Rocket Penguin

Well, I drove a U-Haul truck and trailer filled with virtually all my worldly possessions through the rain for a couple hundred miles. I only stopped for gas and to read condom vending machine poetry.
My worldly possessions, including my car are all packed into a storage unit and I’m spending the last few days before I ship out with my family. People keep asking me if I’m scared. If I’m nervous. If I want to go.
The truth is complicated. I want to go. I just don’t want to leave. I want to do my part. I want to be tested. I’m still angry that I missed both the initial fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know it’s going to be dreadful, but I believe it’s important. I feel a debt to those that came before me. I have had a good life in a great country. There is a price to maintain this for my family and I. It doesn’t feel right to have another man pay this price for me. I want to go. I just don’t want to leave.
The biggest thing I fear on this deployment isn’t an abstraction; it’s a virtual certainty. I don’t fear being killed, or crippled (well maybe a little, but not much). I don’t fear the fight or the living conditions. What I fear is when I come back. My daughter is 18 months old. She only knows a few words, but she knows me. When I walk into a room, her face lights up, as I’m sure mine does, and she runs into my arms. If I’m gone for a meaningful amount of time, she won’t let go of me for hours after I come back. There is no one quite like her. She has a special place staked out in my heart. What I fear about this deployment is introducing myself to her when I return. A year is a long time when your only 18 months old. I fear seeing her for the first time, as she hides from me behind her mother’s legs. Looking at me with eyes reserved for a stranger. I’ve already missed her birth, her first birthday, and a Christmas because of the military. I fear when she becomes a teenager and calls in my debt to her. I hope ten years from now I still feel that the sacrifice we both pay is worth it. I feel the worth now, but I’m not sure if I have the right to make her pay it with me.
My greatest dream is that fifteen years from now I will be walking with her hand in hand, (assuming she isn’t too cool to hold hands with her old dad,) and we will live in a country that is the safest, freest, most prosperous country the world has ever known. I want her to grow up without ever thinking about the possibility of American soil being attacked, just as I believed before 9/11. I want her to only have to worry about trivial things like grades, boys, and music. When she asks me why I missed all those birthdays and holidays, I want to be able to tell her why, and I want to believe it when I tell her. Then I dream of her turning to me and saying, “You know dad, I really like this place.”
“Well princess, I did my best. I did my best.”