This ran in USA Today on December 20:

On the war's fifth Christmas, here's a tableau Norman Rockwell might have appreciated: the family gathered by the tree for a new holiday ritual - the phone call from Iraq... As the phone passes from hand to hand, everyone says the same thing. "Are you okay? Stay safe! I love you." The conversation is intense and emotional. And it is less than entirely honest. That's because the purpose of this call - like tens of thousands of real ones that will take place this holiday season between the home front and the war zone - is not to inform and enlighten, but to comfort and support. Few of the callers, here or there, tell the whole truth all the time.

I must admit, when I read this piece, my first reaction was "Boy, I'm glad I'm not the only one who lied to my spouse in Iraq." It sounds odd that we would deliberately mislead the ones who love us the most, who provide such an important basis of support for us to return to. And yet, in many ways, it makes perfect sense.

Deep down inside, more than anything else, I wanted to believe that I was protecting my family from the horrors of war. I wanted to believe that I was experiencing what I had trained for so that they themselves would not have to experience it. Please note: this is not the same as "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here." I am talking in a larger sense about serving so that our loved ones and those we protect do not have to experience the terrible thing that is war. So it seemed to make no sense to tell my wife about blackened bodies and mangled vehicles at the side of the road, or the terrible concussive force of airstrikes - sharing that with her would, in some strange way, be a violation of that protection.

Then there was the larger problem of context - how do you explain the elation of command in combat or the despair of multiple days without sleep to someone who hasn't experienced it firsthand? How to explain the satisfaction of knowing that all of your soldiers lived to fight another day, even though that meant that some other human beings most assuredly did not? And how to explain the sorrow of leaving your unit when you should be experiencing elation at rejoining your loved ones? There simply aren't words, and somewhere in the back of your mind, there's a fear: fear of being misunderstood. Fear of your spouse thinking you've changed and become something monstrous. Fear of inadvertently letting something slip that gets repeated, and maybe, just maybe, costs someone their life.

But most of all, I think it was because those phone calls (and letters, and tape recordings) were short escapes for me. They were my intermittent opportunities to take off the mask of command and be fully human again, and I simply wasn't going to spoil it with shop talk. As my tour went on (and mind you, this was only a six-month tour, as opposed to the current norm of 15 months), it got harder and harder to put the mask on again after taking it off, which consequently meant that I called and wrote less. Ironically, that was probably harder on my wife than if I had just called and brain-dumped everything on her.

So when you talk to your trooper, remember: he or she is not telling you everything, and for good reason. Accept the fact that you might not get the whole story for months or even years, and focus making the words that you do exchange count.