SARASOTA – When Grant Boxleitner was overseas in Germany, he says communication with his family was difficult, but manageable.
“We were able to use the telephone, write letters, this was before the internet even,” Boxleitner said.
When he went to the Middle East, it wasn’t as simple.
“That was a whole different thing, and I know my mother desperately missed me, and it was just hard to get a hold of family and that was kind of your lifeline to the outside world,” Boxleitner said.
Boxleitner still remembers mail call as the highlight of each day.
“We were longing for a letter from home,” Boxleitner said.
There were no cellphones then, just shared satellite phones with long lines of soldiers longing for the voices of their loved ones.
“You had a line out the tent that was probably a 30-40 minute wait just to be able to make a 5 minute phone call,” Boxleitner said.
Five minutes may seem short, but for Grant and his family, it was everything. He says in the middle of combat, he sometimes thought about the possibility that he’d never get to come home. Now he is home and still has the love. He says his wife is never letting him go.
“She didn’t ever wanna come to a situation where she’d be missing me, where I’d be gone weeks at a time,” Boxleitner said.
