Military orders are often amended. In 1995, during my first deployment, I was detached from my home unit and reassigned to higher headquarters. A new batch of amendments to my original orders was written, which said that I had to stay longer in the former Republic of Yugoslavia than what my original orders indicated. When I told my wife that I would not be coming back as early as my original orders had stated, she took it well and came up with a clever way to show our daughters how much longer I would be gone.

My wife told our daughters, “We are going to play a game each week. This game will start with us tacking up some ordinary playing cards on the kitchen cork board. At the end of each week, we will take down one card. When all the cards have been taken down that means your daddy will be coming back home.”

The day my home unit went home without me and a new command staff arrived, I felt more abandoned than I had ever felt in my entire life. I didn’t know anyone in this new crowd. I had already been living for more than half a year without my family. I cringed inwardly when my new commander introduced me to his staff as his “continuity asset.” That chillingly accurate phrase made me feel like a tiny cog in the vast machinery of our military, which was true enough, but I did not need a reminder of that fact.

When I finally got back home, I asked my wife how her card game with our daughters had gone. She told me that Beth, our youngest, had taken down all the playing cards after the third week, thinking that would speed up my homecoming. Imagining Beth doing her magical-thinking best to get me back home in a hurry hit me like a thunderbolt. I had missed everyone’s birthday; I had missed everyone’s Christmas; I had missed taking Beth to her ballet lessons; I had missed going to Katie’s basketball games; I had missed my wedding anniversary. I had missed my family and they had missed me. And the kicker was there was no way to get any of those key moments back.

Almost a decade later, in the middle of my last deployment, we were told we had to stay put in the midst of the murderous Taliban until Operation Iraqi Freedom stabilized. Let me share this hard-won wisdom from toughing it out in Afghanistan: being in the company of the miserable does not in any way soothe the ache of being homesick.

Some of us who had our orders extended designed a patch for our uniforms and commissioned a local Afghan tailor to make it for us. Our badge of honor had “Stay. Sit.” stitched above an embroidered picture of a dog looking up pitifully. That little bit of rebellion and coping skill got me through that extended tour. Before I called my family to tell them, I kicked a tire until I had vented as much of my frustration as possible, so that I would not pass on to them any of my angst. Luckily, I had on a pair of steel-toed boots.

I am still learning what happened on the home front while I was gone. My wife told me the other day that she never bothered with the deployment-calendar-card-game after Beth dismantled it. When I asked her why, she said, “Anyone who thinks a gimmick like that is going to help anybody cope with the vagaries of a deployment is not playing with a full deck.”

I could not have said it better. What a woman!

Postscript: Those I knew who did not come back home alive from their deployment, I will never forget. How young, how smart, how dedicated and how brave they all were. It is my fervent hope that my fellow American citizens will take into account the sacrifices of those who served our country, and especially take into account those who died serving our country, and then treat all their fellow Americans accordingly—with humility, grace and justice. In my estimation, that’s the best way any civilian who has never served in the military can thank me and my fellow veterans for our service.