Yesterday I woke up to the delightful sound of a dog about to puke. You know the sound, it makes you move at an unnatural speed to try and get them outside. I was too late. Oh well. It was 7 am and I’ve gotten in the habit of sleeping too late in the last couple of weeks because of going to bed late so I decided to go ahead and stay up. I made some breakfast and did my normal morning routine of checking emails and my favorite websites while I had the Today show on in the back ground. That’s when I heard the words that no wife wants to hear “Helicopter crash in Afghanistan…..” and I froze and frantically started  trying to remember if N was flying or not and if he would even be at work at that time and then I heard “4 killed” and it still took a few seconds for that to sink in that it wasn’t him. It’s amazing how fast your mind can start moving when you hear those words. I’ve heard the expression “my blood ran cold” a number of times and never really understood it until that happened and it literally felt like my body was frozen. In all the times I’ve heard about crashes, even when N called me to tell me that HE had crashed I’ve never been that scared. I think it’s because normally when I heard about one it’s later in the day and I can say “if it was him I’d know by now” and when he called me I was thinking “ok, I’m talking to him, obviously he’s ok”. And I think another part of it was the knowledge that when an old friend’s husband was killed in a crash she was notified at a few minutes after 7 in the morning. I truly think that a lot of my panic was related to the time of day. I think I’m going to stick with sleeping later and watching Will and Grace when I get up at 10am. No more news of any kind for me in the morning. When I talked to N about it later he said he could understand how hearing that could make me ping a little.

As relieved as I was to hear the number 4 it still worried me because we have so many friends out there that fly different air crafts. I was thankful that 2 of my friends have their husbands home on R&R because that means it wasn’t them but I’m always wondering, who is it? Will we know them? Will we know their family? I found out that the aircraft belonged to a different branch of service so there was no chance that we knew the people but they still have families that are heart broken right now. Their lives will never be the same. This is one thing I HATE about this lifestyle. In every Kiowa crash in the last 5 years N or I have known at least 1 of the pilots personally. Whether they were previous IP’s that N flew with at Rucker or passing  acquaintances from other troops they were one more person that we lost. After a crash last year N looked at me and said “I’m too young to know this many dead people”. It’s hard. I didn’t write anything on Memorial Day because I had too much to say. It would have been a big jumbled up mess and I just let it pass while thinking of the people that are gone.

This fear won’t end when Nicholas leaves the military next year. We have too many friends that have become family to us that we’ll still worry about. For years to come the news of a crash will freeze us in our tracks until we know the names. It’s something we’ll always live with.