April 7, 2011

• My Father, the Soldier

  My father was a soldier.  I understood that at a young age, when we moved from Missouri to D.C.  My father worked in the Pentagon, as did the parents from most of my friends.  It wasn’t weird.  It wasn’t difficult.  It was simply so.  Sometimes he’d travel to places like Japan or Germany or Korea.  He always brought me home a doll, which succeeded in making me forget that he had left me in the first place.

  In summer of 2001, July 29th to be exact, we moved from D.C. to Kansas City.  My dad was hoping to go into the reserves and retire soon, and my mom had just gotten her dream job.  I was to be starting fourth grade in a new Catholic school up the street.  My grandparents and my brother and sister all lived near-by.  It was going to be perfect.

  Then school started…and one day in September, our teachers told us to go home.  They had all seen something on the T.V. in the teachers lounge.  They came back to the classrooms crying and shaking.  They wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. 

  So I walked down the hill to my house.  It was quiet.  My father was sitting, alone, in the kitchen.  The television program reflected on his face in the otherwise dark room.  He was crying.  He pulled me to him and cried even more.  It wasn’t until my mom came home that I even knew what had happened.  Two planes had flown into the World Trade Center…and one into the Pentagon.  The television reports would later focus on the World Trade Center.  The destruction.  The firemen heroes.  The lost lives.  The last moments on the planes.  The pictures of people leaping from windows or being crushed under falling debris.  But the Pentagon was where my dad was working not even two months before.  He should have been in there when the planes hit.  Instead, mothers and fathers of my friends were in the building.  Most were not in the section that was hit…but when you know the people personally, not just numbers on a ticker at the bottom of the screen…then a few is more than bearable.

  A week later, my dad was recalled to the Pentagon.  He stayed there for 14 months.  He was then sent over seas for two 11-month terms. 

  At the age of nine, my father was gone.  And this time it wasn’t fun.  It wasn’t a few weeks for public affairs work.  No doll was going to take back the three years that I didn’t have my father there.  I slept every night in one of his T-Shirts.  I kept a chalkboard in the kitchen counting down the days until he came home.  I held my mother when she cried for my father.  I wrote him letters and sent him photos of everything in my life that he wasn’t able to see. 

   

   No child should have to go through what I did.  No child should lose their parent for months or years…or forever. 

   

  But we do.  We are strong because we have to be. 

   

  And I am very proud of my father.

   

  M

  • 10:51 am
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