's a temporary memorial outside our community police station and we prayed and we cried for an officer gone too soon and a 'family' who is hurting.  I guess my point in all this, is that getting involved is dangerous, being connected means putting yourself out there, but it also means seeing who people are behind an overarching umbrella of a job position.  

Ice cream and wine

    Tonight, I started a downward spiral and am currently 'self-medicating' with ice cream and wine.  Most days I throw myself into homeschooling my kids and my work that I move through days relatively smoothly, but my birthday is this week.  And no, this isn't a 'I'm getting old' post...  I've never had a problem with my age or where I fall in the realm of aging.  My birthday brings up a whole realm of emotions for other reasons.  

    I'll be 41 this week...  twenty years ago was my 21st birthday and the weekend I was raped.  The moment when it felt like things went into an out of control spiral that I feel like I've been trying to correct ever since.  I was raped by someone I had known for years, someone I trusted and someone who I found used that trust to take advantage of people around him.  But I wasn't the first...

 

  After that weekend, I 'unofficially' moved back to my parents' house because staying in my apartment by myself was more than I could handle.  I spent hours at the hospital, then at the police station, then dealt with the being fired, because I worked for his dad, then hours in court and therapy.  And that wasn't the end of it....  given that we had many mutual friends, my support circle quickly dwindled to just a few.  But I spoke up....

    Over the course of the next year, I would spend more time intoxicated than I can even begin to try to remember, I drank the memories away.  I couldn't sleep at night because the memories would constantly flash back, so I drank until I passed out.  Often I would show up work still drunk, not even to the hungover stage.  My boss could have very easily fired me, but she didn't, she worked to try to help.  She didn't cover things up, she pushed me to continue my therapy and continue moving forward.  

    About six months later, I ran into him again at a local bar.  I was still trying to deal things mostly independently.  A bartender friend of mine called the police and reported his probation violation.  He would be on house arrest for the next few weeks, making the comment the day everything was disconnected that 'he was going to take care of the bitch that put him in this position'.  Less than two weeks later, I rolled my car 3.5 times, which they determined was due to tampering.  But I walked away...

    During this time, I allowed myself to get lost in drinking and meaningless hookups - lost in a mix of trying to numb everything and trying to feel something.  

    When I did finally start dating someone again, I thought I chose someone safe - he was older, divorced, had kids.  But I found he was just as dangerous.  He would put me in the hospital and I would end up in jail before all was said and done, because I scratched him when he was strangling me.  

    Fast foward, I would join the Army, deploy twice, be assaulted and harassed by multiple individuals senior ranking to me, get hurt during a mission and be medically retired.  A medical retirement which wasn't what I wanted, but what was needed and the date that happened to fall on my birthday.  

    So hear we are, the weekend prior to my birthday - looking back on twenty years since someone took something that I can't get back, something that started a path that lead me in a destructive direction and could have very easily been the end of me, but it wasn't.  It took awhile, a long while.  I let myself be taken advantage of, I abused myself, I allowed others to abuse me, I didn't value who I was.  

    Today, things are different.  I still mourn that person I was, the carefree person who saw the good in everyone.  But today I'm different, I grew because of the path I was put on and I think that a large part of the reason that I try to contribute within my community is because I know what it's like to be treated like you're worthless - and no one should ever feel that way.  We each have a choice in the situations we find ourselves in, we can blame others and continue in a path of self-destruction OR we can take the bumps and bruises along the way for what they are, lessons to prepare for future bumps in the road.  

    Is tonight a moment of weakness? Yes, but I don't live in this moment.  Occasionally, that trauma rears it's ugly head and I likely won't sleep much for the next couple days.  But then it will pass for the time being and I will continue moving forward with my life, my family, all the things that matter now.  

    That trauma is forever a part of who I am, but it's just that - a PART...  it's not who I am.  We each have a choice in dealing with our past.  It will forever be a PART of who we are, but it doesn't have to be our identity.  I'm a rape survivor, a domestic violence surviver, been arrested, an MST (military sexual trauma) surviver  - but I'm also a veteran, a wife, a mom, a small business owner and a contributing member of my community.  

    I will continue to grow, but I will have my hiccups and moments where things are more overwhelming, but we can't live in those moments.

Coming to terms

 Yesterday, sitting in my Bible study, something came to me that I think I have avoided acknowledging for the last 11 years.  

When I joined the Army, I scored high on the ASVAB, I had been a bank supervisor and been very detailed oriented.  When I started my journey in the Army, it was to be a Blackhawk pilot - a goal I had met every requirement for, but eyesight.  To this end, I had PRK in 2006.  Unfortunately for me, I deployed in what was supposed to be a year-long deployment in October 2006 while waiting for my year to pass to get my eyes signed off on.  That deployment extended to 15 months and capabilities to clear my vision weren't available downrange.  

While on that deployment, I fell from the side of a 60 while we were out on a passenger transfer.  I was knocked unconscious on the flight line for a number of minutes before being brought back to by the other crew chief shaking me.  I flew another two hours under Night Vision Goggles, feeling like I was in and out of awareness, before landing for the night.  When I went to get out of the aircraft, my legs collapsed.  The pilots sensing something hadn't been right through the flight, immediately had me to taken to the med clinic.  

The next few years involved a lot of testing, another deployment and an eventual medical retirement from the Army.  I struggled through this time, more than probably anyone knows.  My mind didn't work like it was supposed to, my ability to process and retain information was gone.  Who I was as a whole had changed.  My patience was minimal, my thought process seemed to work on a different frequency, things I knew I questioned myself on.  

Back to yesterday...  In August 2007, something changed, something I don't think I ever fully acknowledged - I didn't become less capable or less intelligent - it was simply like my primarily left-brained being had flipped a switch to right-brain functioning.  For years, this has been an ongoing struggle... for years, I didn't understand why all the detail information had been so simple before and now even remembering a simple conversation seemed impossible.  

Today, I have found a kind of purpose in the creative avenue.  Is there part of me that still longs to take a flight at the controls of a helicopter one day? I would be lying if I said I don't still think about it daily.  But it's part of who I was...  a time before my family was really built, a time before I became a mom, a time before I found that a creative avenue could still be a successful avenue for me.  

It took over eleven years to finally vocally acknowledge that the path intended for me didn't include my dream, but it has included what I needed.  I think I'm finally at a point, although it took many years, where I can understand and appreciate that path was never intended for me.  

So, I will continue stitching my way through an understanding and taking my creative avenue one step at a time, while being thankful for the experiences that have come to pass and the path that may not have been what I would have initially taken, but one that I can see had made me who I am.  

Red flag warnings

 

    Over the course of the last couple weeks, we've seen the memes pop up about the Blackhawk incident in Temple or the Chinook with the 'folded' blade and we can all get a good laugh about it.  (Images from UH-60 Black Hawk Drivers on FB)

     The fact is that making humor out of serious subjects is something service members excel at, if for nothing else than just simply to cope.  Military life is heavy and something has to lighten it up if you're going to survive it.

    But there's something else that should be a red flag in all of this...  when we start seeing aviation mishaps, it's a time for commanders to re-evaluate their units and their abilities in the aircraft.  While I may no longer wear a uniform, the trends of pushing individuals to be Pilot-in-commands and progress faster in their training than their really prepared for.  As the crewmember numbers have dwindled, the pressure to progress individuals faster than they are prepared for has become almost a necessity to keep up with the needs of the military.  There's huge issues with this though - to include the fact that individuals that are not prepared for emergency situations are pushed into them.  

    While optempo and making mission is a priority, doing so at the cost of service members is not only irrational and irresponsible, but simply reprehensible.  So I'm asking, before you sign off on that next PC or send that next flight out just to make the hours for the week, that you pause and think of what you will tell the families of those crew members if something should happen. Because five families recently received that dreaded knock and someone will have to answer to the decisions that were made that led to that moment in time.  We've lost too many over things that could have been prevented if someone had the courage to put their foot down.  

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/06/06/2-injured-military-helicopter-crash-southern-alabama.html

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-09/second-military-aircraft-goes-down-in-imperial-county-authorities-confirm 

Transition

     Over the years, a lot of my identity came within my time in service.  This wasn't just a pride thing, but a matter of the space and time where life just changed.  

    When I joined the Army, I had grand plans of becoming a helicopter pilot.  My time in the Army turned out much differently than planned.  I injured my back and my head during deployment before I had been cleared from my eye surgery that I needed to qualify as a pilot.  The injury was just one part of the unplanned path.  There would be violations of trust, overreaches of authority, challenges that would take longer than expected to overcome and in much of that pain I found both my identity and the loss of the identity I'd had before.  

    This is where I think many veterans have a challenge letting go.  When we joined the military, we did for a hundred different reasons, but no matter how long your time in the military lasts - it drastically changes you.  Some will walk away from the military and never want to look back, others will find that everything they are now is wrapped up in their time in service.  

    So much of everything that is now who I am is the result of many different situations, but at the tip of that is the military.  As time has gone on and I have had my time minimized by others, including a lady who retired from the reserves and told me that my medical retirement wasn't a real retirement or the multiple times I've had someone made remarks about my DV tags because they assume they are my husband's.  

    I've hit a point in life where I'm tired of living up to some standard of what people think I should be.  So while this will still have some points in which my military time will be relevant or my still current time as a military spouse will be mentioned, moving forward the topics will be much more focused on where I am at this point in time and the path that God has me own.  I hope you might stay along for this journey and see the messy days that sometimes comes in life.

20 years

As I sit here and try to find the right 'lesson' for my boys to describe this week, everything just seems minimal.  

Do you remember where you were that day?  I was working at a bank where we didn't have access to internet use during work.  After calling loan servicing for a customer, Jeff on the other end stopped and said there was an attack.  I completed my call with the customer and stepped over to the snack shop near by just in time to see the second plane hit the twin towers.  In the days that came, so much was uncovered...  All of a sudden, we weren't as safe as we believed we were.  The military was called up and deployments began.  

This was all distant to me.  One of my cousins was on the initial invasion, but outside of that, I was disconnected to all of it.  It would take a couple of years and the loss of a few people I knew - 1 in Afghanistan and 1 in Iraq, before it became my life.  

So here we are 20 years later and what to show.  Iraq isn't stable, Afghanistan definitely isn't, but Bin Laden was taken care of.  Politicians pretend to know what's going on, veterans who have been there know all too well.  

People as a whole want to have an opinion on the matter...  'we shouldn't have been there', 'we should have done this or that'...  it's like watching a football game where you have all kinds of thoughts on what the coach should have done, but that's not what happened.  

Here's what I know...  20 years ago we went to war, recently that 'ended' in a disaster.  I only served for six years before being medically retired - my husband is on year 16 of active service. Between the two of us, we have seven deployments under our belts.  We've missed holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, weddings, funerals....  as life went on back here when we weren't there.  

Halfway into this timeframe, our first child was born.  9/11 is a piece of history for them.  They may never know how deep it runs within us because it's not 'real' for them.  While they live the sacrifice of the reprecussions, the event itself is no different to them than significant events that happened before I was born.  

So how do you realistically connect their current life and our challenges?  The simple answer is you don't.  Our history isn't theirs, the perception they have based on the life they have lived thus far will change their view of the reality they have.  

Our boys will forever have a piece of war placed on them, not because they have been there firsthand, but because both of their parents have lived it and struggled somedays with dealing with the realities of it.  For our boys, 9/11 is a part of history, but the war that followed was front and center.  

The lesson for the 20th anniversary of 9/11 may be a minor disaster as I struggle to even try to word one complete thought from that day, but the struggles of the in between aren't lost to our boys even though they aren't old enough to have been around.   

My truth

Being a female soldier isn't all it's cracked up to be, in fact you're lucky to get out of it without some type of scars.

It seemed simple, join the military and you could have a chance at proving yourself outside of some gender stereotype.  In basic training, at least one of the drill sergeants was sleeping with a female soldier in our company.  When we got to AIT and she threatened to expose what he was doing to the trainees, she ended up going AWOL for fear of repercussions.  AIT wasn't much different, a supply NCO who took advantage of the female soldiers in training because of rank and position and using it against them.  When a female soldier was raped in AIT, I was there...  the soldier was another AIT soldier whose family was well off and it somehow disappeared.  The female soldier who cut her wrists and left a trail of blood through our barracks.  The female soldier who ran her car into one of the barriers...  This is the initial training that female soldiers live and then they get to their first unit.

Fort Hood was a nightmare.  It started with a unit not fully formed and unit leadership that seemed to be half-assed.  A captain that thought it was acceptable to put his fingers in places they didn't belong and then tried to further it.  I was only a PFC, then again so was another soldier that disappeared not that long ago from Fort Hood.  No investigations were launched because I didn't speak up.  During deployment, two other captains and a SFC spent a little too much time following my activities, but even when mentioned to my senior NCOs, it was laughed off as a joke and ended there.  After 15 months, we came back home.

Then it was AIT again to reclass.  Somehow I thought if I got away from other female soldiers, I would be seen as less of one.  Instead I ended up being physically assaulted by another soldier, one who was supposed to be a friend.  During the time at AIT, the MSG and CSM who were supposed to be my senior leadership at Fort Hood insisted on ongoing threats if I continued to try to get transferred out of the unit to be with my husband who was now stationed in Germany.

Germany was my hope at a new start...  only to be my downfall.  Before I even fully got into the unit there were two SSGs that had a target on me.  Everyday was living with berating and belittling about how I was never going to be good enough.  I was a new soldier to the MOS and doing my best to learn, but nothing was ever good enough for these two.  When deployment came, there was points I couldn't work on aircraft because of the pain meds for my back and one particular SSG would come up just to put me down in front of my soldiers.  When I tried to explain I couldn't touch the aircraft because of the meds I was on, he would lock me up in front of my soldiers and yell and scream at me.

Then I was sent back early....  it was enough for me to be on pain meds, but that wasn't a good enough reason for me to not work on the aircraft accordingly to some SSGs.  Had I worked on those aircraft and something happened, those lives would have rested on me.  I spent ten days at Landstuhl before heading back to my home unit.

Rear detachment 1SG would be my next step.  With taking care of soldiers on rear D, came the soldiers who came back early to ETS.  A friend of my husband and I's got in a bad situation one night after he came back from deployment early to prepare for ETS.  After picking him up, he took advantage of the situation and apparently long suppressed feelings and after attempting to sexually assault me, I kicked him out.

By that point in time, my MEB had started for my back and head injury from my first deployment.  Even though my command was supportive of keeping me in, I was broken and just done fighting.  I was done trying...

Being a female soldier seems grand, but at what cost...  I spent six years trying to prove myself to people that didn't deserve it.  I lost more than just my back and head in the process of service, I lost my ability to sleep soundly and to not feel like someone was always watching me.  I lost my ability to be me and it's taken a long time to get back to that somewhat.   I guess I fight to be seen as a veteran because it goes so far beyond the time in uniform or the deployments, it's still the 'right' that some think rank gives them and the uphill battle that we are still fighting to be seen as equals.