An installment in the New York Times Deployment Diary
I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “live like he deploys tomorrow.” I remember thinking it odd at the time, since my husband, a Navy helicopter pilot, and I somehow always spent the day before deployments frantically getting uniforms ready, packing bags, responding to last-minute tasks and making tearful goodbye phone calls to parents, siblings and friends. Nothing about it was worth trying to live like that every day. This round, however, was different. Dickens very well could have been talking about the days before deployment when he said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
My husband was supposed to deploy on a Saturday. For months, it sat on our calendar in pen, taunting us with inching proximity. In what felt like the blink of an eye, we went from next fall, to next month, to next week, to “he leaves on Saturday.”
T. T. Robinson 