My friend Joey died yesterday in Afghanistan.  He was 21 years old.  His name hasn't even been released to the press yet; I learned from someone's post on facebook when I logged in… Read full post »

I have fallen in love at first sight only one time in my thirty-one years. I was eighteen, and I was traveling with my mom during the spring break of my senior year of high school. Back in my Illinois hometown, the tulips were just sprouting but the grass was still… Read full post »

As the remains of Hurricane Ida swirled around my rented townhouse, I lay in my double bed, alone except for two purring housecats.  It's 9 a.m. on Veterans' Day, 2009, and I've slept in because that's how I'm celebrating.  I start reading the copy of Slaughterhouse-Five … Read full post »

 I can only imagine the stress of being a mental health professional in the Army, as Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, the purported Ft. Hood shooter, was.  We want to pretend that these wars we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are easier somehow, simply by virtue of being more technologically ad… Read full post »

I'll freely admit that, before I moved to Georgia and lived around a bunch of military folk, I had some mostly-negative stereotypes in my head.  I believed that military guys were mostly anal, rabidly-conservative bullies who carried a gun because they couldn't get any other job, or they we… Read full post »

I never thought I'd be in this position.  I never thought I'd be the soldier's girlfriend left behind, left sending care packages and awaiting letters (or more likely these days, emails) while my man hunts crafty bad guys on the other side of the world.

For one thing, I'm not really… Read full post »