I consider myself lucky

[Telly]

So this past week I have been up at a religious retreat. It's a family thing I go to every year. My great aunt is one of the founders of the camp and has been going for 63 years. I've been going for about... 23 years (I'm 26 now) So needless to say it's like a family reunion. You see people you've known all your life and it's just a great experience. It was especially nice for me this year because my husband is deployed and it was really relaxing to be up there and not stressing out all week. To top it off, it was about 70 degrees all week and up in the beautiful mountains of New Mexico. (A very nice escape from Ft Bliss, TX)

Anyway, getting to my point. There are a lot of older people who attend. Some are veterans, some are wives of men who were in WWII, Vietnam, Korea... anyway, you get the point. So I was talking to a lady whose husband was in the Korean War (I think it was Korean, could have been Vietnam). She knew that my husband is deployed right now and I was showing a picture of him to my aunt and she said "Did he send that to you from where he is?" I told her no but she was saying how much easier it must be to talk to him than it was for her and other women back before cell phones and e-mail. She said she would just wait for a letter. Which they would get sometimes once a month. She said they would never get phone calls and she would use those old fashioned voice recorders to record her and their kids and mail it to him and then he would record something and send it back. Wow...

She had also said that her brother had been in the Bataan Death March and they hadn't even known he was alive. She said they didn't even find out until her grandmother read the newspaper and saw his name as one of the people released after some years as a POW. Can you imagine that?

My great uncle was at Pearl Harbor when it got bombed. My aunt said they didn't hear from him for a month!

So, I guess my whole point of sharing this is just that I consider myself lucky to at least be able to get e-mails once in a while from him and phone calls. I always thought about how much harder it must have been in those older wars for the families at home but talking to her really made me realize just how lucky I am.

I can't speak for any other spouse when I say we're luckier now. Because I know that some of you still don't get to hear from your SO often but -- I don't know -- I just really wanted to share. I can't imagine having been a military wife back then.