In today’s world there is hardly a person out there that doesn’t have a cell phone in their pocket.
These awesome little devices give instant access to loved ones.
But when you are serving your country and you are on deployment, you don’t always have that instant access. Access to devices that allow you to Skype or email isn’t always available.
Sometimes, because of what is going on around you, they block all outgoing transmissions and you can’t use anything that puts out a signal.
These options also weren’t always available to our service men and women either.
In the recent past, I have been on deployments where phone calls home were as easy as picking up my office phone and calling my family and emailing back and forth every day.
There are some units that even have the ability to Skype back and forth with their families. These abilities are all awesome and it is great that the Armed Forces are using these technologies to keep families connected.
But, there is just something special about getting letters and care packages from home. Once upon a time it was the only way to communicate.
There was no email, no phones and no Skype to keep in touch with your loved ones on the homefront.
As active service members, we would wait for mail call to see if there were letters from home. Depending on which coast you were stationed on, letters would go to a main shipping center for the Navy and then they would get sent to a base somewhere near where you were and then it would finally get put on a ship or on a plane or helicopter and then sent to your ship.
Needless to say this took a little while. I remember on one of my deployments they would announce mail arriving as if it were an important dignitary arriving on board the ship.
It was funny to hear the entire ship roaring with applause after the announcement.
It was agonizing, waiting for the mail to get to the shop and praying that something from the person you loved was in the mail bag.
Those letters were so important. They kept you going until the next time you got mail.
The only thing I had to look forward to was being able to read the words that my wife actually put on that little piece of paper.
On one deployment I got a package from home. My wife sent me a bunch of goodies. While my wife was packing the box, she had left it unattended for a little bit and my two-year-old daughter thought that daddy needed something from her, too.
So she put the only thing that she had to give in the box… her pacifier.
When I got the box and found it at the bottom of the box, I asked my wife why she sent me a pacifier and she told me that our daughter must have put it in there. We laughed about it for quite some time.
It is truly unbelievable how getting those silly little boxes or letters meant so much.
And it really did recharge my batteries and helped close the divide when I was so far away from home.

To submit a story for The Bond column, email lkelly@soundpublishing.com. Veterans are encouraged to share a memory of their service.