This morning I almost tripped over my husband’s enormous rucksack (confession: I had to google the word “rucksack” and look at a picture to make sure it was indeed that… yes, I’m a reservist wife. ) It was sitting right in front of our closet where he’d left it last night when he came in at midnight after a five day training at Barksdale, a 10-11 hour drive from where we are in Nashville.

Five hours later, he was back up and off to work at his “real” job as a marketing director for a radio station. Today’s their first “Brown Bag” of the summer – it’s a big concert on the grounds of a local church where they bring in several different bands and it’s completely free so it’s usually very well attended. And it will be Cliff’s last. His job ends a week from today and so far, we don’t know where he’s going next.

The fear of the unknown can be the scariest thing, can’t it? I was facing this same fear last year when Cliff was in Iraq. As a reservist/NG spouse, there is no real training to prepare you for living a military life – especially when you live nowhere near a military installation and you have no connections to other military wives.

I had a little bit of an advantage when we found out Cliff was deploying. I was in Iraq in 2003 as a writer/reporter. I actually went twice – once on the U.S. Harry S. Truman during that first week of the war, and then a second time, this time to Baghdad, in November of that year. The guys in my husband’s detachment used to tease him that I’d deployed more than he had. I had sat in Saddam’s chair at the palace used (at the time) for the CPA headquarters. I knew what it was like finding this soft baby powder sand EVERYWHERE you turned. I had felt the heat over there the only way that most can describe it – like standing in the exhaust of a C-130 or in the direct line of fire of an enormous hair dryer blowing hot air. I’d rode along on a tank patrol in a local Baghdad neighborhood and spent time on a base just south of Baghdad hearing soldiers’ stories. I had talked and visited with Iraqis, even in one of their homes, and I’d heard the stories of what it was like under Saddam and what their hopes and dreams now were since the “Americans had come.” I’d had an Iraqi woman thank me for what our military had done. “We were hoping what happened in Afghanistan would happen here,” she told me.

Facing our fears

I had an advantage as a wife when I found out that Cliff was leaving. But I still had fears. The biggest one: that he wouldn’t come back. The next biggest one: I had no idea what to expect or how this deployment was going to be. I didn’t know where I would get my information, I didn’t know how often we’d get to talk, I didn’t know what we would both be like at the end of this.

Cliff left for mobilization in January of 2007 and deployed to Iraq in March of that year. That month especially was hard because communication changed. When he was training in California, we could talk almost every day and do web cam with our son. They even played checkers online together. But of course, in Iraq, it was a different story. But we settled into the new “normal” as best we all could. Still, when the call came, I was totally caught off guard.

It was late one night and Cliff had just told me he was going to go grab a bite at one of our favorite fast-food restaurants. It was our code word we’d set up before he left to let me know if he was going out on a mission, outside the wire. He’d been at his assigned base for over a month and somehow I’d convinced myself he would never leave there. And now he was. And I wasn’t handling it very well.

Cliff asked if we wanted to pray and we did. I have to admit though, my attitude wasn’t very prayerful. I was asking God to protect my husband but my tone said “you WILL protect my husband!” When we got off the phone, I had to face reality. There was absolutely nothing I could do right then. And I had no idea what might happen. The fear of the unknown was in full force.

Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

That’s when I had to face it. The unknown. And what I realized that night was what others have said before: you hope for the best and prepare for the worst. I had to look at the worst possible scenario and ask myself, what would I do? For me, I knew I would still have my faith. I would still have God. I would still have my little boy and other family to support me. And though I would be heartbroken, I knew I would still go on.

This may sound really morbid to some, but it was only after I looked at the worst possible thing happening – my worst possible fear coming true – that I could let go of my fear of the unknown.

Some of you reading this may be struggling with fearing the unknown, unsure of this deployment, your family’s security, your marriage, your husband’s safety. My suggestion? Face your fear. Are you afraid of your finances? Sit down and make a plan. Are you afraid of your husband getting wounded? Sit down and write it out if you have to, but think about what would need to happen for your family to keep going. Is your husband home but unemployed? Figure out what Plan A, Plan B and Plan C are. That’s what we’ve had to do.

I guess my point is this. We can let fear control us or we can control our fears. What are some of the fears you’re dealing with, or have worked to overcome?