Samantha Pourier is the wife of Army Maj. Paul Pourier, who is preparing for a deployment to Iraq later this year.

Well, it’s that time again. I’m three months pregnant, which means my idiot husband is getting ready to go to war.

Sometimes he jokes that all he does is come home, get me wine-drunk and squirt a kid into me, and then go off to war again, to come home in a year or two to a new baby who can already walk. Our friends laugh and laugh.

And I have to physically restrain myself from stabbing him in the eyeball.

Because it’s pretty true. All he does is deploy, come home, get me knocked up, and then deploy again.

Other people are out building a life. They work for real companies that accomplish things. You don’t see Amazon or Google or Wal-Mart re-invading the same region every five years or so, to no discernible national end. Their investors would eat them alive if they did that.

But for some reason, our generals and politicians find it perfectly acceptable to keep sending my husband to dirty sandboxes once every couple of years.

I’m not griping about the conquest. We are an empire, after all, and it’s kind of our imperative to keep subjugating people who are different colors than us.

All I’m saying is, it would be nice if my husband got a break from enforcing peace onto hapless wogs to see one of his children being born, just for once in his frickin’ life.

Because if he isn’t here to see this next one born, honestly, the next one might not be his.