Angie wrote a very sweet post about the changes in their household that her husband will encounter when he comes home from Iraq soon. And then she wrote this:
We cannot wait to have him home 'for good', if that's even a term wecan use in the Army. We already know when the next deployment should be
so that makes it really hard for me to say to the boys, "Daddy is
coming home, for good this time" I'm not so sure I'll ever be able to
say that to them. I don't even think they even understand it since he
has come and gone so many times in the past 10 months. For now it's
sorta like a temporary, 'for good'.
I too have been struggling with defining "for good" lately.
My husband is in a weird branch of the Army that does shorter but more frequent deployments. He just returned from seven and a half months, and I think many people in my life assumed he was just coming home for R&R. People kept asking me when he had to go back. They wanted to know if he was home "for good."
Sometimes I answered that he was home "for good" instead of on R&R, but other times I said that he was home until next summer. Because "for good" is completely relative, I think. He deploys again in about six months, but he will be away from home on training for nine non-consecutive weeks. Is the proper answer that he's home for good until he leaves for SERE? Is hopping back and forth between Army schools considered "being home" anyway?
To other military families, return from deployment is as "for good" as it gets. To my civilian aunt who called the other night, she can't believe he has to leave home again so soon.
This "for good" concept is foreign to us. They're never really home for good, are they?
