I'd been warned.
My co-worker Zeke Barlow, who reported poignantly on how the family of a Seabee officer dealt with his deployment to Iraq, said it was the unspoken secret among military families.
And then last month while waiting on a tarmac for a battalion from the Navy Mobile Construction Battalion to return home after six months in Asia one of the wives, with her 2 year-old and 10 year-old daughters clinging to her, boiled it down for me.
"It sucks," she said. "That last two weeks before he goes all we do is fight."
It's the way all the stress and anxiety of the separation comes out.
In those final days before leaving with emotion so close to the edge and departure looming like the scary part of a movie everything inside that you try and hold back starts bubbling up in strange ways. Instead of milking the last few days for all there worth, you and the ones you love are snapping at each other.
For me it came out in stupid last minute home improvement projects and a lot of cursing. For my wife it came in waves of tears, interrupted conversations and having to leave the room to collect herself.
My 7 year old daughter Isabel seemed fine until two days before I left and then broke down holding onto me for an hour and asking me why I had to go. My son Finn, 5, didn't seem too troubled. Especially since I promised we'd have a little vacation when I got back. But the night before I left he wanted me to lay down with him as he tried to go to sleep and he asked me to stay home now instead.
At some point my wife said she couldn't see how all those military families manage. A year away, or six months seemed like an eternity. At least spending a month in Iraq embedded with troops would give me a taste of what they had to go through during their time overseas.
It's not as if I didn't know that. One of my first memories as a kid was of my dad coming home from Vietnam after his second tour. I was sitting on the basement floor as my mom was folding laundry and I saw this tall, skinny guy who hadn't shaved tip toeing down the stairs to surprise her. He looked over me and put his finger to his lips, but at the time I didn't recognize who he was.
An Naval officer told me about a month ago, that all his deployments were hard. He ached for his family and for lost time, but the separation had also made them stronger.
But all that feeling is a bit too much to handle in the final days before leaving.