They WHAT!?!?!

At first, I was able to patiently wait for our household goods to arrive.  Knowing we had sent it early, we were expecting it to be delivered in January, at the latest.  Christmas and New Years passed.  Our empty home echoed with our voices and our clothing became more and more worn as we lived out of our suitcases.  Honestly, wearing the same seven sets of clothes for four months in a row has a way of being a bit difficult on threads.  By the time January arrived, I was more than eager for the "ready to deliver" notification.  Unfortunately, it never came.

My engineer, knowing that our little family really needed to get settled, approached TMO (Traffic Management Office) concerning our AWOL HHG (household goods) and Unaccompanied Baggage (UB) Shipments.  What he was told made our blood run cold.

Now, in the military, we are CONSTANTLY hearing horror stories about things going seriously wrong during moves.  However, it often involves a friend of a friend's fourth cousin removed.  While I had heard about "the worse case scenario," I had never actually met anyone who had one of those PCS moves from hell.

When my engineer came home from work and told me that the military had LOST everything we owned, I, honestly, thought it must be a joke.  No way!!  Our things are just stalled out at customs!  That is all!  I remember wanting to believe this with everything that was in my.

NO, Laura...they have no idea where ANYTHING is!  The staff at TMO went through everything trying to find it.  There is no record of where it is at all.  (Picture a man trying really, really hard to comfort his wife....whose head happens to be spinning like something out of the Exorcist).

Having heard the whole lie about how they track everything from the time it leaves base until it is delivered at our next location, I stood there....stunned.  Looking around at our empty house thinking that it might be staying that way, my heart and stomach plummeted.  While we didn't own a lot, what little we had was our way of making any house our home.  I seriously wanted to lash out at someone, but I didn't know who to pummel.

Months passed.  The Furnishings Management Office (FMO) had started nagging my engineer about picking up the loaner furniture in January.  Finally, completely fed up, he informed them that they will get their stuff when we got ours.  While I know how I felt during this whole mess, I cannot image what he must have been going through.

Being the active duty member in our house, he was the only one authorized to interface with either FMO or TMO. He was the one who had to deal with every nagging phone call from FMO as they pressed to take away the ONLY furniture in our home.  It was on my engineer's shoulders to call, call, and call TMO again about status updates concerning our HHG.  While I was upset with what was starting to feel like the "theft" of everything we owned, he was having to hear, straight from the horse's mouth, that Blue had simply "misplaced" it and we had to live with it.

Even now, years later, when the HHG Situation comes up, my poor engineer gets this look of absolute disgust.  While our little family had to live with the loss of everything, all he got from Blue were shrugs and demands for the return of the loaner furniture.  No, Blue did not earn any "points" from this experience.  If anything, we got a glimpse into the fact that, with the Military, we had to be prepared to face everything on our own.

It was about the time I had resigned myself to the loss when, in May, we received the phone call that they had, indeed, found our HHG.  It had been sent to the opposite side of the world and was about to be claimed by the customs department in the country that it had been sent to.  A couple of weeks later, a truck with our four crates and two UB boxes arrived at our front door.  Everything was intact and life was good once more.

While that move ended with everything being delivered, it taught us that, with every move, we had to be prepared to lose everything.  While I do not like saying this, I am thankful we learned that lesson then fore it prepared us for the moves that followed.  Moving with the military is anything but easy.  But it is our life, so we learn to shut up and roll with it.