When my father, Odysseus, and his men sailed off to the Trojan War, they were confident their gods favored a quick victory. Instead, the siege of Troy lasted ten years. After Troy fell, the survivors made their way home to Sparta, Mycenae, Pylos, and elsewhere in the ancient Peloponnese. Neither my father nor any of his troops arrived home with the rest. We waited for years as the news grew worse. Odysseus was dead, we were told,or imprisoned, or, worst yet, he had married another woman and abandoned my mother Penelope, my brother Telemachus, and me.


If he is alive somewhere, his thoughts may wander to Penelope and Telemachus, but he won’t be thinking of me. I am the daughter he doesn’t know exists. Odysseus went off to the Trojan War when his son, Telemachus, was barely old enough to walk. His wife, Penelope, was a teenage bride, and is now a young wife, mother, and queen who has to try to rule Ithaca without him.


I was born seven months after he left. I am a hero’s daughter and a princess of his realm, but I have lived my entire life without a father. I’m nineteen now, and still waiting.


All over the world, and throughout history children grow up as I have. This website will focus on the children of those men and women who have gone off to fight America's wars, and provide information and resources for all who care about military families and want to help.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

On the Death of a Military Child

Though the article “Military Children in Crisis” http://www.truth-out.org/101709C was published on Truthout.org last fall, I only discovered it yesterday. In it, op-ed writer Stacy Bannerman writes that “America's military kids are in crisis, presenting acute, debilitating symptoms of deployment-related stress, virtual mirrors of their parents who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
I’ve been blogging daily for about a month now about various things affecting military children, and to this point I have tried to keep it positive, focusing on things people and institutions are doing to identify concerns and provide help. This entire month another conversation has been going on in the back of my mind as well, focusing on how wrong things are when military children are subjected to the kinds of stresses that require such interventions.
On this anniversary of September 11, I woke up this morning with the hard things about life on my mind--the losses so grievous we wonder how we can go on. This article, about the suicide of a seven-year-old boy distraught over his father’s deployment, speaks to the most unspeakable of these griefs.
“Three-plus decades ago,” Bannerman writes, “parents were exempt from conscription because of overwhelming concern about the harmful effects of deployment on children. Today, roughly half of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are parents, many of whom have served multiple tours. Repeat deployments stress soldiers and escalate the likelihood of psychological injuries that can last for a lifetime. There is a small, but rapidly growing, body of evidence suggesting that the same is true of their children.”
Why are there no powerful lobbyists for military children? Why is advocacy left largely to the partners of military personnel, many of whom are dealing with crushing stress themselves? Psychologically debilitated children just don’t dovetail well into the image of fighting heroes that is only the way a jaded, disinterested society can make itself care about our wars. As Bannerman writes, “there's just no way to spin a suicidal second-grader into a poster child for patriotism. Since there's not a Walter Reed to tend the invisible war wounds of Army kids, there is no potential lightning rod that could galvanize the people or embarrass the administration.”
What kind of America do we want? Isn’t it true that the way we treat the most vulnerable in our society is the best measure of who we really are as a nation, not the false notes of speeches and warm fuzziness of feel-good sound bites? Are we a country that can tolerate military policies that create suicidal seven year olds? Just wondering.
Posted by About AART at 7:21 AM

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