Thanksgiving Thoughts from a Deployed Hero

"Well, let me start with Happy Thanksgiving.

As has been the routine of my last couple of years... I found myself today eating an MRE for Thanksgiving dinner in between planning for missions. When I was a PFC, before my first tour, I was in California, training in the dead of winter in a high desert for Iraq in OIF 4. It was a chicken and salsa MRE. cold. Then, I actually did get a thanksgiving the following year. I came home in mid October and remember my mom tearing at the dinner table because she was thankful, as well as I, that I had made it home alive. Then, the following yearI was on a boat, and I don’t think that I was able to call or email home for about 60 days because we were running missions in Somalia and Bangladesh. Now here I am. Today I had a lasagna MRE for dinner as I sat in the office alone, letting my guys get some rest before the mission and I was getting the logistics together. My thoughts always drift home. Pumpkin beer, cold winters, fires in the fire place, football, stuffing my face until I can't sit up, family, being in a safe place where I don’t have to be on guard, or worry about if my other marines are ok... are we, ok?

My mother wrote me an email saying that she feels like her emails are boring in comparison to mylife, and doesn’t know what to say.... so she writes of home and the things I described. But what she doesn’t realize is that all those things bring me closer to home. Even an email with one sentence in it saying hello, tells me I am not forgotten and left in this dark worldthat has been the last 4 years of my life. So this thanksgiving I am thankful for that. Thankful that someone out there cares about me enough to remind me of what I love about home and that if I can just keep pushing, I can make it home and experience these things again, without the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Love Ben"