What to talk about?

Any military that are in country can't talk much about what they do there. At the very least, you don't know when they are going out on missions, what those missions are for, or where they are. Very obvious reasons, security, secrecy, etc. When they come home, they can tell you some of what they did. Again, obviously not everything, but at least something.

In my situation, Grover can't tell me anything about what he does. The best answer I can give anyone about his job is that he's MI(military intelligence). If  said person inquires any further I literally do not have an answer for them. To some this might seem highly irritating. I'm compltely okay with it and totally used to it. First of all, I get what national security is and what it means to have that entrusted to you. So I absolutely have no interest in jeopardizing that. Second of all, for a little over four years I've been listening to the only most boring of military stories. For example, I was telling Grover how everyone was asking me about what he does and how annoying it is when people think that I'm not telling them to be coy or that I don't ask Grover because I don't care. Later on, possibly the next day for me, same day for him, he sent me an email and said, "I did something today I can tell you about. I walked 10 miles across the fob to let some of my joes know that they had baggage duty." Truly, that's what he emailed me. I laughed so hard I cried.

Here's the part of it that does get on my nerves a little bit. When Grover calls to Skype, I desperately want to spend as much time as possible talking to him as I can. So far the Skype has been blurry, but even a watercolor image of him is better than nothing. Somedays we talk for a few minutes and then I'm grasping at straws trying to come up with a reason to keep talking even though I know we are totally out of talking points. I know I should let him go get some rest and I should get back to doing whatever it was I was doing before he called. It kills me though to only talk for 17 minutes in a 24 hour period. There's only so much that we can say about whatever the kids did and whatever ridiculous things I'm doing on any given day.

So I write him four emails a day, talking about everything and nothing at all. He writes back when he has time and sometimes they are three words and sometimes much much more. In the end, the good news is, so far it's bearable. I just keep thinking something is better than nothing. I've had four years of training for this. Four years of not knowing what the hell his job involves, four years of trying to carry the conversation when we talk, and four years of periodically doing it on my own. He had a lot of training and so did I. Honestly I think it feels good for both of us to put it all to use finally.

I think we'll revisit this subject again as the year goes on. It'll be interesting to see how we deal with this conundrum over the entire 12 months. I'm sure that it's likely to change just like our entire lives with move and evolve while he's gone. But that is an entirely different subject likely leading to a much longer post. :)