Trying to watch him leave

Well gentlemen here I go again... We got the first "home-sick" call today and just when I start to get my head around the whole process that is “Boot” something catches me not looking for it and gets me. I know what the boy feels I did my whole Boot Camp thing at Fort Leonard Wood and they dogged us constantly. You fight with these constant blurry sneaky emotions the ones you don't realize are there' until you are fighting back tears and then here they stroll right up on you from the blind side. I guess for me it’s the one thing I was fighting the longest to suppress, It's not the fact he/she is growing we have all pretty much had that to deal with. No it's the small child that needed your hand to descend down stairs needed Dad, Daddy, The Old Man to be there to watch to see the approval with a smile like we all did. .
I am now engaged in a new battle the one that has me pumping up my young recruit and ensuring him that "you got this" that phrase has become part of our vocabulary "you got this" these words came in to my head the morning we were getting ourselves together to drop him off at the Recruiting Station and the entire day before I had fought with what to say? how do I say something that is self-assuring and at the same time motivational and "you got this" just rang inside my head(not hard to make much ring in there anymore though) I wanted to grab him and say I will take care of it son, but I didn't. I wanted to say it will all work out and every other cliché I could think of but I didn't. I wanted him to stay small I wanted him to look at me and say Daddy please but he didn't. We knew in that moment that this was his every bit, the good, the bad, and the ugly all his.
We have spent what seems like our entire lives ensuring the safety of our young people and pride ourselves on that; even allowing them or someone to brag on us from time to time. Yet here our young adults are struggling with a program that is in its very nature designed to be the hardest thing they have ever done, to weed out the weak and unprepared those undaunted by this show the world. Show them that the self-sacrifice is justified even if they don’t ever see what they have done as that it most definitely is.
I know he will make it, that in fact "you got this" was perfect not because I said it to him but by me saying it somewhere now during these dark days (to be dramatic) in his mind he will hear my voice saying it, my voice reassuring , my voice. Homesick now that is a hard one, but we live through it and become more complete as a result, sounds easy enough right? but I have laid there in a darkened barracks with slight tear running down my cheek not wanting anyone to see or hear, no not wanting to go home that’s not it at all. See that is where they see what we did the day they turned and walked away, now they see more clearly childhood is over and that my dear friends is probably one of the scariest moments in a person’s life. When you are thrust into being an adult not playing at it but truly living it, a lot of these young men and women don't have the ability to see long term cause and affect yet, not their fault just not in that brain yet.
This action is one of the building blocks for that the simple fact of what they did in that moment when they raised that hand and said "So Help Me God" has brought them to this point. Ship 13 still has a little distention in the ranks and that is to be expected they are all still struggling with their own tragedies but they will come together they will form that cohesive group and make it work. So I said to J again today “you got this” son no doubt but now I am beginning to wonder do I “got this” because it is also the hardest thing I have ever done and at almost 50 that is saying a lot but it’s true in so many ways. I guess I finally do get something else though something they always tell us that one day “our kids will teach us” why couldn’t they just have taught us a new way to eat ice cream.