The end of this week marks the end of a three week break in BCT cycles. My Husband is currently doing his duty for the Army as a Drill Sergeant. The beginning of a new cycle, starts nine weeks of being a single wife and mom. I handle everything and anything that you can think of so my husband only has get up and work and to come home and sleep. Neither one of us was prepared for what this job really meant. When it was offered to him in theater, the promise of not being deployed for two or more years blinded us from what him being a Drill Sergeant really meant.

He works insane hours that only the military could force on someone. He has to be at work by 430 in the morning and during the first four weeks isn't usually home until 9pm. By then all he wants to do is come home and crash. Last cycle he went five straight days without seeing Bug. She was sleeping when he left and sleeping when he got home. It's not just the work hours that make this job the worst one in the Army, we were actually quite prepared for them. Its the red-tape that comes along with it. Thanks to the new "nicer Army," there are several rules that make it increasingly difficult to train someone and to make them understand discipline when you cannot properly show them that for every action there is a reaction.

As with all jobs, some of the NCO's do not help the situation. How can you teach someone to have military bearing if your strutting around holding your belt with ACU's "sagging," and your cap on crooked, talking to your chain of command like you talk to your homies, like your some big shot rap god or something? Or you're fat and lazy? Do people really not think JOE doesn't catch on to these things?

It doesn't help that J came from an Airborne unit. An extremely squared away unit, especially by this post's standards. It is hard for him to go from that to here, where the Army standards bend to every person who cannot handle them. I remember J used to talk crap about DS's. He used to tell me about ate-up JOEs that he had just recieved. He now says that doing this job is Karma for that. It wasn't the trainers that caused undisciplined, rag-bag soldiers, it's the red-tape.

This will be his fourth cycle. The first two were the toughest, when the third started I cried. It's hard to feel single when your husband is laying in bed next tp you. The cycle starts and we both have two different lives that cross each other for an hour at night. We try and make the most of the time we have, but it's still hard. He's spent his day enduring unrelenting stupidity, while I've spent mine with a screaming child. At the end of the day, what we both really want is a break. I think now we have gotten into a groove, though. I know what is ahead and I am ready for it. We know we will out of here soon and back to "the real Army." We have the countdown widget on the desktop. And even though it has sucked royally to go through this, I wouldn't change it for the world. Getting through this has made our marriage and our family stronger than anything else I could possibly image. If we can make it through this, we can make it through anything. <3