Many years ago I stood with a few other spouses and I watched the bus drive off with our husbands for a combat deployment.  I wasn’t naive as they thought, I had heard the whispers and rumors. Dh and I were 20, married less than a year.  I was pregnant.  He had no idea when he was coming back. Combine this with the reality that I was married to a soldier and everyone knows military marriages never end well… no one thought we had a chance. And when he came home that time, more than half a year later, dusty, battle worn and a whole lot more grown up,  if not much older, than he had been when he left, we did struggle.  We hurt each other.  We had a baby and new home and we tried for a while but then we stopped trying because it was hard and we thought it would be easy. Somewhere in there he brought up the idea of leaving for selection for another unit and I told him he was welcome to do it.  Single. We struggled, but somehow and by the grace of God, by the next tour I was still there. But the hard truth is that when I was saying goodbye that second time, those other wives I had stood with before?  They weren’t there anymore. Their loss was weirdly hard for me, like it represented a collective failure of our community, an omen, an eventuality. And now after more than 16 years and 4 deployments, I can almost count on one hand the spouses I knew then that are still around now. Dh and I, we have no magic in us. There’s plenty of couples who are the same…