President Barack Obama's foreign policy hits close to home for some women. They are the few, the proud, the military girlfriends.
President Obama is preparing to send 17,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan in addition to about 35,000 troops already there.
Most of them will be deployed to small, remote bases in the most violent parts of the country, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Some deployments will happen in April, so military girlfriends at UF are preparing to say goodbye to their loved ones now.
For Jess Custer, a UF political science senior, this means postponing her wedding date an entire year.
"Things I used to read about in textbooks are now affecting whether I can order flowers for my wedding," she said.
First Lt. Brandt Anderson proposed to Custer in November, and the two planned to be married this summer before he left, until his deployment date was moved to April 12.
She said it is difficult to come to terms with the idea of him being at war for the next 12 months and to accept the Obama administration's decision to push up the date for the troop surge.
When you marry into the military, Custer said, you marry the political administration's ideology also.
"It makes you not want to like whoever is in office," she said.
Thousands of couples have been separated in wartime, and she said there is a sense of romance to it. She will be sending care packages full of books, food and love letters.
"But the reality is, you are going to bed alone at night," she said.
Amanda Hines, who will also say goodbye to her boyfriend in April, has lived with deployment anxiety before. Her boyfriend, Greg Rigdon, a corporal in the Marine Corps, served eight months in Iraq last year.
Hines, a UF public relations junior, said she couldn't drive him to the airport last time because it was too hard to say goodbye.
"When he left I felt numb and shaky," Hines said. "I went inside and collapsed."
While he was gone, she was always by her phone waiting for his call. She said she was always scared that the call she received wouldn't be from him.
Though his phone calls were rare, Hines was able to send him daily e-mails or Facebook messages.
But in Afghanistan, he will not have regular access to the Internet. Rigdon is set to leave mid-April and won't be home until after Thanksgiving.
Custer said the next year will be a balance between making her life choices while understanding his are on hold.
"It would be nice to have him home," she said. "It would be nice to be normal."
