When my family lived on a farm in Virginia (the fifth of my eight childhood homes), our landlord chopped down a giant oak tree that was threatening to fall on our house. For a week my brothers and I crawled on its thick trunk, playing a game we called “Army,” wherein we hopped over branches to gain promotions and attain the rank of general.

We didn’t know the rank order, but we knew that generals ruled and that our father was a major, which we were pretty sure was somewhere in the middle of the pack.

That was my relationship to the Army growing up. I was proud of my father, but it was the pride of a fan cheering at a baseball game without really knowing how baseball works—grounded more in loyal fervor than statistics.

I admired the military in a distant way, but always assumed I would leave it behind with the rest of my childhood. A third of the graduating class at my Department of Defense high school in Seoul would enlist straight away, but the thought of joining up never even occurred to me. I wanted to be a writer and to have a permanent home and friends who didn’t leave me every year or two.

Instead, I would marry an Army officer at 21, go through two more “permanent change of station” moves and spend the formative years of my early twenties working on one of the five largest Army installations in the continental U.S.

I would progress into and out of the Army community like someone entering and leaving a cult—first comes complete lack of knowledge, then skeptical introduction, indoctrination, excited engagement, and, finally, a more nuanced understanding and shift away from the hubbub, into “the real world.” Whatever that is.

I met my husband in college when I was 18 and a wannabe pacifist, and fell in love with him before I realized he was in ROTC. (His haircut really should have tipped me off.)

Dating a cadet was a nice intro back into the Army community, because the only military-related thing it involved was dressing up for annual balls. I didn’t think about what our future would look like until Nathan casually mentioned a visiting speaker telling the cadets they could expect to fight for their country. I was confused.

“You mean you might have to deploy?” I asked.

“Yes. I definitely will.”

“But aren’t the wars almost over?”

It was 2008. We’d been at war in Iraq for five years, Afghanistan for seven: continued fighting seemed unthinkable. I had just cast my vote for Barack Obama and was confident I would never have to say goodbye to someone I loved. I was naïve.

Growing up, my father never deployed (Army lawyers are not so in-demand in war zones). He went on temporary duty assignments (known as TDY) often, during which I would sleep on his side of the bed and watch Olympic ice-skating with my mom. I missed him, but I never worried for his safety, which certainly did not prepare me for the reality of being a military spouse during wartime.

Nathan was eventually assigned to a combat arms branch, meaning he is the type of soldier the Army highlights in recruiting commercials. He goes to “the field” a lot (which means sleeping overnight during training missions at our local installation), goes TDY a lot (which usually means traveling out-of-state) and for the last four years he’s been assigned to an infantry brigade of roughly 4,000 soldiers that deploys to the Middle East a lot.

Just as the speaker predicted, Nathan has gone to Afghanistan twice, though we’ve been lucky that the sum total of those deployments was nine months. His combined time in the field/TDY/deployed is somewhere between a quarter and a third of our nearly-five-year marriage, so three or four months out of every year. I try not to dwell on numbers.

The distance has been hard on our relationship, with the obvious pay-off being reunions. And, boy, does the Army know how to set up a reunion. At our base, every welcome home ceremony is filled with enough pomp and circumstance to acknowledge its gravity, and enough cheesiness to make it sincere.

Think soldiers marching en masse into a gymnasium filled with hyper-emotional families, many of them with young children in red-white-and-blue tutus and camo pants. Think fog machines, a country music playlist, dimmed lights.

Nathan’s first return from Afghanistan was at 4 a.m. and I’d been up for nearly 24 hours, afraid that if I let myself sleep I’d miss it. I’d been to dozens of these ceremonies as part of my job, and I was, if not jaded, at least a little weary of the spectacle.

Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” started playing, the song that always cues the returning soldiers to march through a pair of double doors. But this time, Nathan was among them.

As I started shouting, I finally understood what it is to be one of the people on those gymnasium risers, each one with a lump building in their throat. I finally got the meaning of the ceremony.

It’s a simple acknowledgement of how horrible deployments are and a tiny thank-you before soldiers move into reintegration, which can be as difficult as separation itself. It’s a reminder to nuclear families that they are part of the Army family, that someone gives a damn.

To this day, I can’t listen to “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” without crying. I don’t even like country music.

Before our first duty assignment in Colorado, where we live today, we spent five months in Oklahoma. Nathan took a field artillery course and I watched Lost and taught myself to cook. We didn’t have a second car and my only social interactions were shallow ones with other spouses I had trouble connecting to.

As we transitioned to Colorado, I hoped things would get better, but I couldn’t help feeling I’d dug myself back into the very place I spent my childhood wanting to escape.

In Colorado, I had dreams of bike commuting to a job at the local liberal arts college. Instead, after applying on a whim to a public affairs position at my husband’s base, I was signed on by a military contracting company as a media relations specialist (an area in which I had no expertise) with two weeks to prove myself. I was terrified.

My first week on the job, one of our soldiers was sentenced to life without parole for killing a developmentally disabled 19-year-old; a soldier died in a noncombat-related incident during a deployment; and I was tasked with writing the governor a list of policy recommendations that would benefit the military community (things like “free park passes,” nothing substantial like “overhaul the VA”). I would soon learn this was a typical week.

Gone were the days when sorta kinda knowing the rank structure was okay; I had entered the era of needing to know everything, from what our commanding general’s spouse’s name was to our installation’s suicide rate and why a gate was locked down and when any number of units were leaving or returning from war. I went from knowing nothing to knowing virtually everything happening on our installation at any given moment.

The knowledge itself was a rush, and helped me connect with Nathan more as a peer. I was given more and more responsibility and soon found myself escorting local and national media to high-profile courts-martial, Secretary of Defense visits and celebrity appearances (Billy Ray Cyrus is a very polite guy, believe it or not).

Better even than the knowledge were the people. A few minutes into my first day, I was bear-hugged by one stranger and asked by another what my religious affiliation was. The public affairs crew was never politically correct, but they were kind and generous and in-my-face in a way I needed.

Being a group of soldiers, retirees and spouses themselves, they knew how to look after me, particularly while my husband was gone. My “big boss” in particular mentored me through personal and work-related issues, and routinely dropped everything to give me a ride or help me with a home renovation project.

I wound up introducing another public affairs employee to the soldier she would marry, and our husbands both deployed together in 2012. For those hard months we were inseparable—we played softball together, ordered take-out together, even turned somersaults of joy during the 2012 elections on her couch together.

A few hours before my husband was set to return from Afghanistan, she called to tell me she’d had a minor cooking accident that involved a knife and fingers. I took her to the emergency room for stitches and told her she was off the hook for attending Nathan’s welcome home ceremony, obviously. But she still showed up four hours later to take photographs of us embracing in the post gymnasium.

Through work, I built up the military community I hadn’t found in Oklahoma. And I finally “got” the most appealing aspect of the Army: you’re a tiny piece of something so much bigger than yourself, something so unique and laden with import and celebrated by America, that it’s easy to feel like you’re making a difference.

With the good, of course, there’s always bad. A few months into the public affairs job, I started noticing cracks. It wasn’t one person or institution, but it was there in delayed paychecks from my contracting company, in lay-offs with less than a week’s notice, in the way reporting inappropriate behavior was often more difficult than it should have been. The weight of the knowledge itself grew heavy.

It was tough to communicate these things to people “on the outside.” When a civilian asked me how my week at work was, I usually lied and said, “Fine.” But sometimes I took a chance and responded with, “Hard. We lost a soldier.” Sometimes, if I was feeling really reckless, I gave an explanation about what happened.

Without fail, it made people uncomfortable, even people I was close to. Their eyes would dart out the nearest window and I’d catch a slight upswing in their pitch as they changed the subject.

I observed, as a military wife and employee living in a very military-positive town for longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life, that many Americans are so uncomfortable with the choices we (via our elected officials) have made that we either lavish our servicemen and -women with unthinking praise or we ignore them. Anything to avoid hard discussions about the purpose of the wars, the legality of the wars, the legacy we’re leaving abroad, and how to take care of our service members.

I also learned that government is no monolith, and certainly no well-oiled machine. It’s just ordinary people working side-by-side, mostly doing their best, but in an environment where one person’s laziness or inefficiency can make things difficult down the line.

About three years in, the fatigue came pretty close to wearing me out. When the excitement fades, what’s left is the typical pride one can take from doing a job well, but also a specific sadness. The military is a tough place, war is (at best) a necessary evil, and some parts of the system are broken.

I began to miss how easy it was to sing cadences about the military when I was a child, too young to know any Vietnam vets, not yet old enough to know Afghanistan and Iraq war vets. I started to sense that maybe what I was doing, while “important” in that it benefited soldiers and families, could be more important, more meaningful, more directly beneficial.

There was a reawakening of the self within the cogs of the larger machinery—though I didn’t yet know who I was outside the machine.