Four words that stop you in your tracks

And the winner is…
Will you marry me?
We’re having a baby.
Oh shit, damn it!

There are a lot of four word combinations that can impact your life in very significant ways. The particular combination I’m talking about just happened to be, “There’s been an incident.”

If you just sit a minute and imagine all the situations in which this phrase could come up, you will undoubtlably think of minor occurrences such as spilled milk, or dire events like dropping the atomic bombs. For me these words came over the phone one evening in January 2005. They came completely unexpectedly.

Calling back on a message left on my answering machine, I reached to Department of the Army calling about my son, Matt, who was at that time deployed in Kirkuk, Iraq. I wasn’t stressed when I called, thinking it was another call to invite me to a family-of-the-troops function. Then came THE words… “There’s been an incident.”

You hear how a person’s mind goes blank and they can’t grab onto anything at times like this. That didn’t exactly happen to me. Instead, as the sergeant was talking and trying to explain things, my mind started racing with all the horrible possibilities: death, capture, impending death. Then came the four word combinations that brought some measure of relief:

No, he’s not dead.
No, he’s not dying.
He’s not a prisoner.

Over the next year Matt went through countless surgeries, including the amputation of his left leg, and much physical therapy. There were ups and downs, and steady improvement. Life is now back to normal, what ever that is, and Matt is looking at the possibility of being deployed again. Something he is up for, but I’m not sure I am.

I’d rather hear some four work combinations from him that go something like this:

She’s a great girl.
We are getting married.
We’re having a baby.
They lived happily ever after. (Ok, that is five words, but I could live with it.)