What if...?

How do you tell the person you love of your biggest fears? How can you tell your soldier of your fears when you know that what they need most right now is to focus on their job? How do you ask them to add you to that piece of paper that makes the military contact you if they become a “casualty”? The answer should be as simple as just saying the words; just coming out and saying “Baby, please add me to your DD93.” Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that easy. Because nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to come out and say “I’m scared you’re not going to come back to me.” Nobody, not you, and not your soldier, wants to say the words “What if…?” Because the “what if” is the scariest part of the deployment.

“What if…?” can be the two scariest words in the English language when they are put together, side by side. What if… There are so many “what if”’s in our lives. “What if…” is terrifying, not because of what follows those two words, but because of the fact that they represent the unknown. Nobody really knows the answers to all of those “what if” questions. What if he gets shot? What if he doesn’t come home? What if he sees something that changes him forever? What if he’s not the same person when he comes home that he was when he left? What if he changes his mind about your relationship while he’s gone?

Lots of “what if”’s there, and that’s not even half of them. The soldier has his own “what if”’s. What if she’s not faithful? What if she decides she can’t wait for him to come home? What if she can’t handle the stress and fear of what could happen to him? What if, what if, what if.

We all play the “What if..?” game more often than we should. We’re also all far more afraid of the unknown than we are of the known. We know that things could happen, and that’s what scares us. What could happen, not what will happen.

Of course, we always play the “What if..?” game with the most negative scenarios. We never think about the positive “What if…”’s. We never think about “What if he really loves me?”, or “What if she’s there waiting?” We never think about the positive outcomes that could happen. Our minds always automatically go to the worst case scenario. So I have to wonder, what if. What if we started looking at the positive outcomes? What if we started thinking about the happy “what if”’s? Would our outlook on the world be a little different? Would we make it through deployments just a little easier? Would we not be quite so afraid?

When it comes to the military and deployments, what it is we are most afraid of is not the known, but the unknown. Really, that is the case with life in general, but with those of us who are connected to the military, whether you are enlisted yourself, or you are the loved one of someone who is enlisted, this is a far greater reality. It is never the known that causes us to wake at night in a cold sweat, barely able to breath. It’s not the fact that our loved one is sleeping in a tent in the desert. It’s the idea that they might be attacked while they are sleeping in that tent. It’s not the fact that they are in foreign country doing their job. It’s the idea that they might be surrounded by insurgents in that foreign country, just waiting for them to let their guard down for a moment.

How do we, as the girlfriends, the fiancees, the wives, or just the friends and families, of these soldiers cope with that fear of the unknown? All we can do is keep ourselves busy, and keep faith that our soldiers know what they are doing. All we can do is have faith that their training really was enough, that they’ll know when to duck, or that they’ll bob and not weave at just the right time. It isn’t an easy thing to do, but we can’t let our soldiers know the extent of our fear for them. When they know the full extent of that fear, then they worry more about us worrying about them than they do about doing their job, and that worry can get them killed. Or so I’ve been told.

So hold your heads up, dear readers. Put on a happy face, because that’s what your soldier needs you to do. That is what I will have to do. I will have to hold my head up, and put on a brave face. I will have to only let my soldier see my pride, and perhaps only a fraction of the fear. After all, I don’t want him to think I don’t care at all, because I care more than he can possibly know. I cannot let him see that it is fear that keeps me awake at night. I cannot let him see that it is my missing him that keeps me from sleeping. All I can do is take care of myself, so that he is not worried about me while he should be worrying about his job.

Remember, dear readers, that fear of the unknown does nothing but keep us awake at night. Playing the “what if” game does nothing to help, it only harms. So while we are afraid of the unknown, we must do what we can to squash that fear. We must get past the negative “what if”’s, and try to see the positive ones.