Operation Desert Storm

Today is the 22nd anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm.  I did not remember.  What was once the most momentous of moments in my life has now become an interesting blip.  But that evening in my little apartment in Oceanside, California, Operation Desert Shield was done and no one knew what was coming.
War, for me, was a lot of movies.  I had known people that were in wars, but I didn't know them while they were there.  I wasn't in love with them and I certainly wasn't carrying their baby.  War was many years ago, it wasn't right now as I stood in my kitchen looking down on the only family I had with me, my two little kitties.  War was also drawn out and news of it was sporadic.  It was not a hundred hours and shown live on CNN. 
I remember feeling so incredibly helpless because I had no idea.  Really, who does.  We had all waited so long for something to happen that I don't think we thought anything really would.  I had gotten pretty good at the waiting part.  Danny had left in August.  I read some books, rented some movies, bought some furniture, started sewing and grew 5/6ths of an Ashlyn.  I remember knowing nothing about the middle east, especially Iraq.  We had all heard of Iran in the '80s but this was a new place, new bad guy, new weapons.  And I was a new wife and almost new momma.  And Danny, not even old enough to drink but out in the sand somewhere firing mortars.
I thought this was the hardest it was ever going to be because it was the hardest it had ever been.  And now, I don't even remember the day. 
The nation learned where Kuwait was.  We learned what a SCUD was.  We learned who Schwartzkof and Powell were.  We took advantage of the soldiers return to honor the last group of soldiers that returned without any fanfare.  I learned that I was pretty damn resilent. 
Danny came home seven weeks after that 100 hours.  Ashlyn came six weeks after that.  There we were still in that little apartment with the two little kitties, but we were tested now, and we had passed.  I don't know how Danny felt, but me?  I felt like the real deal.  I was a marine wife.  I had done what no one I knew had done.  I had waited it out without any major catastrophes. 
I think Desert Shield and Storm has become a paragraph in the history books.  It has become that in my own history.  But without it, who knows.  I learned how to be a grown up while Danny learned the finer points of being a Marine.