This is Chapter 1 in the Transition Memoir. Come back every Thursday to read Amanda Huffman’s story, one chapter at a time.
When people ask me how I decided it was time to leave the military, I tell them I made a list. It isn’t a lie; I did make a list. But it also isn’t the whole story. The easier truth is that I had already decided that military life wouldn’t work for us once we decided to start a family, but there was more to it. There was also hurt and betrayal from those I served with that pushed me to leave.
I made a list when I got pregnant with my first son. Some of the things at the top of the list were:
It felt too complicated.
I didn’t like my current job.
I was afraid of leaving our soon-to-be-born son when he was six months old for a deployment.
I didn’t know how long my husband and I would continue to get stationed together.
Of course, the list had some reasons to stay as well. The pay was nice, and bringing in two incomes was great. I loved being an Air Force officer even if I didn’t love my current job. Even so, I knew there would be more jobs in the future – career opportunities I would enjoy.
And yet the reasons to leave kept coming.
If I think about why I left I would have to say the decision to leave didn’t happen in an office in Ohio making a pro and con list weeks after I found out I was pregnant. Instead, we have to go back to 2010, when I deployed to Afghanistan for nine months with the Army while serving in the Air Force.
You see, before you go on a deployment you hear all these great things about being deployed. You are supposed to be excited to go. It is part of why you joined the military during a conflict. Fear and doubt are not emotions of a “good” airman. So, when people talked about deployment there was always an air of anticipation and pride.
When tasked with a deployment to Afghanistan with the Army, I did what I was supposed to after initially crying over the terror of not coming home. I went through the painful process of telling my parents, sister and husband. I kicked into gear and didn’t allow myself to think about the danger and the possibility I wouldn’t return. Instead, I started to get excited about the things to come from the deployment opportunity. The mission to help the Afghan people directly as part of a Provincial Reconstruction Team did sound pretty cool. I could pretend that I wasn’t afraid. I was excited!
While I can and have written about the positive aspects of deployment and how it changed me as a human (I learned so much about myself and gained confidence in what I could do) the deployment was also very challenging. Even today, it is hard to talk about the difficult things I experienced in Afghanistan.
I knew the deployment would be physically taxing. We would be riding around Afghanistan in combat vehicles wearing heavy body armor intended to keep us safe. I knew I would need to pull my weight physically as a woman serving alongside an infantry unit I couldn’t serve in. But I rose to the challenge and proved I was physically strong and capable. I thought if I met that challenge, it would be enough to get me through.
However, the physical challenge ended up being easy compared to the mental and emotional strain put on me and others on the team in the form of detrimental leadership and manipulative team members. When you deploy on a combat mission and leave the safety of the base you have to rely on the people on your left and right to keep you safe. Your life is simply in their hands outside the wire. But as the months went on, I experienced situations over and over where I found that the people I had to trust could not be trusted by their words and actions. Mission after mission, month after month, the mental strain grew and grew.
When I look back to the deployment, I think about how lucky I was because the only person I truly had to worry about was me. I was already married but my husband was a service member and gave me the support I needed and didn’t require me to do anything to take care of his needs.
But when I thought about the future of another deployment and leaving behind a family I wondered if I could do it again. How would I survive another deployment? How could I live through what I experienced and leave my family behind? I came home broken. Mentally scarred. It took years to unpack the damage that happened overseas and even today things pop up that I have suppressed because it was so hard to deal with at the time.
I never expected that my story would include a PTSD diagnosis not from the trauma I saw off base from the enemy we were fighting. Instead, it came from those who were supposed to support me, the service members and civilians I was deployed with. The utter hurt and betrayal that happened to me while deployed overseas, even today over a decade after being home, still makes it hard to trust people.
So maybe I made a list when I left the military. But my truth is my deployment to Afghanistan changed my life in many ways and one of those changes led me to leave the military when I became a mom. My reason for leaving is far bigger than a list I wrote in Ohio. While I don’t have any doubt I made the right choice, the truth is in a dusty room in the middle of nowhere Afghanistan.