The (N)everchanging Orders

My husband is currently deployed.

Before they left out, they received orders with a set number of days on them. It was put out that anything beyond those days would take the approval of a high-ranking officer. All of that sounds really great, and from my recent experience, soldiers have been returning in that originally publicized window.

However, I’ve learned that orders are nothing more than a piece of paper.

A simple piece of paper that can be changed dramatically by another piece of paper.

It would have been great if the orders didn’t change during our first deployment and we had only done a year-long tour instead of 15 months. Those new orders didn’t come down until about half of the soldiers in our unit had already taken leave. Therefore, we had a number of soldiers who had close to a year between when they went on “mid-tour” and when they redeployed. This was the first deployment, and being a relatively new set of soldiers in a brand new battalion, this hit like a shockwave.

It would have been a very different second deployment if it hadn’t started in Iraq and ended in Afghanistan after a change of mission came down.

The shift took place about four months into a year-long deployment after we had heard for months before we deployed, from official chains, that there was no way we would be shifting to Afghanistan. Thankfully, this wasn’t our first go at things, and we had prepared our families before deployment for a possible shift to Afghanistan. We had advised our soldiers to do the same. It’s much easier to answer all those random questions before the deployment than it is when you have limited connectivity. When I called to tell my parents, there were no questions about the situation besides “When?”

Little did I know that, a week later, I would be on my way back to Landstuhl as my soldiers and husband moved forward to Afghanistan.

So this deployment, not to be negative but to be realistic, I don’t put a whole lot of weight in that little piece of paper.

I will be ecstatic when those orders become reality and he comes home on the original timeline as when he left. I will be overjoyed if the thought process “first in, first out” actually comes into play.

But, I’m not going to get my hopes up.

Our boys and I started our countdown with almost an extra month on it, and my husband and I talked through the thousands of different possibilities before he left. We prepared ourselves. We were realistic. We planned more on the mission changing, so that way if it does, we aren’t disappointed or left with a thousand questions.

If there is still a month left on our countdown when he gets home, I will be very happy.

Until the day he marches through those doors, I will keep busy, I will focus on the positive, but I will always prepare for the worst case scenario.