Somebody that I used to know

I've never been in a position to analyze every aspect of my life for eight hours a day, five days a week for eight weeks in a row. And now, after 10 years of complaining how I gave my soul to the Air Force and got very little in return, I must admit that the support I've received from across the Air Force (including, for the first time in my career, from my chain of command) has been overwhelming in a positive way.

Picture standing in an enclosed room and kicking a hornet's nest while wearing the sweetest perfume imagineable. There's nowhere to hide from the angry critters newly (and unexpectedly) unleashed from their comfortable nest. At first, there's a sense of shock..."oh my God what have I done," followed by "this is gonna hurt," and then finally a realization (at least in my case) that "I kicked that nest on purpose, so this is clearly happening for a reason."

Those hornets are memories (some quite traumatic), spanning some 30-odd years, 16 household moves on three continents, and a tour in Afghanistan. When I say it that way, it's daunting to think that I survived this long without a mental break. I did, and that's good. But a little more than two weeks ago, I recognized that the level of help I needed return to the world as a productive member of society was well beyond what one hour of therapy one day a week could provide.

My therapy assignment for this week is much more challenging than anything I've tackled before, and is possible only because of the incredible treatment I've received since arriving at Landstuhl's Evolution Program...write a letter to someone you lost. And the person I've lost who I've missed the most for the past 13 or so years is...myself.

Dear Lisa,

It's been too long since we made time to talk, and I've missed the joy and passion you shared with everyone around you for so many years. Sometimes I think you forget what an incredible person you were before you headed to college, and I think it's time to remind you of the you I remember so fondly.

You were always an athlete, playing softball, basketball, gymnastics, swimming, riding your bike, and leading other neighborhood kids in outdoor games. Remember the schoolhouse you built for Maria in our basement, where you patiently taught your little sister everything you knew, sitting her at the desk, and drawing lessons on the chalkboard? I knew then that you'd pick a career where you felt like you could make a difference...and you have.

I know that growing up in a Navy family was hard, and I'm sure that if we all had it to do over again, we'd make more time to spend together as a family admidst Dad going out to sea for six months at a time and Mom managing the house as the Navy moved us from place to place.

What I admire about you is ever since you were a teenager, you've always kept a tight-knit circle of friends by your side, and many of them remain your closest friends today...a true testament to your ability to reach out and connect with others.

But it's in high school, particularly your junior and senior years, when you blossomed and were the happiest I've seen you. Pieces of your art and photography hung in museums in Washington DC and you were recognized for your exceptional talent by teachers and later college admissions officers who lured you to their universities by offering you scholarships to study at their institutions. Teachers praised your writing skills, and you took great pride in everything you created. That same year, Loren challenged you to run on the high school's distance track team. You'd never run further than down the street, and by the end of the season, you were running 7 and 8 miles a day. You left for college glowing and confident...determined to face whatever the world had to offer.

And just as clearly as I can recall those great joys, I also remember exactly when we lost touch. It was your second year in college. There was no way to predict that your first serious romantic relationship, and one with a fellow Air Force ROTC cadet, would end in a date rape in your dorm room early that spring. Though your military leadership said over and over that it was your fault, and I think you recognize now, 13 years later, that nothing you ever said, did or wore made you deserving of such a crime.

As you entered active duty, I watched as you found solace in helping the Air Force establish their Sexual Assault Prevention program, meeting with more than 2,000 military women, hearing their stories, and filling a void by building a support community where there was previously nothing. But then I watched as you gave up on the things that brought you the greatest joy...art, photography, writing, sports...instead, drowning yourself in work you found unfulfilling, in relationships with no future potential, and in your personal quest to be "the best" at everything you attempted at all cost. You ran, just as you did in high school, this time not for enjoyment, but rather as a way to escape the pain and remind yourself of happier times.

For some reason, and maybe I'll never understand exactly why, Afghanistan brought back the you I'd missed for so long...the one who finds joy in little things jumping on trampolines, who isn't afraid to say what she means, and who makes choices that lead to personal happiness, instead of basing so many decisions on what others may think and feel.

You know who you are, and you've known that person for as long as anyone who loves you can remember...but now the challenge is to embrace that true, gleeful, intelligent and passionate version of yourself. Don't lose sight of your ultimate goal...to live a happy and fulfilling life. One with no regrets being surrounded by people who love and appreciate you for who you are and not who they wish you could be.

Watching you come back to life is like discovering the volume switch on the radio. A beautiful song has been playing quietly for years and years, and just recently did the crescendo begin. Use these next five weeks, then five months, then five years...and then a lifetime...living in the way that keeps you the happiest, making choices that keep you happy, and dreaming of all the great things to come.

It's a tough world out there, but you've taken the first step. You see what you've been missing. Now just get out there and do what you do best...make it happen.

I'll be watching. And cheering.

-- me

You Can Ring My Bell

Post traumatic stress for me has looked and felt a whole lot more like post deployment paralysis. The only way to describe it is to imagine a dunk tank at a carnival...the one where people pay a few dollars to throw a series of round softball-like objects at a target, and a successful hit lands someone into a tank of dirty water right after a distinct gasp and splash. Every day I'm balancing on the edge of a triggered seat, swaddled like a mummy but in a dark, soft blanket. Below me is an aquarium as large as an Olympic swimming pool with clear glass walls, populated by a few schools of friendly fish and a small group of sharks.

As I balance on my wobbly perch, an endless line of people slowly walk past, each lobbing a round object at a tiny little bullseye a few feet away from me. Some of the objects are small enough that I feel the seat slightly quiver when they hit the target, and though I hold my breath anticipating the worst, I don't fall. Some objects make a whistling sound as they approach the target. I have no idea how many hit equals a dunk into the pool, so before each pitch I inhale and every muscle in my body contracts, bracing for impact.

Plunging into the water should be a relief, but I'm swaddled. Above water the swaddle was perfect...I felt safe and warm. But under water, my arms and legs are tangled and I think my only hope for survival is for a vicious shark to gently nip at the cloth, releasing me to swim to safety.

The spash of my body smacking into the water causes everyone in line, hundreds of people, to congregate around the tank, each one yelling what they think is helpful advice, but their voices all blend together through the glass and water, and I hear the words only as a roar of chaotic noise.

Post traumatic stress disorder is a body's normal response to an abnormal sequence of events. My brain has learned to associate what were formerly normal objects and circumstances with my most vivid emotional memory of those objects and circumstances. A ringing cell phone puts me right back on the main road leading to our base in Afghanistan. We watched someone throw a cell phone out of a car window about 100 meters in front of us, and heard a dull thud as it failed to set off what we assumed was the intended IED underneath our vehicle. The metallic clank of doxens of pieces of newly cleaned silverware being dried and sorted in a restaurant brings me right back to the Afghan dining facility where I pulled my weapon, later second and third guessing myself into hysterics wondering if I had responded in the "right"way.

The most interesting analogy I've heard is that PTSD responses are much like the responses conditioned into Pavlov's infamous dogs. The dogs learned to associate a ringing bell with food. Suddenly, the ringing bell no longer meant food, and at first their mouths, still thinking "bell equals food," salivated in eager anticipation. And only over time did they unlearn that association, now recognizing that a ringing bell is indeed just a bell.

It's been more than three months since I returned from Afghanistan, and the ringing bell still indicates food to me. The first few weeks, I hid from the bell, asleep in bed, hardly ever leaving the house. Then I tried to avoid the bell as Melissa and I travelled a few thousand miles across two continents. First, I tried to hide in my office, drowning the noise in work. When that failed, Rob tried to protect me from the ringing bell for the past few weeks as we flew from Germany to New York to San Francisco and back again. But at the end of each day, the ringing bell still made me salivate, thinking food was just a few seconds away.

The stand-off ended three days ago, when I entered an intensive PTSD program at the military hospital about 20 minutes from home. I came here voluntarily, and through the encouragement of those closest to me both professionally and personally. So for the next eight weeks, I hope to find some peace through methods I would have never associated with military counseling...art therapy, yoga, and classes on brain function, spirituality, relationships, addiction, and on and on, plus more (and higher quality) individual talk therapy than I would have received under any other set of circumstances.

Eight weeks will likely not be enough to make the bell stop ringing completely, but since my full time right now is to heal, I am determined to turn down the volume. Or at least to begin to regain control of who and what can ring my bell. 

The Calculus of Coming Home

This week's homework assignment for my therapist was deceivingly simple...answer the question "Why me?" with an answer more insightful than "Why not?"

I've said it before and I could say it a hundred more times. When I was 19, I volunteered to serve my country, not really understanding what I had gotten into. Seeing the military in it's most pure form (at war) made me feel like an upside down snowglobe, waiting for the fog of plastic snowflakes to settle to reveal some magnificent landscape. Reality is a total white-out right now, and I feel like someone spun me like a top and now I'm stumbling to walk in a straight line to the exit door.

Why me? Because it took drastic measures...the three days of notice, the 9 weeks of pre-deployment training, the adrenaline of being in a warzone for 6 months, the amazing people I met along the way, and the shock of reintegration into reality...for my stubborn brain to finally face some harsh realities. Realities that have been hiding for years under the treads of my Nikes, at the end of 16 digits imprinted on a piece of plastic, or at the bottom of a tall Starbuck's latte. This is happening because until last April, I maintained absolute control over nearly every detail of my life. Then suddenly I didn't...and instead of that making me furious (my own anticipated outcome), my loss of control was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. And that made assimilating myself right into my former life not only painful but downright impossible.

It's no secret to those who know me best that I have this underlying urge to be a people-pleaser, all the while scorning such behavior in others. I guess my own act was so convincing that over the years I managed to fool myself into thinking it was genuine. Or something. I needed to be everyone's "person," their best friend and confidante. In my Air Force life, I am guilty of some covert political wrangling, carefully aligning myself with the "right people" at the "right times" without appearing (to myself) to be manipulative. It's a dirty game we all seem to play in this warped game of reality that is life as a military officer.

But at the end of the day, advice from a near stranger after four weeks at Fort Polk still makes the most sense, and has unlocked my answer to the question of "why me?" Before I met this Army officer, no one was ever brave enough to tell me that I was trying too hard, but I'm sure they noticed. Maybe it was just glaringly obvious right then, an experienced Army infrantryman watching an outsider struggling to assimilate into his world in a few short weeks. That was far beyond anything resembling my comfort zone. So I overcompensated. And he called me on it during a four hour conversation which began around midnight.

"Lisa, you have got to stop trying to prove yourself and just be yourself," he'd said to me in an exasperated voice I would only tolerate from a bonafide badass, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other, sitting on the corner of the dirt road that led to our laundry trailer. It was probably three in the morning and his words buzzed around me like mosquitoes, lingering in the humidity, their wings quivering in the otherwise noiseless night.

In my mind I was tough as nails, but in reality I was uncomfortable in my own skin, a paradox that was not lost on me in the least as I sat in my Afghan connex some six months later, where for the first time in my adult life I gave myself permission to get lost in my own head. For ten years I had been successful in the Air Force  in spite of myself, somehow convinced that the only way to stand out was if I was willing to work harder than anyone else...and I was. Every day it felt like I, the English major, was trying to solve the quadratic equation with no idea of the values of a, b or c, where x equaled happiness and, well, the calculus of life just became too overwhelming...so instead I deferred to basic math. Five miles (by foot) plus eight ounces (by mug) plus 20 milligrams (by pill) equaled a version of happy that would just have to suffice at the moment.

Why me? Because Afghanistan was somehow the math professor who spoke English instead of Russian. The equations were no longer written in the Cyrillic alphabet. And the values of a, b, and c seemed like things I would possibly understand if I could just have a little more time to study. And if I made a conscious decision to apprentice under Issac Newton or John von Neumann instead of studying with a Teacher's Assistant.

So why me? Because why not? I'm ready. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've lived the most honest version of my own life, but in my mind, that was only possible in Afghanistan and isn't yet attainable in reality. I can also say that in my eyes, anything that gets me just one step closer to understanding the quadratic equation for happiness is worth every bit of the struggle. And solving for x is a journey I'm ready to take.

To Support and Defend

There are a lot of new people in my life lately. It's certainly no secret that for years and years I've used my closest friends as sounding boards, but lately it's been glaringly obvious that professional sounding boards are much better equipped to help me sort through the rainbow of emotions that followed me home from Afghanistan.

Over the past month, I've averaged roughly 90 minutes of professional counseling a week, derived from various sources. Before Afghanistan, the social and career stigmas of therapy were unwanted blemishes on the perfect (though rather disingenuous) life I was living. I'm an excellent talker. I'd also like to think of myself as an excellent writer. But as it turns out, writing about my personal struggles (at the command of my therapist) has been overwhelming.

For a week I've been staring at my "homework," a white 3 x 5 index card on which my assignment was painstakingly scribbled, not by me, but by the person to whom I have to answer tomorrow afternoon. I've carried my assignment in my pocket everywhere I've gone, and though it's now tattered, it's no less daunting.

"I have a homework assignment for you," he said at the end of my last session. "Write about the most traumatic event, and note how the event impacted on your views of yourself, other people and the world. Talk about why you think this event happened to you, and how the event has changed your views about yourself, other people and the world."

Yeah, that's easy. Just sift through nine months of memories, each mildly traumatic in a unique way, some positive...some negative, and pick the most significant one. And I'm back to old habits. My "homework" is due tomorrow at 11am, and it's taken me until now to piece together my thoughts...the pressure of a deadline never fails.

And what it came down to is that it's one thing to prepare for war, shooting rubber bullets and paintballs, and pretending the various pests (both human and otherwise) in Louisiana were the enemy. But for me, nothing stirred more authentic trepidation than knowing I was flying into a country where the enemy could be anyone, anywhere, anytime.

I boarded the United States Air Force aircraft headed into Afghanistan with 15 guys who had spent an extraordinary amount of time over the past 60 training days teaching me everything they knew. I admit to nerd-like qualities, which were immeasurably beneficial as I basically sought to become fluent in my personal equivalent of Swahili in 9 weeks. I felt safe on that airplane...flanked on either side by my favorites of the young mentors.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered the combat zone," declared the Loadmaster, who was all of maybe 22. And then, it was real. Just eight months earlier my father put his United States Navy uniform back on and swore me back in as a Major in the U. S. Air Force, and in my oath I had sworn to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." I'd taken that same oath each time I was promoted, but somehow those words seemed hollow for a personnel officer, sitting in a comfortable, safe office, away from any real danger, living an Air Force life governed by email, Power Point slides and staff meetings, where my job was to "support and defend" the Almighty Dell.

I entered the combat zone on the 2nd of July, and even now on my toughest nights, that Loadmaster's declaration of danger still reverberates in my ears. And as I sat in my tiny little airplane seat that afternoon, I had no idea of the true meaning of "support and defend." I know now, and returning to that same Dell-driven monotony I left behind months ago has proven a significant undertaking.

Exiting the combat zone was anti-climatic by comparison, and it lacked the closure I now think may have been helpful in returning to my former life. This time I was alone, hidden among a large Air National Guard unit redeploying to somewhere in the central United States, holding in my lap the same black bookbag with the same pink and white polka dotted ribbon tied on top I'd clutched some 160 days earlier, heart racing, ears ringing. This time there was no Loadmaster declaring that we had "exited the combat zone." We landed. It was cold and snowy. I was exhausted. We dragged our bags full of combat gear in circles like an army of ants. We slept. We woke up again, dragged more bags in circles, returned our protective equipment to the United States Army, and then waited. And waited. And waited.

Before I was sent to Afghanistan, I couldn't fathom "real" danger. The best way to describe wartime danger is to imagine a wooden rollercoaster at an old amusement park, and listening to the soothing sound of the gears grinding as the car slowly chugs up the hill. That's the training. And then there's a moment of utter silence. The arrival. Your stomach muscles tighten. You draw a quick inhale, and your stomach drops as you're physically shaken all the way down the hill. Except there aren't restraints. And the hill never ends. And it feels like you're secured with dental floss, wrapped around your lap a thousand times, and every so often another strand snaps free and you feel one step closer to flying uncontrollably out of the car.

That's what it feels like to be outside-the-wire, to "support and defend," and to know that the only way to arrive safely the bottom of the hill is through patience, vigilance and a whole lot of Groundhog Days.

And getting off that outside-the-wire rollercoaster feels a lot like walking on flat ground after spending an afternoon on rollerskates. Every step feels awkward at first, but then a brain that has walked on flat ground for 32-odd years remembers the sensation of picking up one foot after the other and moving forward. That mind is willing to talk about every single step, and about why establishing closure to those memories is so important.

That's why I went to war. I had always sworn to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic." Ten months ago, I had no idea what that meant to me. I know now.

It changed me. I've braver now, and my confidence feels earned. I'm brave enough to write my own advice for myself, and not to worry about what anyone else might think.

Be yourself...the rest will work itself out. Through patience, vigilance and a whole lot of Groundhog Days.

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

I have been home for 51 days, and in that period of time I've written one blog. I said I thought it would be hard to reintegrate into my old life, and as I suspected, I've experienced those 1,200 something hours across the most broad spectrum of emotions you can imagine. The first three weeks were spent in hibernation at home, sleeping, unpacking, and reacquainting myself with real-world responsibilities (like grocery shopping and putting gas in the car). The next two weeks were spent with my best friend of 18-odd years, Melissa, globetrotting from Germany to Portugal to Paris to Morocco to Luxembourg, which has in the past brought me great joy, so it wasn't a stretch that I assumed the same would be true this time. The past week as been spent trying to adjust to being back at work and to having Rob home with me again.

To the rest of the world, the face of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder probably looks like an Army soldier whose limbs have been torn from his body during an improvised explosive device explosion. Or maybe it looks like Jessica Lynch, who was held in captivity for several days and underwent more than 30 surgeries to put her body back together. I always imagined that people who suffered from PTSD had been blown up, physically scarred, or watched insurgents fall as a result of a well placed round. I never in a million years imagined that I would come back from Afghanistan and experience a mental break that doctors now tell me was a clear indication of PTSD.

It happened aboard a Ryanair airplane. Melissa was visiting, and it was very important to me to have her experience the closest accessible place that resembles where I (and her boyfriend, who is also in the Air Force), have spent a significant amount of time. When I booked the tickets back in November, I didn't really think about how insane it was for me to fly to a (relatively safe) Muslim country (unarmed) just after leaving another (extremely dangerous) Muslim country (where I had weapons and protective gear everywhere I went).

It's a three and a half hour flight from Frankfurt-Hahn to Marrakech. I've been to Marrakech two other times - it's a magical city, it's beautiful, the weather is great, and it's cheap and easy to access. I was excited. We got onto the airplane, sat in our seats, and got settled for the flight. The airplane took off, we reached a cruising altitude, the seatbelt sign went off, and I started feeling sick. I've never been sick on an airplane in my life. I ran to the bathroom. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. My hands were clammy and gray. I was shaking. And nauseous. And terrified.

I told the flight attendant that I would be in the bathroom indefinitely, just so that someone knew where I was. I crouched down into the dirtiest one foot by two foot space you can imagine between the door and the toilet. I raised the toilet seat, looked up at the ceiling, and started playing a game to distract myself.

"Musicians by alphabet," I remember thinking to myself. "If I can just stop focusing on how sick I feel, maybe I'll be okay."

ABBA, Beatles, Collective Soul, Dead Kennedys, Earth Wind and Fire, Frank Sinatra, Grateful Dead...

Then I did it again with girl singers...Adele, Beyonce, Carly Simon, Diana Krall...

It didn't help. The flight attendant tapped on the door every thirty minutes or so (I guess, since I wasn't wearing a watch) to make sure I was okay. After maybe two and a half hours, she brought me a Pepsi, and in broken English explained that "sometimes it helps...just try."

It helped. I drank a 4 ounce Pepsi in about 30 minutes and wandered back to my seat, somehow managing to stumble my way through exiting the aircraft, navigating customs, stepping into the pre-booked transportation to the hotel, and getting Melissa settled at the hotel before I almost lost it again.

I begged the owner of the hotel to walk with me to a Moroccan pharmacy to buy medication for what I decided at the time was either a parasite or food poisoning (both of which were feasible given my living conditions in Afghanistan). Armed with dime-sized antibiotic pills and some type of anti-nausea medication, both of which were to be taken three times a day, I made sure Melissa had an incredible time in Morocco...and I had one, too. It was probably one of my favorite trips of all time...minus the "incident."

But the night before we left, the nausea returned. This time I bought a Coke, took two Dramamine, two Tylenol and a Benadryl before we boarded the airplane. I slept the entire way home.

As we started driving home, I was back to my cheerful, non-carsick self, wondering quietly whether my "nausea" was really a panic attack, since it had mysteriously now disappeared once I'd re-entered familiar territory. We went to sleep and I showed up in the Mental Health Clinic on base the following morning.

The psychiatrist there confirmed my premonition. I was exhibiting many more PTSD behaviors than I was willing to admit at the time. Being in confined spaces was a problem. Traveling in un-armored vehicles was a problem. Not having a weapon was a problem. Seeing people in uniform, even a physical fitness uniforms, was a problem, nevermind head scarves, call to prayer and everything else I associated with Afghanistan that I experienced in Marrakech. Having my back to the door was a problem. I had problems.

The airplane incident had indeed been an anxiety attack, and he prescribed anti-anxiety medication to take as-needed to slow me down when that happened in the future. There were a series of days when I took the maximum three doses just to be able to function, though right now I am fine without them.

And then, well, the floodgates opened. PTSD was the key that unlocked Pandora's Box of conflicted emotions which the experts explained to me were streaming out as a result of my brain trying to merge two worlds (Afghanistan and my real life) into my new reality.

This is the part no one talks about. Coming back from war is difficult, and shocking. And humbling. And for me, it's also been embarrassing...because my PTSD stereotype was indeed the blown-to-bits Army dude. It surely wasn't me.

Rob told me a joke this afternoon, and it's somehow the perfect description of what I think many people assume about combat veterans of wars without a clearly defined enemy and little public support.

"How many Vietnam vets does it take to change a light bulb?" he asked.

He paused and looked at me, wondering if I would be able to answer. I couldn't.

"You wouldn't know," he said, "because you weren't there."

You don't have to go out, but you can't stay here

There's a lot of stuff people don't tell you about coming home from a war. And a very smart person told me that I'm probably having a harder time than most because I've gone and done this tremendously dangerous thing for the first time when I was 32 and pensive, vice being 19 and invincible, as are many service members when they experience war for the first time. I was well aware of the risks we were taking out there, some voluntarily and others purely by the nature of our mission. And I am now, more than ever, well aware of just how lucky I am to have made it back home.

But what I didn't expect was how difficult the transition would be. I drove down the Autobahn for the first time yesterday, in my non-armored Volvo. I was driving significantly faster than I should have, and I was on the constant lookout for some other car to pull directly in front of me and detonate, so somehow in my mind, being one of the fastest cars on the road made me safer. Yes, I do understand that in reality that's not the case. Today on my drive back, I saw two tan Humvees driving in a small convoy on the opposite side of the road, and I couldn't help but wonder whether they'd been to Afghanistan like I had. I thought about how I'd feel much safer in one of those than in my tank of a civilian automobile.

Knowing that being home alone for a few months isn't a good thing right now, I asked two of my dear friends if I could come visit them on the Mosel River yesterday, about two hours from where I currently live in Germany. And by far the most interesting sequence of events was a conversation in German between me and their eight year old son.

"Lisa," he asked. "What did you do in Afghanistan?"

I didn't really have an answer better than "I was a teacher, like your mother." But the truth of the matter is that now that I'm back, I wonder what I did in Afghanistan and what I have to show for it. Yes, I worked with people and I changed a handful of lives...for now. But by all accounts, without a Western influence, those lives will slowly re-adapt to their own cultural norms and I'll be another faded foreign memory.

It's hard to walk back into my former life, pretending like nothing has changed in the past eight months. I want to talk to everyone about what I did in Afghanistan and why I think it was important. I'm consumed by it, in fact. And given that my predisposition to getting lost in those thoughts is annoying to me, I can only imagine how others must feel to listen to me. I want to think about other things...normal things...but I'm not there yet. I want to be able to stand in a crowded room of people and not be scanning everyone's hands to make sure they're not concealing a weapon or a bomb, jittering at the thought of how I would respond. I want to stop brushing my hand across my right hip, not feeling my M9 sitting there, and wondering where it went.

I want to be normal again. And if the first few days are any indication, normal will take time and patience.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

As it turns out, this deployment ended in much the same fashion that it began...chaos, followed by a lull in activity, followed by more chaos, which ultimately delivered me back to Reichenbach-Steegen, Germany, the safest of any location in which I've been in the past 8 or so months.

I was bound and determined to be patient at one of the military's largest transient bases. And I did well. For about 72 hours. I laid in bed endlessly, watching movies, chatting with friends, making travel plans. But on Monday I absolutely cracked. Why on Earth should I hang out in Wrong-a-stan when I could be hanging out in my own house with a nice glass of wine surrounded by friends?

Both Rob and my friend Bryan offered to look up the military flight schedule, find me the name of an aircraft commander, and provide advice on how to find my way out of this transient situation. I picked up the phone at about 2am on Tuesday morning, calling blind to someone I'd never met, and somehow I convinced this extremely friendly pilot to take me home to Germany...at least 72 hours before the Air Force planned to let me do so.

It was gently snowing in Wrong-a-stan, and upon hearing that my chariot awaited, I dashed to my tent, heated to 90 degrees and brimming over with more than 40 girls, grabbed my bookbag and sleeping bag (the only pieces of luggage I brought back from Afghanistan), clipped on my pink reflective belt, and bolted to meet the crew. It took another at least three hours to negotiate all of the details, but by about 5:30am I was sitting somewhat comfortably on the back of a C-17, in complete awe that my master plan panned out, and listening to the de-icing machines clear the snow from the fuselage of the airplane.

There was something unbelievably special about this particular mission between Wrong-a-stan and Germany. This pilot was flying the remains of three American military members who had lost their lives fighting the war from which I was returning. Prior to my deployment, my job was to take care of these fallen heroes at Ramstein, where all of the American fallen transit en route to Dover Air Force Base so that my team can open their flag-draped transfer cases, re-ice the remains, re-seal the cases, and send them on their way.

What a sobering end of my incredible journey to spend almost nine hours gazing at these three flag-draped cases and truly appreciating just how lucky I am to be returning home to see my friends and family. Somewhere in the world, the friends and family of these three fallen heroes are in a state of shock and mourning, a huge contrast to  my own reunion emotions. It's a substantial flight between Wrong-a-stan and Germany, and about 30 minutes into the flight I managed to put down Water for Elephants, crawl into my sleeping bag and fade off to sleep.

I picked my sleeping location deliberately. The three flag-draped cases were tied down in a U-shape near the front of the aircraft, their heads all facing in the direction of home. I curled into my sleeping bag, nestled carefully inside of the U, my head facing toward home, surrounded by these great Americans, and imagining how they would have felt to be on the exciting journey home that I was then experiencing.

Those were, perhaps, my best eight hours of sleep since I began this journey more than eight months ago, and as I awoke, we were beginning our initial descent into Ramstein. As I stepped off of the airplane and onto the bus that led me to my first un-monitored step in a very long time, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of freedom...the same freedom those three fallen heroes had given their lives preserving.

I chose breakfast for dinner my first night home...buttermilk waffles and eggs scrambled with cream. And I drank a glass of champagne to celebrate not only my return from Afghanistan, but also to celebrate the lives of the 1,836 American service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan. May their lives inspire the next generation of American men and women to chose service as a way of life, and to help share our good fortune with those who were born into less fortunate circumstances.