The Truth About Deployment Life

by Michelle Montoro

After 22 years of active duty service in the United States Army, my husband is retiring this summer and will no longer be a soldier. To honor him as well as all of the military families past, present, and future, I wanted to share some truths about life during deployments. I have spent the past 12 years of my life as a military spouse, so this article is primarily about the military wives whom I have met and gotten to know during my tenure as an Army wife. It is also for and about the military spouses whom I have never met and do not know who have lived though multiple deployments while starting and raising families, pursuing their own personal development, and nurturing and strengthening their marriages through the long separations. I respect you. I support you. I applaud you.

I have only had to live through one deployment since meeting my husband, although he has multiple deployments under his belt that happened before we met. As freaked out as I was when my husband first received his deployment orders, the entire process was not nearly as terrible I thought it would be.

Certainly, it is true that everything breaks as soon as your husband leaves…