Homecoming

Patrick is out at the homecoming game tonight. The Edgren Eagles are playing Camp Zama's Trojans in football.

It has been a fun week for the teens. On Wednesday, there was a pep rally, and they called out all the players' names on all the teams that are competing this weekend: football, volleyball, tennis, and cross country. Patrick said it was fun to run out with the team and give their big cheer and be cheered on by the whole school. Last night, there was a huge bonfire (it worked this year, Tommy :-)) and they burned the Zama mascot in effigy.

Tomorrow, Patrick will run in the afternoon. The races are usually in the morning, but tomorrow is also the SAT, so the kids who have traveled up here from Tokyo and the local juniors and seniors have to take the SAT in the morning and then run the race in the afternoon. It's a challenge to create a high school sports program in a foreign land, but DoDDS seems to make it work.

Away from the high school campus, another homecoming is taking place this weekend. The airmen of the 13th Fighter Squadron, the young sons and brothers and fathers (and daughters and mothers), who have been deployed in Iraq for the past five months, are returning home. The first men, the pilots, arrived yesterday, and the others are expected soon. Two of the g irls in Katie's gymnastics class weren't there today. Their daddy is home, and nothing is more important than family right now.

Footlockers and boxes have been arriving for a couple of weeks now, and the post office is completely bogged down. It's a joyful sort of bogging-down. No one seems to mind (much) that their other packages are stuck somewhere else.

In this military homecoming, something came home to me. In the U.S., before we moved here, the war in Iraq was something very remote. Yes, it was on the news and in the papers, especially when the local national guard was sent over, but it didn't really affect my family. In my defense, I had a new baby then, and I wasn't paying much attention to anything outside our four walls, but even so, it was a distant war.

In the past fourteen months, we have watched two groups of men and women deployed and returned. The parents (mostly mothers) who stay behind fight the battle in their own way: keeping the family together, keeping the kids busy, distracting everyone from the missing person at the table. They deal with the everyday stuff of family life and try to bridge the distance with email and webcams and blogging and sheer determination.

And no one complains. No one enjoys it, to be sure, but it is part of the job, and they do what needs to be done.

So that people back home can live normal, everyday lives and feel that the war in Iraq doesn't really affect them.

I have never been so humbled. Or so grateful.