Iraq and the Undeclared War on Ourselves

My stepsister had her wedding last August in Texas, so most of the family met in south Texas for the wedding. Three short weeks after the wedding, my younger brother deployed to the Middle East again. He had already been deployed once in 2005, and I was scared to death then, so when I found out he was ordered to go again, I freaked out as expected. My younger brother is a genius. In fact, he is so smart, that his own intelligence enables/encourages his laziness. I'm not smart, and therefore have always worked hard for what I wanted, but because everything came naturally to my brother, he never found the value in "effort." Anything that took effort, he would simply walk away from.

When he joined the Air Force, we were so proud of him because we felt that he finally took a step in the right direction. For so long, he would just float through life not really caring about his future. Mom did what she could, and dad did not even know he was in town. By this point, I was living 4 hours away from my family, so though I did not know the specifics, I knew my brother was wasting his life. When I say 'he's a genius,' I mean he's actually a certified genius. It just baffled us how he was not a world-renowned scientist by that point. He joined the Air Force during peacetime, so we really didn't know he would be deployed within 3 years of his enrollment. He's been back from his last deployment for a few months already and all seems well. His physical and mental health seem to be in great condition, but I think that is mostly because on his position. Since my brother is in operations/communications, he had little to no actual field combat. Of course he was trained on guns and everything, but I do not think he actually had to use them.

I was lucky. He was lucky. We were lucky. My brother, unlike other young soldiers, came back minimally scarred. As far as I know, he hasn't had any flashbacks. Maybe it was his position, or maybe his attitude, but we were very lucky to have our lazy cynical brother back in the states virtually unchanged.

I used to have a boyfriend in the Army who was a medic. Unlike my brother, he wasn't so lucky. Before he was deployed, he was such a lively individual; very full of life, and passionate. But when he came back, he just wasn't the same person. Maybe now, after several years have passed since he's come back from Iraq, he's reverted back to his old self. But I wouldn't know. We haven't talked since then; he was offended that I didn't write to him every day.

It's so weird how different people are affected by things differently. My brother refused to even give us an address to write to, while my ex-boyfriend wanted us (his family & I) to write everyday. I tried to write everyday, but I just couldn't. I love to write, and for someone who writes all the time, and would even write to random soldiers, I just couldn't write to the ones I love. Everyone's heard of
writer's block, but hardly anyone's heard of "Lover's Block," and that's what I had, a Lover's Block. Every time I sat down to write to him, I simply couldn't finish the letters. That, or they'd get so drowned in tears that the ink would smear and become illegible. I was so scared. Up until maybe a year ago, I still had all these unsent letters I had written him during the time I couldn't muster up the courage to send him what I really thought about at the time, and what I was really doing.

But I did write him, and some letters were sent, but only a fraction of the letters, with only a fraction of the fears. Maybe my brother knew us best, and knew some of us, if made to sit down and write, would force our brains to think about our loved ones in a far off place, making us miss them more; making us yearn for physical death, rather than to endure a fruitless solitude, as a result of their absence in our life.

I missed my brother. I missed my ex-boyfriend. It was easier to deny the obvious than to accept the facts, because accepting the facts, the very dangerous facts, could make you go insane. For the whole year and a half my ex-boyfriend was gone, I quit living. I stopped going out with friends. I gained 50 (or more) pounds. I quit my bands. I became as antisocial as one could get. Some say I hibernated. Others say that I quit living. Either way, it's been several years since the ex has been back, and a few months since my brother's been back, and we're still feeling the effects of the war.

So many books have been written about the experiences of war; how war affects soldiers; how war affects land. But no one ever writes about how war affects home, or how it affects the wives, the daughters, the sisters and the mothers, the fathers and the brothers, of the solders overseas. Some soldiers die on foreign ground not seeing their family ever again, while other family members die, a less obvious death, when their loved ones come back, and they are no longer the ones they love, but merely clone shells of what they used to be.