(Wo)Manning the Fort Alone

But that fairy tale came after four long and lonely months. “In all the years we were married, whenever my husband brought up miluim, reserve duty, I’d be terrified that if he went, he wouldn’t come back alive,” Eliana says.

And then came October 7, when it was clear that her husband would be called up to war.

Eliana had a week’s reprieve before her husband’s unit was called up to be stationed in Chevron, but that didn’t make the goodbye any easier. “Saying goodbye was in a sense anticlimactic, because we’d been talking about it all week and worked through all my fears and stresses. And seeing how difficult it was for him not to be there made me realize how important it was for him to go and how vital my support for him was — that I couldn’t stand in the way of him doing what he felt he needed to do.

“When I actually said goodbye, it was almost like saying goodbye to him for the day. He really didn’t think he’d be gone for four months. We were thinking more like a few weeks. But over the course of the day the reality that he’d left gradually sank in, until by the time the kids came home, I literally couldn’t stop crying.