My father enlisted in the US Army on 23 April 2000. I vividly remember going to the recruiter with him; the recruiter was a ginger and desperately tried to talk to me while I cried behind my mother. I was 6. He moved to Fort Benning on 13 September 2000 for basic, transferred to Fort Bragg on 27 April 2001, and PCSed to Italy on 28 August 2002. It's hard to believe he has been there for over a decade now. He deployed for the first time to Iraq on 28 March 2003; he's shipped out to Afghanistan three times since, in 2005, 2007, and 2009. He has spent 43 months of his life downrange at war. His battalion is currently back in Afghanistan; as a First Sergeant fulfilling the role of Rear D company commander, though, he has remained on post in Italy. He's been pulled for promotion, likely by end of the year, at which point he will be a sergeant major. Since his enlistment, I've seen him typically every other year; my guesstimate is that I've seen him for a grand total of 14 weeks. I could not be prouder to be a soldier's child and my father is an exemplary soldier.
Throughout my life, he and I have had a strained relationship. When I was toddler, while my parents were together, my mother has video of me screaming for him while he was out paintballing and boozing with friends. His first deployment was, for me, wonderful: I constantly received letters from him and phone calls whenever he had the opportunity, even if it was at 0200 my time. Once he returned to Caserma Ederle, his home base, that stopped. I have every email we've ever exchanged saved; it is not uncommon to see a gap of at least a month, if not several, between his emails. Phone calls were rare and on his time schedule. Our visit in 2007 culminated in a screaming match in my driveway when he threatened to leave and, finally, a promise to keep in contact with a weekly email. We exploded over email a year later, with accusations flying and blame getting put on both of us. Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed, except I grew in my ability to accept him, as my father, for who he is and not who I wished he was.
The week after I was raped and I told him, he flew out and ended up on my doorstep as a surprise. The visit was intensely appreciated and, though rocky like always, I really enjoyed getting to spend a whole week with him. Since then, he's been pretty good about keeping contact with me; it's vaguely shocking but I'm enjoying it while it lasts. He's said multiple times what a good teacher I am. Our last phone conversation, on Christmas, he told me how proud he was of how well I've done in school and that he was especially impressed by how well I've done in spite of everything that happened this semester. I've very literally never heard that before from him.
There was a point to this post, though. I've started watching "Married to the Army: Alaska" on TLC. I see these wives and kids with deployed soldiers, and the soldiers make a point to call and Skype once or even twice a day. Obviously, when black outs occur or they're on missions, things are different, but the soldiers make such an effort. There's one woman who, like me, hears from her soldier less often; she got maybe 5 Skype sessions in 7 months of deployment and a call every couple of weeks. Another wife commented on how ridiculous (and pathetic, really) that is. Watching the show, I try so hard to justify why my father, even when he's now on Rear D and not downrange, contacts me still so rarely. He's not an officer, like some of the soldiers on the show, so he can't easily delegate tasks to make time for himself. He's a SFC, so he has so much more responsibility than the lower ranking soldiers. He's in charge of his entire battalion while they're downrange, and it's several full-time jobs rolled into one. I really want to believe he contacts me whenever he can. Even with this recent improvement, though, I'm just not so sure that's true.
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