Military Matters – Letters From Home

While soldiers frequently receive attention when they depart and return from overseas deployments, their families back home rarely receive the attention they deserve for the support they provide.

One Fort Carson soldier’s wife in particular recently went beyond her own call of duty, by not just welcoming her husband back, but making him feel like he never left.

SPC Markus Bowling, part of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team within the 4th Infantry Division, received 273 letters from his wife while deployed to Afghanistan.

That’s one handwritten letter for each day he was away on his 9-month deployment.

“She worked 40 hours a week, she was taking care of 2 kids, she was basically living a single mom life,” he explained, “and for her to take the time out of her schedule to write me a letter, kind of reminded me why I wanted to marry her. Even in the hardest most difficult situation, she’s always thinking of someone else.”

Markus had an iPad, and wifi was usually available, but video chatting wasn’t enough for Teresa.

“When it’s nighttime here, it’s daytime there, and we’re not always able to talk to him, or to use the internet,” she said, “but I wanted him to be able to carry it around so he could have encouragement whenever he needed.”

“A letter was always unexpected,” added Markus, “Those are the things that really mean the most, when you least expected something. You know that the person still thinks about you and cares about you.”

Markus’s job overseas was primarily to monitor the social media pages of the enemy, and also to capture his brigade’s efforts through photos and videos.

However, this deployment also included a lot of downtime, allowing Markus to read every single letter, sometimes more than once.

“The days when there would be a gap between some of the letters, I would just go back and re-read them, just to kind of encourage myself to know that there was someone back home waiting for me,” he recalled.

July 4 was difficult, but Teresa sent patriotic photos of the kids, Matthew and Amelia.

Christmas was equally challenging, but they found a way to make the family Christmas card work, by merging separate photos to make it look like they were holding the corners of the same American flag.

Finally in late January, that telltale Toby Keith song played back at Fort Carson, as it does for every homecoming ceremony, and Markus marched through the doors just after 2am to the roar of cheering families included Teresa, Matthew, and Amelia.

Markus wasn’t surprised that Teresa attended the homecoming, even in the middle of the night, but what he didn’t know is that he wasn’t the only one taking pictures while they were apart.

Every single day, she had taken a photo of their two kids sitting in the exact same spot, and she surprised him with the photo album that night.

“There are 273 photos for every day that you weren’t here, so you got to see them grow up each day,” she said.

And while helping him to catch up on the past 9 months is important to the Bowlings, they are just as focused on the future, hoping to pick up where they left off, even if it takes a bit more time for little Amelia to remember her dad than the rest of the family.

Markus also had a lot of praise for the Colorado Springs community and their church, because knowing how much they supported Teresa and the kids allowed him to focus on his mission, and avoid the distraction and stress that come with worrying about the rest of his family back home.