The Stories Behind the Faces

I thought I would take a day off from reporting what’s been in the news, and talk a little about the impact “Xanthe’s World” has had on me over a month and a half of daily blogging.

My partner, Jim, and I watch very little television, but every evening we turn on the PBS News Hour for our daily update on the world. One of the rituals in our household (indeed we have very few inviolate ones) is to drop whatever we are doing--usually preparing or eating dinner--to stand in silence as the News Hour adds to its Honor Roll of the service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They’ve been presenting the Honor Roll for years--probably starting around the time I began writing Penelope’s Daughter--and we have been following the ritual of standing respectfully since then. We look at the face on the screen and sometimes say the names aloud, to honor them.

Along with their photo and name, their service rank and branch, age and home town are shown. Sometimes we comment “small town,” as a way of remembering that so many who lost their lives had looked around where they lived and not seen much opportunity there. The rest seem mostly to be from industrial cities hit hard by today’s downturn in manufacturing.

When we first started honoring the dead, my attention was focused mainly on their ages (although I must admit that, regardless of any other fact, I feel a particular punch in the gut every time a woman’s face is on the screen). I made particular note of the youngest ones, still in their teens. Beyond their serious faces, many look scrawny and lost under their huge dress uniform hats. Others are shown laughing and having fun with friends or doing something they loved. It takes my breath away to realize they have already had all of life they are going to get.

Before I started “Xanthe’s World,” I would see fallen service members in their thirties and think, “well at least they got to live a little longer,” although I know that any life cut short is a terrible thing. Now, as I stand to honor them, I say aloud, “probably had a family.” I imagine the open doorway where the spouse is standing, looking at the somber, uniformed men that never bear good news. I picture the children in classrooms being summoned and sent home. I picture the funeral. I picture going home to a house forever changed.

There’s grief on the prairies, and among the red rocks of the southwest, and the bayous, and the pine barrens. There’s grief in Dayton, and Gary, and Bethlehem every day now because of those faces on the screen. And there’s anxiety, dread, and depression in the families of those whose faces haven’t appeared yet, but easily could.

I know a great deal about loss from the experiences of my own life, but I don’t think we really can remember how grief explodes us from inside. We don’t want to go there, and as with all searing pain, we can’t, at least not completely. Once the News Hour has honored the dead, I go on as usual, because I am not part of the community of sorrow that every fallen service member creates. What’s changed is that my peripheral vision has gotten a little better. For me, as for 98 percent of Americans, I am not living these wars, but at least now I have a little better sense of who is.

Our Military Kids

I got an e-mail yesterday from Greg O’Brien, PR/Marketing Director of Our Military Kids, informing me about this wonderful organization, which, among other projects, provides grants of up to $500  to pay for children who have a parent currently deployed with the National Guard or Reserves to participate in extracurricular activities such as sports, fine arts, camps, and tutoring. Unlike active duty components, the Guard and Reserves are dispersed throughout the country and their children often live very far from bases where they would have access to free or reduced cost programs.  

Our Military Kids, founded in 2004, has given out more than 22,000 grants, totaling over $8.5 million.  Thanks to the generosity of foundations, corporations, and hundreds of individuals, Our Military Kids has been able to fund a grant request for every eligible child.

“Our Military Kids is a program that reassures the men and women of the National Guard and Reserves that someone at home is remembering the sacrifice their family is making while they serve overseas,” said Nadia Short, a former Army Chief Warrant Officer and now a General Dynamics Vice President and member of the Our Military Kids’ Advisory Board. “Not only does participation in activities boost morale and allow children to continue with their development, but it also builds self confidence and gives them something to talk about with their parents when they call home.” 

Additionally, Our Military Kids offer the same grant program to children with a parent who was severely injured while serving. Such activities help nurture and sustain the children during a parent’s lengthy recovery and/or rehabilitation.

A recent survey of more than 600 National Guard families shows how important the stability, routine and fun of such activities is to children while a parent is deployed, and the benefits it can bring to the entire family.  You can read more about the survey here, and read the press release here. 

Service members are making ongoing sacrifices for our country and Our Military Kids is dedicated to minimizing the cost their children pay for their service. “You cannot believe the difference this makes for my family,” one mother says. There is no way we could have afforded karate and gymnastics for all six of our children without the grants, particularly with their father still recovering in the hospital.”

Choosing a Military Life

The military is relying on a "tiny sliver of America" rather than on the full spectrum of the population, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a standing-room-only audience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina the evening of Wednesday September 29, 2010.

Military recruitment is increasingly concentrated in the South and the Rocky Mountain West, in rural areas, and among military families, he said, adding that that "for most Americans, the wars remain an abstraction."

Gates cited the all-volunteer army as contributing to this.  Returning to the era of compulsory service (which ended after the Vietnam War) would be both practically and politically impossible, he pointed out, but the "void of relationships and understanding" between the military and the rest of the country that this change in policy left in its wake, poses a risk.

I’ve written before about the disconnect between the 98 percent of the country who are not serving, and the 2 percent who are, and how this makes us as a nation unaware of the serious stresses on this 2 percent.  Gates touched on this in his speech. "We've had so few fighting our wars for so long," Gates said. "How long can these brave and broad young shoulders bear the burden that we as a military, a government and a society continue to place on them?"

The focus of Gate’s speech was getting young college graduates to sign up, to "go outside your comfort zone and take a risk, in every sense of the word." Military service provides “extraordinary responsibility at a young age," Gates said, commending Duke for maintaining ROTC programs and other connections with the military, unlike many top universities. 

Now that we are at war and will probably remain so for some time, it’s true that we need a broader swatch of the population embracing what Gates called the "ethos of service." Ironically, however, will it turn out that the more people are sensitized to the stresses on the 2 percent, the less likely they will be to choose to join them?   The real solution must be to create a lifestyle of military service that does not ask more than individuals and families can bear.  

For a full text of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remarks, click here.

Award-Winning Fiction for Military Teens

My Story: Blogs by Four Military Teens, by Deanne and Michelle Sherman, is a series of blogs by four military teens that showcases their feelings and experiences before, during, and after parental deployment. Although the characters in My Story are fictional, the stories are based on real life experiences and conversations with military teens. Topics raised with special sensitivity are the emotional issues surrounding deployment, and concrete impacts on families, such as PTSD, clinical depression, and substance abuse. Pride in their parent’s military service, and what the authors call "post-traumatic growth" are also strong themes.  Here's an excerpt from one of the blogs:

"I’ve got a big soccer tournament and Dad says he’s not coming—some lame excuse about too many people, too much noise, and he can’t handle the traffic. Mom will be there, though—that’s good. I really cannot believe Dad is not coming. He’s quiet and so nervous now—the littlest thing totally freaks him out. Just last week Ashley and Lisa were playing cards—slap Jack—on the kitchen table, and Dad came unglued. the sound of them slapping the table really set him off, and he yelled at my sisters. I kinda felt badly for them, so I took them out for ice cream later that night.

Anyway, I wish I could have some friends over to the house but I think it would be embarrassing. I never know how Dad is going to act. "

Statistics show military children sought mental health care 2 million times in 2008, doubling since 2003. Clearly the war is in Iraq and Afghanistan are having a great impact on teenagers.  Though they need far more than books to read, perhaps these books might serve well to help non-military teens understand their friends. If they, like so many, don't have friends from military families, this book might be even more useful to help them see there is a different world just beyond their neighborhood.

Here's a link for more information, and for buying online.

Running for Dear Life

Stacy Bannerman, one of the leading advocates for military families, has written another incisive article, “At War at Home,” which appeared on the Women’s Media Center website. This one discusses her reaction to the deployment of her own husband.

A military consultant suggested she exercise more and practice deep breathing while he was gone, because those would reduce her anxiety and improve her focus on taking care of herself while her husband was at war.  She doesn’t say if she got other advice, but she does report asking the consultant whether she had ever experienced the deployment of a partner.  Turns out she was a civilian.  With that advice, it figures.

It’s true that running and deep breathing are good for the mind and body, but her experience illustrates the point that the military leaves spouses pretty much on their own as far as mental health is concerned.

“So I run and I breathe, increasing the speed and incline, running for my husband’s life, until I am bawling on the treadmill,” Bannerman says in the article.  “And I can’t stop it—any of it.  I can’t stop running, or sobbing, or him from being gone again.  I can’t stop another endless year of isolation from family, friends, and community....I can’t halt...how my heart skips a beat when I see a dark, unfamiliar vehicle cruising toward the house.”

More than anything, she reports hating herself for feeling weak, as if worry and fear are somehow a failure to adequately buck up, and hating that the service-related psychological injuries of military spouses are being ignored--although nearly half of our nation’s military spouses report their mental health suffered while their husband or wife is deployed.

“The military offers on-line counseling, but I am already isolated enough,” Bannerman says.  Many spouses and military children (who experience the same debilitating anxieties and other psychological problems) resort to mood-enhancing drugs, presumably both prescribed and not. They listen to shallow praise for how resilient they are, get a pat on the back from time to time, and go off to breathe deeply for months at a time. 

Other Kids Serve Too

I recently learned that a program called Camp Desert Kids was coming to Camp Pendleton, near my home. This Families United program was developed to help young children understand on their own level the place to which Mom or Dad has deployed. At Camp Desert Kids, participants (both children and the homefront parent) experience the deployed parent’s service location in a way that is both fun and educational. 

They learn that Iraqi and Afghan children are in many way the same, although they do many day to day things differently. I remember when I was the age of these children, the way to get my attention was to talk about kids from another culture--what they ate, how they dressed, what games they played, what songs they sang, what their words were for different things. The camp approaches the children on this level, as well as specifically focusing on the aspects of deployment that would be most interesting to a child, like being inside a tent and dressing up in camouflage.


This sounds like a great way to reduce the anxiety in military children by making them feel they know a little more about what is going on with their absent parent.  Here’s a video about the camp.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Stressed

Here’s some more from the recent article, “When the Troops Come Home,” which I have been working slowly through and thinking about over the last week or so. 

More than 2 million American children have sent one or both parents off to our current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In an official 2008 survey of military spouses, 29 percent of the children who had a deployed parent had difficulty reconnecting when the parent returned home. Put another way, 580,000--well in excess of half a million!--children have had their relationship with one or both parents significantly affected by deployment.

Studies show that older children have a harder time than younger ones, a fact I think is well illustrated by the picture here.This is understandable, I think, because as a child’s awareness and emotional development increases, the ability to worry and be stressed in other ways grows with it. 


Another finding is that girls have a harder time than boys.  I would not have guessed this because far more boys have the parent of the same sex deploy, and we hear so much about the importance of parental role models. Could it be that boys are more confident in their ability to go it alone, or perhaps even at a young age, are less likely to admit feeling troubled because males are supposed to be tough?  I would be very curious to hear what readers have to say.

It’s interesting that age five seems to be the point where a child reaches the point wher he or she can process what it means to have a parent leave for an extended period, but at that age they do tend to adjust and adapt fairly quickly both to the absence and the return.

Researchers from the Rand Institute have found that the number of months apart, rather than the number of separations and reunions, is the most important predictor of stress in children.  The Army’s standard twelve-month deployment is harder on children that the Air Force’s shorter but more frequent ones.

Sadly, some military jobs demand so much time away altogether, whether for long or short periods, that some children more or less learn to live without that parent. "They get a little numb, as much as he's gone, to his absence, so they're used to just being Mommy and them," says military spouse Tiffany Gully. “It's sad to say, but he's almost an intruder in the beginning."