Quotable

I’ve been doing this awhile and I’m a good student.

“Those aren’t bad guys, those are your guys!”

“How do you know?” The master asks the student.

“Look at their gear, their boots, sunglasses, pants, holsters – his watch. They’re operators.”

A chuckle follows in pride at a student who has learned to observe well.

We are watching The Hurt Locker, curled up in the couch using an afternoon to simply bask in togetherness. The soldiers in the movie have figured out what I spotted instantly. Then an enemy sniper takes out half of the operators.

Leo spouts off on inaccuracies with techniques and why the character who jumps into sniper position probably wouldn’t be a sniper. I listen, picking up bits and pieces of information, same as I have been since we met. I ask specific questions; pointed in directions I know will not be confined to information that isn’t released.

The student might be a prodigy.

I have spent most of the movie in deep empathy and secret relief that my husband isn’t one of these EOD team soldiers. Their job is too dangerous; I can’t fathom waiting at home while my husband disarms bombs all day.

Except.

Except the wife of every EOD team soldier just breathed a sigh of relief that her husband doesn’t do the job of my husband.

It strikes me again, as it has so many times in the last 11 months how we all do this. How we all live in that blissful ignorance of pretending the unthinkable won’t happen to us because we aren’t them.

Because we made different choices than them.

Because we don’t live there.

Because we’d do it different.

Because I’d never have my baby at home.

I know the world doesn’t work like that. I know God doesn’t work like that. I know this man sits next to me thanks to the prayers of a thousand saints, the skill of a hundred warriors and the protection of a host of angels. I know that every time he makes it home, whether it be from the office or a tent in the desert, it is by the grace of God. While I will always believe that God entrusted us with our faculties so that we would exercise good judgment, I will never again believe that alone can save us from tragedy.

So I say a prayer for us all. For the men in harm’s way, dodging bullets and disarming IEDs, and the minivan on the highway, full of kids headed for school.

There but for the grace of God, go I…

 
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