While watching recent campaign coverage, I remarked how difficult and exhausting it must be for politicians in the presidential race.

“That’s not difficult,” my husband said bluntly. “Nobody’s dying.”

I didn’t respond. I already knew what he meant. For many servicemembers and families, 9/11 and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shaped our relationships, conversations, decisions, happiness, fears and daily thoughts in significant ways. Pride and anguish make for strange bedfellows.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq. An Army wife friend of mine summed it up best: Five long, hard years.

“The deployments keep getting longer and more frequent,” another Army wife and the mother of two toddlers, told me. “But I am still here, still strong, and still supporting my husband and all of our soldiers.” Her husband currently serves in Iraq on his fourth deployment. 

Military wives have always soldiered on. One evening in the weeks following 9/11, I attended an Air Force wives’ social I’ve never forgotten. The women had managed to turn a no-frills room on base into an autumn sanctuary. Handcrafted harvest arrangements and pumpkins adorned the tables. We ate home-cooked dishes by candlelight. We kept the conversation light, even though we knew we had just entered into a dangerous, complex and unpredictable era. To me, that evening represented a little bubble of hope amid all the horror.      

With seven years of combat operations in Afghanistan and five in Iraq, politicians and the generals in Washington often use the word “stretched” to describe the cumulative effects of these war years on our troops and their families.

“These are times that try men’s souls,” comes to my mind. Thomas Paine’s famous phrase regarding the American Revolution appeared in a collection of colonial essays called

“The Crisis.” More than 230 years later, “The Crisis” seems a fitting moniker for our current era.

“Since 9/11, we have taken the fight to these terrorists and extremists,” President Bush told Congress and the nation in his January 28 State of the Union Address. “We will stay on the offense, we will keep up the pressure, and we will deliver justice to our enemies.” 
The president meant “we” in a collective sense, but it is the less than 1 percent of Americans serving in the military who will actually stay on the offensive, who will keep up the pressure and will deliver justice to our enemies. A good chunk of that 1 percent is under the age of 21. I’ve thought a lot about these young men and women. I’ve thought about their parents and grandparents and the mix of pride and fear they must have. And I’ve thought about the politicians and policy makers, who as privileged young men avoided the Vietnam draft with college deferments, and who now, as privileged old men, send our people into harm’s way.  

A general recently called the job of our troops in Iraq “bone-crushingly difficult work.”
So why do it? Duty to country, soldiers and families, the general said.
People have always been the heart and soul of the military.

“America is a force for hope in the world because we are a compassionate people, and some of the most compassionate Americans are those who have stepped forward to protect us,” President Bush also said in the State of the Union.

I’m glad the president described our military members as compassionate. He could have used other adjectives: brave, able-bodied, determined, or strong. Instead, he picked a word many probably would not choose in a word association game to describe a marine or soldier. Yet compassion is the very thing that allows our servicemembers to put a nation of families before their own families.

How do you mark an anniversary not of the celebration variety? With reverence for the fallen and prayers for peace and stability. And one more — hope for a better day.