When I look back on the year Paul was deployed, I remember it as one of the hardest years I have ever been through. But I also know it could have been much harder if I hadn’t met Kelly. Paul and Mark didn’t know each other before they deployed together, and it was just luck that Kelly and I exchanged email addresses on the day the boys left.

I wish I could tell you that I picked Kelly because she is irrevrently funny, extremely nurturing and always, always has my back. She is all those things, but that’s not why I picked her. I picked her because she is pretty. (This is starting to sound like a dating story – but isn’t making new friends a lot like dating anyway?)

I spent three days in pre-deployment briefings with the families of the men on Paul’s team and none of them seemed very interested in making friends. We all sat side by side in the conference room, staring straight ahead, avoiding eye-contact, whispering only to our husbands, and pretending to pay attention to a parade of military experts lecturing about how to read an Army pay stub and whom to call in the case of an emergency. I wasn’t all that concerned. Like all things related to this deployment, I was extremely nieve about my need for a friend to get me through it.

But in the last hours of the last day of briefings, with only a trip to the airport between me and year without my husband, I felt a small twinge of panic deep in my stomach. What if I couldn’t do it alone? So, I zeroed in on a girl who was beautiful, dressed in JCrew and looked – the best I could tell – fairly normal. I leaned over the table to where she was sitting in front of me, and handed her my email address on a tiny piece of paper, “Just in case.”

I laugh now as I re-read the first, tentative emails between Kelly and I… “I’m doing great here” we would write. It wasn’t hard to pick up the subtext: “Unless you’re not doing great. If you’re not doing great, then I’m not doing great either – but I’m not going to be the one to say it first!”

In those first few weeks we were playing a game of chicken with our frayed, sleep-deprived psyches. To be honest, I don’t remember which of us was the first to admit that it wasn’t going all that that well. But I can tell you this: if I had known then what I know now, I would have dropped the email façade, called her up and had our first crying/laughing/letting-it-all-go conversation on week one.

Egos being what they are – it took us a couple months longer than that.

But during the year our husbands were deployed together, Kelly quickly became the only person I could tell when Paul was being a jerk (civilians seem to think you’re a pretty horrible person if you’re mad at someone who happens to be at war); the only one who understood that hating the deployment at a particular moment didn’t mean hating the military, the mission, or my role as an Army wife (and it helped that she didn’t need military acronyms explained!); and the only person who could talk me down from whatever ledge I happened to have walked myself out on – without an ounce of judgement or condecension because she had been there, too.

It must be true that enduring hardships together makes your relationship stonger, because though there are friends who have known me longer, I can’t think of very many people who know me better than Kelly does. We realized we were more bonded than even we had guessed when, about 6 months into the deployment, we came home from our respective doctor’s offices with prescriptions for Xanax on the same day. (For the record, neither of us ever filled them…. but in restrospect, it the deployment might of been easier if we had!)

Though we live 3 1/2 hours apart, Kelly was always just a phone call or an email away. She faced the ups and downs of the deployment with me, and she was the one riding to the airport with me to pick the boys up when it was all over.

There are a lot of things I could reccommend to help get you through a deployment, but having a best friend to go through it with you (Even if it’s someone in another area who you email and talk to on the phone) is priceless. Paul and Mark came home from Afghanistan with countless stories and pictures. It was nice that Kelly and I had a few of our own.

Read more about the importance of finding a Battle Buddy.