October 9th 2009.

    The doorbell rings.  I’m home sick again.  I’ve been feeling sick often lately. Mom assures me it’s just a rough passage to becoming a woman.  I don’t care what she thinks, the cramps suck, everything sucks.  This day sucks on a monumental scale. 
    Of course my mother answers the door, why wouldn’t she?  It is still morning, I’m peeking out from my second floor trying to look down on the intruders on my day off, I see nothing...a government van in the driveway...I recognize them, they’re all over post. Running downstairs from my room, I am trying to be nosy. 
    Mom turns as my feet hit the bottom stair with a thump, I turn 12 in a few weeks...I’m tall and rail thin, the image of my mother in her youth no doubt.  I see her face but I’m not really paying attention to her.  The two men in dress blues give me a deploring look without expressing it through any outlet except their eyes.  I knew the first man, at least on Sundays.  Chaplain Knoedler is a friend of my father, seeing him normally is a good thing, this is not good…
    “Mrs. McChord, Ali.  I’m so sorry to bring this to your door.  Six hours ago Sergeant McChord was killed in action while on patrol in the Helmand Province.â€�  He said nothing more...and the other uniform said nothing at all.  Instead he took two steps inside and caught my mother before she could fall backwards into the wall.
    Dad is dead.  This point right here is what shaped my life for the next five years.  My father became my hero at that moment, not that he was ever anything else to me.  Some people in situations like this grow to resent the establishment, much the same way insurgency takes hold of young minds.  I did not have this, I had the shell of my mother.
    My mother had no support system, the story of two orphans who meet and fall in love...that is my parents.  The supported each other, having met at seventeen in a group home...life continued right into adulthood.  I came sooner than I should have forcing my dad’s hand into military service.  He loved it, he loved us, he was a well adjusted person. 
    Mom...well, that’s how I became an orphan.  My mother spiraled into a depression almost turning our duties on their tops...I became mom.  She spent the death benefits in a little over a year...and when I thought it couldn’t get much worse, it did. 
    I had taken a day for myself...thirteen year old me wanted to get a weekend with my friends.  Well, that was until another knock on another door with more uniforms made my life even worse.  “Your mother was found in her apartment dead from an apparent overdose kid...we’re sorry, is there someone we can call?â€� As a matter of fact there wasn’t...and let me welcome you to my life today.