My husband reported to our first duty station a month before I did. Given the logistics of tech school and packing up my whole life and following him, a month wasn’t a terribly long time to wait. But I arrived at Tyndall on Tuesday night. Nick had to report to work on Wednesday and since I didn’t have an ID to go anywhere on base so I set out to unpack all of our boxes. About noon I heard a noise outside. Opening the door I realized that there was an alarm going off. I freaked out. It was my first day on base and an alarm starts going off. I call Nick because who else am I supposed to ask. He, being supportive as always, says “We are under attack! Go hide in the closet. I will call you when its ok to come out”. Um, what!!
Hours later, Nick gets home from work. He’s calling me. He’s stepping over the boxes that hadn’t been touched all day. He searches the whole house and can’t find me. Finally, when he goes into the bedroom to change out of his uniform, he finds me. I was hiding in the closet. For real, he told me we were under attack and I didn’t know any better. I had been in the closet, hiding, since I had gotten off the phone with him earlier. I had made myself a little cubby hole. I had a Maglite flashlight reading one of my books. After about an hour of pure silence, I had Army crawled to the bathroom. And since I was so close, I had crawled to the kitchen and gotten some bottles of water and snacks and then back to the closet I went. Whoever was attacking, wasn’t going to see me through the window and would hopefully leave our house alone.
Nick just breaks down laughing. He was laughing so hard he had to sit down and started crying. Minutes later, after he calms down enough to talk, I asked him why he was laughing. Well, apparently, every base has a “Test of the Big Voice System” followed by an alarm EVERY Wednesday. What?!? Nick told me we were under attack and I naively believed it and spent the entire day in the closet.