Jen and Brian Chaffee's marriage was born out of war. They met at Camp Shelby, Miss., in 2006 while in training for what ended up as a 22-month deployment to Iraq with the Minnesota National Guard.
Their first child, Madison, was 6 months old when Brian deployed to Iraq again in 2011. The day he left was the first time Madison crawled, and the day he returned a year later was the first time Madison walked. In the time between, she knew her father only through twice-weekly Skype sessions.
"Here's daddy!" Jen told 18-month-old Madison when Brian finally came home.
"That's not daddy," she replied. "Daddy is on TV."
But the fact that the vagaries of military life are baked into the fabric of the Chaffees' marriage did not make it any easier when, Friday morning at Grace Church in Eden Prairie, Jen Chaffee and nearly 700 other Minnesota National Guard soldiers stood at attention as their commanders announced their mobilization for another deployment to the Middle East. It marks one of the largest single deployments for the Minnesota National Guard since the second Iraq war began.
"He understands," Jen Chaffee said earlier this week as her husband played with Madison, 8, and Ally, 3, on their 5 acres of land in Washington County. "He gets it. But at the same time — he gets it. He knows what it means to be deployed. He knows the bases where [soldiers are] being hit, being mortared. It's more of a double-edged sword."
The soldiers from the 34th Expeditionary Combat Aviation Brigade will head to Fort Hood, Texas, next month for training. Two months later, they will depart for the Middle East to provide air support across the region in the 19th deployment of Minnesota National Guard aviation units since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
It comes at a unique time in America's military involvement in the Middle East. When the Chaffees met while deployed more than a decade ago, they were part of President George W. Bush's Iraqi surge. At that point, some 166,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Iraq.