My First Post - Mike's Special Forces Selection

Hello everyone! I've decided to try writing a blog to keep those friends and family members back in Illinois up to date on what's happening in the lives of Mike and Christine :o)

Today marks a week since I've seen Mike, as he is currently in the woods in North Carolina trying to get selected to be a Special Forces officer.  Being mostly ignorant on what this will be mean for my life, I am still on the fence as to what I'd like the outcome to be.  The only outcome I am currently rooting for is that my fiance comes home in one piece with no serious injuries!  One thing I do know about the selection process is that it is physically and mentally demanding.

Now, obviously three weeks apart is nothing compared to the year-long deployment we just went through.  There is however one catch to this three weeks and that is that Mike had to turn in his cell phone.  The last time I spoke to him was last Sunday at 7:30am.  When Mike was in Iraq it was incredibly hard but at least I was able to speak to him on an almost daily basis thanks to the technology available to us today.  Not talking to him now is not fun and in fact very lonely but at least I have an endpoint in sight that is relatively close!

A lot of people have asked me whether or not Mike was nervous and/or excited to go to selection.  The answer is probably both.  Mostly he talked about wanting to get it over with and know what the future held, which is in agreement with my thoughts exactly!

So, what happens if he makes it in? Nothing in the immediate future will change.  We will get married in November, go on our honeymoon to Jamaica, come home for 20 days at Christmas, and move to Ft. Sill, OK for a 6 month captain career course.  If he gets selected to be a SF officer what will follow Oklahoma is a move to North Carolina for about a year of training (including learning an assigned language such as Russian, Chinese, Arabic), as well as probable assignments to Ranger School and Airborne School (Ft Benning, GA). After the year of training (we're talking around July 2013) Mike will have a commitment of 3 years of active duty service.  Maybe some of you are thinking what I often think: how will Christine ever get/keep a teaching job?  Well, I don't really know but as Mike always assures me, "they need teachers everywhere."

For those of you who'd like to read up a little more on Special Forces here is a link:
http://www.goarmy.com/special-forces.html

If Mike does not get selected for SF the plans will be the same as described above accept that we will put in requests for where we'd like to be stationed after the career course in Oklahoma and Mike would continue with his last year of commitment, ending around July 2013.

I'm ending this blog post with hopes that some of you might find it interesting and that I can keep up with it!