I'm sure that most of you will have heard about this over the weekend:
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And yes...my husband was on one of the submarines involved in the cruise missile strikes on Libya. ( For official releases go here, here and here.)
I've had one heck of a week actually. Since last Tuesday there has been a pretty much constant stream of information about my husbands boat that has been at times...really confusing and inconsistent ( I may have mentioned that in my previous post).
I'm still a pretty green navy wife, obviously. :) This is our first deployment, and is a HUGE learning experience. My husband's boat is slowly meandering their way back home. We've endured months of a very lonely separation, and could not be more excited for it to just be over! So when news reports started popping up about my husbands boat being "diverted" to Libya, naturally little warning bells started ringing in my head. I knew Libya was in turmoil...heck, I've been watching that whole region since the riots in Egypt broke out! It seemed however that things were going to stay just quiet enough for my husbands boat to make it home on time...until this week!
I heard the initial report, and called the Ombudsman. Nothing had changed, just a hyped up media. Okay, that's cool. Settled. Two days later, they call an " EMERGENCY MEETING". Uh hmm. I attempt to not spend the rest of the day running the worst case scenarios in my head only to get to the meeting and be told "Nothing has changed, just a hyped up media." Me thinks thou dost protest too much. However, even feeling like the meeting was a little odd and uncalled for, I took what was said seriously and tried very hard to put the whole thing out of my mind. I mean...I have a homecoming to plan for! And I haven't even decided what I'm going to wear yet!
Two days after that ....we're freaking bombing Libya. And once again, my husbands boat is plastered all over the news.
Miraculously, in the time since then they have transmitted emails twice. Bless this Command for that! And those emails included one from the COB stating that they were still running on schedule. I think, however, the coming weeks are going to see a lot of tense Navy wives in my area praying, and watching the news religiously, for any hint of change.
This whole experience has taught me a bit more about OPSEC. I mean, on here I am as vague as I can possibly be. Most of you still don't even know which of those submarines my husband is actually on. I know not to post on Facebook ( I actually RARELY use Facebook so that's a non issue) and all of that jazz. That's what OPSEC has meant to me until this week.
But now I understand the lengths to which the military must go to protect OPSEC. Obviously they knew. Operations like the one this weekend don't just happen over night. And obviously something, somewhere, got leaked ( hence the reporting almost a week in advance) And that fact alone SCARES THE CRAP out of me. Not to mention the fact that my husband was involved in a highly publicized military operation...that's a whole new level of anxiety.
So I'm in this weird...1/2 grateful, 1/2 upset limbo of how I feel this situation was handled with the families. I TOTALLY get why they couldn't say anything to us. I really really do. They couldn't just come out and say " Well...yeah, actually, we're gonna bomb Libya in 2 days." But on the other hand, all of that " We care about you families, and that's why we give you all of this privileged information" is ringing a little hollow to me right now. That really is just something they tell you so you don't fly off the deep end and they have to send one of their valuable assets home to pick up the pieces.
I'm really going to miss my rose colored glasses....
