I found this through Bouhammer. I'm not even sure how I originally found his blog but I occassionally check in there. Today I found this video. It seemed appropriate to put it up here as well.
There are about 1700 men in Task Force Phoenix VII and my husband is one of them. On September 11, 2001 while we were glued to the TV like everyone else, his National Guard Reserve unit got activated. By noon that day he was gone to patrol the streets around Ground Zero and I didn't see him again for two weeks. There is a sort of strange continuity from his patrolling the streets of lower Manhattan to patrolling the streets of Kabul that I'm not sure how to express. I've given it a lot of thought, way too much actually, and I haven't come up with anything so I'm just going to leave it alone.
Today is our twenty-second wedding anniversary. In all of those twenty-two years I can count on one hand the number of times we've spent our anniversary together. September 12, 2001 we were going to go fishing. I haven't actually seen him in over five months so missing our anniversary doesn't mean much. There have been other videos and photos from Afghanistan posted on the web and though it's sort of ridiculous I look for him in there. Seriously, though, you take a bunch of men who are roughly the same size, shave off all their hair, dress them the same, slap a hat on them and it's hard to tell them apart at a distance. I could have been looking right at a photo of him and not known it.
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