“Dad is going to Afghanistan.” When I heard that I couldn’t imagine what it really meant. My Dad was a captain in the Navy for years but only in the reserves. He had been a captain of a submarine but never was in active combat. That all changed when my dad was called to Afghanistan; I was only in third grade when it happened. At that age I didn’t even understand what was going on over there or why my dad needed to go. He wasn’t leaving for a couple months after my parents told me, however, had been going to training every day. Training lasted all day and sometimes he had to go out of town. I couldn’t say everything felt different after I knew, but my family definitely felt worried. I talked to my dad about what was going on over there and…show more content… I had hugged him and watched him leave, not aware that it might be the last time I saw him. Fortunately we all survived for the next month. We had regularly talked on the phone with my dad to check up on him. He would always talk about how different it was in Afghanistan, he said “you couldn’t even dive over a piece of trash because there could be something in it.”
At home it felt strange to me that I did not have a dad around, I had never really been away from him for long and not seeing him every day was hard to deal with. I was only in third grade at the time and just turning nine, having to deal with everything without my dad started getting to me. On my birthday he called us on skype to tell me happy birthday and that he would come home for Christmas, I couldn’t wait till I got to see him again, but I also knew that it would be another year till his tour ended and he came home for good.
When he got home for Christmas my dad didn't seem happy that we got a cat but was happy to see us again. He had asked me about typical stuff like how was school and what we were doing, but then I had asked him what he was doing over there. He didn’t say much but he did talk about the time his base got
