LEEDS — When her husband went to Afghanistan, Natasha McCrum slept with a computer beside her. His call might come in the middle of the night. And she didn’t want to miss him.

First Lt. Kyle McCrum would try to reach his family.

“There was one satellite phone,” the National Guard officer said. But there were other priorities on the remote base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. His platoon of 25 to 30 men sometimes waited weeks for supplies to arrive by helicopter.

“We had all we could do to get food out there,” he said.

But that was last year.

Today, the McCrums and their three girls are enjoying the simple luxuries of hammocks, s’mores and swimming.

Since last Friday, the family has stayed in an idyllic cottage a few steps from Androscoggin Lake in Leeds.

“I just like sitting here by the water and swimming,” the dad said, kicking back Wednesday morning in a kind of floating porch. In his lap, 2-year-old Nettie sat curled up. Molly, 4 months old, sat with her mom. Amelyia, 11, sat nearby.

“I like baseball games and all of that, but most everything I want to do involves quiet,” Kyle McCrum said. “This was an opportunity for us to do something as a family. I just want to go someplace and sit by a lake.”

The McCrums’ cottage is one of eight owned by Barbara Angell, who runs Angell Cover Cottages on a bank of the 7-mile lake.

Every year, she donates a week at a cabin to a charity. This year, she wanted it to go to someone who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

So she contacted a friend at American Legion Post 31 in Auburn. Legion Trustees J. Roland and Pauline St. Pierre managed to connect Angell with the Military Family Assistance Center in Augusta.

That office reached out to families across the state.

Natasha McCrum reached back. She and Kyle had never taken the girls on a family vacation. And though many soldiers come home and plan extravagant vacations, Kyle returned from Afghanistan in December. He went home to the Aroostook County town of Mars Hill, north of Houlton.

“We’ve just been working and staying at home since,” Kyle said. “I’ve been working at the farm with my family and cousins.”

Kyle is a potato farmer whose family has been harvesting potatoes for more than a century. 

He had been daydreaming about a vacation when Natasha called him with the details of the Angell Cove vacation.

Three weeks later, the family sat in their cottage with its lakeside view.

Though he’ll be relaxing, Kyle said he is also trying to decide whether to leave the National Guard. Staying means striving toward the 20-year mark and retirement.

“It’s about that time,” he said.

He joined 12 years ago as a kid just out of Central Aroostook High School. In 2005, he served as an enlisted soldier in Iraq for a yearlong deployment. When he returned, he attended officer candidate school. He was a newly minted officer when the Army sent him to Afghanistan as a platoon leader.

His group worked closely with Afghans, training them to take over the defense of their country.

“There were some very, very good Afghan soldiers, but there was always the threat that they may turn on you,” he said. There were firefights. But everyone in his platoon made it back.

He was promoted to second lieutenant in Afghanistan. But Kyle is prouder of his unit’s lack of casualties.

“We had no loss of life,” he said as he watched his family and smiled. “And that was an absolute miracle.”

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