“Forgiveness does not mean I approve of or condone what transpired.”
Source: The Best Part of My Day Healing Journal
“I was inspired to write Countdown 'til Daddy Comes Home when I searched for books to help my 4 year daughter cope with her father deploying to Afghanistan and found nothing that quite fit our situation. My book is not only a great story for kids it has real suggestions for parents on how to keep you family connected during deployments or frequent business travel.”
Source: Countdown 'til Daddy Comes Home
“La esperanza es como la sal, no alimenta pero da sabor al pan.”
Source: Seeing
“Above everything else, beyond the long hardships, one out- come is the most invaluable. The sisterhoods. The lifelong friends and bonds that will never lessen. Years can go by, and I will pick up with each of those sisters as if a single day hasn’t passed. Only we can truly understand one another; not even our husbands can fully grasp what we’ve been through with each other and how ironclad those bonds are.”
Source: No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife
“It’s the wide variation of women in our little shared petri dish that makes our lives never boring. Really all that we have in common is we each fell in love with a dude in uniform. The rest of it is a wild card. . . . Each of us trying to get through the day, the deployment, and the time in between.”
Source: No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife
“We all reek of weariness. A room full of the black-soul phenomenon. All of a sudden I don’t feel so alone in the recognition of my own mixed feelings mirrored in those faces. In those faces, I see that the seemingly repugnant behavior wasn’t so atrocious after all. Everything is forgiv- able. Everything we said and did and felt was magnified by the pres- ence of something we couldn’t control, and that fact definitely brought out the crazy. Each of us will carry a balance of regret and pride for the rest of our lives.”
Source: No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife
“There is no way to imagine what it feels like to be shot at. I will never be with him when he is the most scared.”
Source: The Day After He Left for Iraq: A Story of Love, Family, and Reunion
“The Crazy feeling builds and builds. It never stops, it never ends, there is no relief.”
Source: The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
“Most likely, they were writing the same type of macho bullshit that I wrote, trying to sound tough with their words in case words were all that made it home.”
Source: Soft Spots: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
“No matter what the reason, the ways I tried to justify the situation, the second-guessing that lingered, nothing could change the fact that people stopped existing because of me.”
Source: Soft Spots: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder