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Before deployment, anxiety becomes a fact of life. This isn't discussed much, probably because the majority of deployment victims are male and it simply isn't manly to say you're scared.

I thought I'd come to terms with my fate a couple of months ago, but as my departure date approached, sleep deserted me. I took a week of leave before the week I was to depart, just to sit around the house and do nothing, sleep in, mow the grass, chop wood, or read. No rules...just right. But I couldn't sleep.

I'm not a jumpy person by nature. I don't recall having trouble sleeping in my life--not more than a night or two, anyway. I'm a person who needs her sleep: 9.5 hours a night is just right for me. If I have less I'm tired, and if more I'm lethargic. But as D-Day approached, I found myself sleeping very lightly. I didn't dream (I never do, to speak of), but would wake with a start--one of the full body twitches--around 3am, tense and nervous, with nothing in particular on my mind and wired for sound. I was lucky to get three hours of sleep.

In addition, my back cinched up. I carry my stress between my shoulder blades, mostly. I tried exercise, meditation, pain killers, and had my chiropractor adjust them, but nothing worked for more than a few hours. No matter what I did, I'd wake in the night with my back pinched again, sometimes so much so that my arm would be tingling or numb. I knew nothing would really help, short of me facing what I had to face. Unfortunately, I couldn't rush it.

I've rarely been in this sort of prolonged holding pattern. I am not accomplished at waiting, and don't believe in worrying. I do what I must to be prepared for what I must do, then I do it. In every case in my life so far, I've discovered that the anxiety that attends procrastination is invariably worse than whatever it is you must face.

In this case, however, I couldn't just jump on a plane and go when I was ready. I had no choice but to wait and...think about it. Even when I didn't think about it, it was clearly in the back of my mind anyhow--evidenced by my sleep interruptions and back pain.

Thus, increasingly weary from sheer anxiety, I dropped by the armory to pick up my weapon issue the morning of my flight. Despite the fact that I'd had an appointment and the entire process of signing documents and weapons issue should have taken less than five minutes, the contractors running the place managed to issue our weapons in no less than 45 minutes.

Then we drove to the airport to check in two hours early. At this airport--Montgomery Int'l Airport (MIA)--I've learned the hard way that you don't take your chances showing up a mere hour before your scheduled flight, because you may not be on it.

It's an awful, indescribable feeling to know you're leaving home and won't be back in the near future. I'd never thought about it, because (let's face it) we're basically selfish creatures that don't really get into empathy. My original deployment length was scheduled for 90 days, but thanks to manpower shortages and the need for increased security in Iraq, my orders now said 122 days. That's 122 days in theatre--not away from home, total. The "away from home" number looks more like 135, give or take. I wouldn't be back until Christmas--and then only if I was lucky.

Four months is a long time to step out of your own life and into a foreign situation on foreign soil doing a foreign job without your loved ones or your diversions. Four months is a semester of school that I would miss. When I return, the sick and starving kitten we picked up a few months ago will almost be grown. Four months is a long time to be alone.

And I don't even have kids. I can't begin to imagine what those with families go through when they deploy. This is one of those things we all think we understand but we don't really understand at all, kind of like "War is hell." We all know war is hell, but until you've been there, "war is hell" is just a soundbite, a bit of trite wisdom.

By the same token, we know people leave their families to go to war, but you can't understand what that really means until you've done it.

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