Health & Fitness
Family!
A San Bernardino County soldier, after spending six months in Iraq and Afghanistan, records his own family's reunion inside a Baltimore airport.
In normal times, I never would have posted a video that catches my being weepy. Public tears violate the code of my male ego.
But after a day of struggling with the idea of posting the video, I opted to go public because it illustrates the most difficult aspect of a soldier going to war: Family separation.
I first feared family separation in February, when I first deployed to Baghdad. But after three months in Iraq, as well as another 90 days in Afghanistan, I now know full well that everything else is bearable in war – incoming enemy rounds, long work hours and horrible internet connections – except for family separation.
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So after work on Aug. 24, after being back in the USA for one week, I had camera in hand as I eagerly waited for my son, Marshall, and wife, Sharilyn, to emerge from their terminal in Baltimore-Washington International Airport. My last live memory of my wife and son was in February, when I watched them until they disappeared into the security inspection line at the same airport.
The video is painful on the eyes. I was trying to capture the moment on a camera while enjoying the first moments of a family reunion. I kept rolling while trying to hug my wife and son, which explains why the perspective of the one minute, 15-second video resembles a fumbled football.
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Our four-day weekend was busier than a war zone deployment. We started with the Spy Museum in downtown Washington, D.C., on Thursday and didn’t stop until we saw the original Fort McHenry “Star Spangled Banner” flag inside the Smithsonian of American History on Sunday. Our whirlwind weekend included driving during hurricane rains while returning to Fort Meade, Maryland, after visiting Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello on Saturday (we were caught in the outer bands of Hurricane Irene; the rains were fierce, but the wind was bearable and the roads were clear, so the male ego in me insisted that I keep driving).
And when the weekend was over, I took my family back to the airport. This time, I didn’t take a video as they disappeared into security.
