I'm awake, so you get to be in my head for a bit.

I can't sleep.

My husband's alarm for him to get up and go to PT (physical training) formation is going to go off in an hour and I can't get to sleep. My one reprieve from life and my own thoughts, and my mind is too busy recycling...that.

I guess since it's been over a year since it happened, I can talk about it more freely and maybe share some details I had left out.

I'm talking about my husband being shot.

It comes up a lot and will probably continue to do so, because it is something we have to live with.

Friendly fire. You can believe my expression was as incredulous as yours is now. We've had to go through everything we have because of friendly fire. Life as I knew it was changed because an E6 (staff sergeant, for us non-military folks) was being a complete numbskull in his handling of a pistol and it went off.

A staff sergeant. Not even your run-of-the-mill sergeant. A rank higher than a sergeant made a major goof that might be expected of a private. Thank goodness the only other person involved was only grazed by the bullet going through his pant leg before hitting my husband. (After all of this, the staff sergeant was demoted two ranks and denied re-enlistment, which he had been planning for and would have occurred a few months later.)

It could have been worse.

My husband saved a life. Simply by standing where he was, talking with a buddy. Had he been anywhere else for some other reason, that buddy would have taken that nine millimeter bullet to his heart. (How do I know? After my husband was taken away to get emergency care, the rest of the guys stayed to figure out what happened and reenact the whole thing. That was the result they came up with.)

He was coming home. The entire hellish year he'd been in the giant sandbox was almost up. My husband was on the return trip of a deployment, his group having stopped over at a main airforce base for a few weeks before making the last leg of the trip home. I was getting ready to leave Washington myself, expecting to have two weeks to make arrangements in Hawaii before he got back.

Things changed drastically with the series of phone calls I got to inform me of the accident. I can't even tell you what I had been doing that morning, or the rest of the day. But for the rest of my life, I will probably remember that I was dancing to Zumba on the Xbox with my friend at her and her husband's apartment when my phone rang. I was expecting it to be the usual, "Hey, how are ya, just getting a call in when I can". But it would be the last thing I ever wanted to hear. My friend could tell you how stunned I was. I just sat on her couch, not even crying. I didn't even cry until I was home, telling my mom, and she started to cry.

So what has that got to do with life now? Everything.

There have been many nights I've been startled awake several times by my husband jolting in his sleep from something in a nightmare. Other nights, I've held him, rocked him, and comforted him after he woke up, shaking and sweating from those same nightmares.

I've had to watch as a man, who had come back from basic two years before, alive and fit as ever, came home broken. This man, who had shown me all the different kinds of push-ups he knew, who had worked out for hours a day overseas to get his body into the best shape it's ever been, may never do another push-up in his life, may never run another mile.

I have to see him in pain every single day. The numerous doctors he's seen have pushed every kind of pill at him that they could think of. And it doesn't matter if he has medications or not, because his soul and body have suffered such a deep trauma, that chemistry simply cannot touch it. And it seems that the army has given up on making him whole again.

And after going through all of this, time after time in my head, I come to the same conclusion.

There is nothing I can do.

I cannot fix my husband's PTSD, his depression, his damaged nerves and muscles, his nightmares, his spine problems, any of it. I'm not a doctor. And in all reality, there is nothing I can do to fix it.

But there is one thing I have learned. I can affect the part of him that no doctor, no psychiatrist, no medicine can ever touch, and that is his heart. His soul. Who he is. I can let him know that he is never alone, that I'm backing him up, that I am always here for him. When he feels weak and can't continue, I hold him up. When he can't see the light, I promise him there is one. When he gets sucked dry by the stress of life, I pour my love into him. When there are no words, we hold each other.

He's seen hell, and I've seen forms of it. This is something that we go through together, or we won't get through at all. No one can come close to our love, because we've seen suffering, we've met depression, and half the time, we live it.

Does it suck? You bet your britches, it does. But we are a team. No other person will complete him the way I do or meet the needs the I do, and the same goes the other way around. We cling together, and we cling to God, because I have a feeling this ride isn't over yet.