Bringing the Battlefield Home

I have been hearing a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder affecting children of servicemembers, but I haven’t seen an article that describes the effect of PTSD on families quite as clearly as this one by Alison Auld.

University of New Brunswick sociology professor Deborah Harrison, coauthor of a recent paper on the subject, said adolescents living with parents with PTSD may face physical abuse, emotional neglect and unpredictable rage.“It’s a crisis like any other kind of major illness or violence in the home,” she said in an interview. “What papers like this bring to light is the enormous amount of suffering that [PTSD] injuries inflict on all the members of the family.”

Her work involved detailed case studies of teenagers whose fathers or stepfathers did multiple rotations in war zones. One girl, called Rebecca in the paper, said that two years after his return from Afghanistan her father developed severe PTSD. He became so violent at times that they had to call police and she had witnessed him being led away in handcuffs. At one point, he was hospitalized after attempting suicide.

Living with someone with PTSD is like having a stranger move into the house. “At some point you lose that person who’s raised you all your life, Rebecca says, “and it’s replaced with someone you don’t like at all.” Another teenager studied said her father would become enraged without warning, and that she has had to become the parent to her mother, who is so affected by her husband’s outbursts and their now-frequent fights.

Families are left to cope with a range of unexpected emotions such as guilt, anger, frustration, grief and bewilderment as they deal with the changes in a person they used to know and love.Sometimes PTSD goes into remission and families have to readapt to someone resembling the old parent, one who doesn’t rage and lash out. Trust must be a huge problem in those situations, and it must be sad for the PTSD sufferers too to see the damage they have done just by looking in their families’ skeptical eyes.

It’s hard to read about this without wishing there were a way to avoid PTSD in those serving in combat zones. Is it worse in this war or are we just recognizing the disorder now? If it is worse, why?

The truth in the end is that war is traumatically stressful, and that it continue to be fought long after the combat zone is left behind, in the living rooms and bedroom of military families.

Almost Forever

I was a huge reader as a child, and I think I related to the world at times more through books than my own experiences. For that reason, I am always looking for books to share on this blog, both as resources for military families and for the other 98 percent of us, who need a way to understand the experiences of military children.

Maria Testa’s Almost Forever (Candlewick Press, 2003, ISBN: 0-7636-1996-5) sounds like a wonderful book for middle graders. The story, told in short, blank verse poems of stark simplicity, is about a six-year-old girl whose father goes off to serve for one year as a doctor in the Vietnam War. Although he tells her that a year will pass quickly, and that when he returns she will be seven and in the second grade, the little girl sees it differently: "I did not tell Daddy that he was wrong--that second grade was half a hallway and a whole world away from first--and that one year was forever."

Fear, bewilderment and other common emotions of young military children are presented here, as are many typical daily experiences, like watching the news, nightly prayers, and exchanging letters. Changes in the mother’s behavior are also related from the young child’s point of view, as well as the upheaval of a move. The child is more an observer than an actor, and often an uncomprehending one--just like all six year olds--but the lessons will not be lost on older readers, whether they are military children or not.

Separate Journeys Together

The photo of Jane and family on her website
Adrian Campos Photography

I found a wonderful blog the other day, kept by a military wife who identifies herself only as Jane.  She is blogging about her husband Micah's deployment, beginning with when he first brought home the news.  He is now more than seven months into his tour of duty, and I have only begun to read the blog to learn about her experiences.  Here is an excerpt from the entry where she learns about the deployment, with a link to the rest of the entry and the site home page.

"Instantaneously I felt my world start to unravel.  As much as I had thought about this day – how he would tell me, how long we would have before he left, how I would cope – I couldn’t comprehend it all.  It was just too overwhelming.  I couldn’t think about the birthdays and holidays he would miss.  I couldn’t think about how he likely would not be able to meet his son on the day of his birth, and [selfishly] how I wouldn’t have him as my birthing partner/coach.  I couldn’t imagine days, weeks, months – an entire year – going by without hearing his voice in the house. [...]

In those moments immediately after he told me, we hugged.  I cried.  I felt stupid for the pointless argument we’d had over the weekend.  We hugged tighter.  Eden knew I was sad and tried to console me, which usually works, but unfortunately did very little.  All I knew is that our lives would change drastically.  We would have to go through things together, yet apart.  The only thing that was certain was that on the XXth, we would begin separate journeys together – journeys that would take us to faraway places – a grueling desert and the catacombs of our own minds.  Our journeys would require a strength unlike any we’ve ever needed before.  It would be a marathon, not a sprint.  And we would need tremendous support from each other and our loved ones to make it to the other side stronger."  read more

"Normalizing"

Military housing in South Korea

I wrote yesterday about the efforts to “normalize” tours of duty for soldiers serving near the DMZ in South Korea. As I wrote, I was troubled by a few things, and they have stayed on my mind since then.

The first has to do with the children at Camp Casey.   North Korea has  technology that it likes to demonstrate from time to time to show its power and its disdain for other countries, especially us.  Perhaps their missile tests and other such things are empty sabre-rattling, but it seems a rather unstable situation with possible quick and deadly changes in the state of things on the ground.  I am assuming the DoD must be confident Camp Casey is safe, but I am wondering what it bases that on.  Safe yesterday and today does not necessarily equate with safe tomorrow with an aggressive and hostile neighbor.

The other concern is that, while family-accompanied tours of duty seem to work quite well for families when the base is set up with the services they need, am I correct in my assumption that the vast majority of service members do not deploy to Korea, or  our other “safe” posts around the world?  Stories like the school at Camp Casey are nice to read, but they are small diversions from the big issue, which is that most military children have parents in war zones.  There is no “normalization” possible in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan. Most military children will not benefit in any way by improvements in safer bases around the world.

This is not to say that efforts to “normalize” postings to keep military families together are insignificant, but they should not detract from the fact that the “new normal” for many thousands of military children is having parents deployed repeatedly for a long time in dangerous situations that leave their safe return constantly in question, and their children’s and spouses’ lives destabilized and stressful. Solutions to that will require far more than new schools and family housing on "safe" bases around the world.

As I have said before, I don't have a military background and there are many things I don't understand.  I would appreciate any light readers can shed on these issues or any others I have raised in my blog!

Deploying the Children Too

Here's an interesting development by the Department of Defense, in recognition of the stress of deployment on military families. At Camp Casey in South Korea, a new school has opened on the base to enable deployed soldiers with children between kindergarten and eighth grade to bring their families with them.  

“Once the domain of single soldiers or married ones here on one-year, unaccompanied tours, it’s now reverberating with domestic activity, and -- for the first time since the U.S. military arrived here six decades ago -- the sound of school bells, says Donna Miles, of the American Forces Press Services in her article “New School Signals Commitment to Families, Alliance.

The school, a former barracks large enough to accommodate 363 children, is located less than 20 miles south of the demilitarized zone. Already there are plans to add a second building to accommodate 250 more.  The new school represents another step in the army’s plan to normalize tours across the Korean peninsula and improve the quality of life for servicemembers and their families. From what I infer, “normal” is a longer, two- or three-year deployment in which families live on base with the deployed servicemember. 

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved the normalization plan in December 2008, setting in motion plans for longer, accompanied tours for the 28,500 U.S. servicemembers now stationed in South Korea.  “Area 1,” north of Seoul, had been restricted to single or unaccompanied servicemembers, generally serving one-year tours. That meant these posts had, in addition to no schools, no family support and activity centers or housing suitable for families. “Even when we started normalizing tours, we basically had to say, ‘You can bring your families, but only if you have no school-age kids,” Army General Skip Sharp said. He's the one in the picture, signing the ceremonial ribbon, held by a Camp Casey student, that he will cut at the opening ceremony.

The new school has proven to be a hit with the military families, and most importantly, military kids. “I actually love it here,” says eighth-grader Hailey Blake, daughter of Army Cpl. Robert Harmon and one of the first children to arrive at Camp Casey about two years ago. She, and the other children who came in the first stage of normalization, have been enduring a long bus ride to school or attending a private boarding school. “It feels great, especially being the first ones here at our new school,” said Christine Meehan, daughter of Army Sgt. Thomas Meehan, and president of the eighth-grade class.

The excitement on the base about the new school, and the chance for families to be together in Korea is palpable, especially for the inaugural eighth-grade class.  After all, how often do you get a change to choose a school mascot and colors. Let’s hope there’s still peace along the demilitarized zone while that is going on!

Problems in Reserve

I am coming to realize there is not only a chasm between the 2 percent who serve in the military and the rest of us, but a chasm within the military as well, between the situation of active duty service members and reservists. I don’t mean a rivalry, but rather a drastic difference in the situations their families face when a reservist parent deploys. The article “Military Families Among Us: The Hidden Challenges for Social Workers,” by Jodie Bargeron, MSW, LSW, touches on this.

Iraq and Afghanistan services members face longer and more frequent deployments than in past wars, in significant degree due to reliance on reserve members. This creates a problem for reservist families, who may not live in a place where they can access the military support available to non-reservists. “A family may not know any other military families in their town, much less any other families with an actively serving member,” Bargeron says. “Without a centralized military base, families lose the point of entry to supports they need. Children may not know others at their school with an actively serving parent. More importantly, natural supports such as the school social worker, teacher, pediatrician, and day care workers have limited exposure to families serving in the wars, and therefore may be unaware of the effects of deployment on child development and how to help these children and families.”

In the past people believed that if a child was too young to understand deployment, he or she was too young to be affected by it. It’s now apparent that very young children with a deployed parent may regress or begin to miss developmental milestones (Geneman and Lemmon, 2008), based on the length and frequency of deployments. Today standard combat deployment is one year. During the 2007 surge, deployments lasted fifteen months.

Adolescent children are less likely to see developmental changes, but they more frequently show symptoms of anxiety and depression. Children of reservists are less likely to receive the outside support they need for continued healthy growth. School and medical social workers may recognize the signs of stress, or even neglect or abuse, without understanding or even knowing about the deployment.

Approximately 30,000 U.S. children have experienced the return of an injured parent soldier or the death of a serving parent (Lemmon and Chartrand, 2009). Families of reservists are less likely to have easy access to military support services to deal with the trauma this causes the family.

Bargeron's article is addressed to social workers, identifying ways they can be more aware and sensitive to reservist families in their service area, beginning with identifying those they already have as clients, but Bargaron makes a closing comment that applies to all of us. The best place to start helping a reservist’s family or any other military family, is “to acknowledge their sacrifice while their parent or spouse is serving. Honoring their sacrifices opens the door to support.”

The Fourth R: Resiliency

Everyone wishes to keep his or her children safe from even the little traumas of life, but we all know this isn’t possible.  What we hope for in place of the impossible is that our children will be resilient in face of whatever happens.  I don’t recall reading or being told anything when my own children were small about how I could be effective in helping them develop resiliency, and it’s interesting that the subject now seems to be growing in importance as a result of the stresses military children now face with repeated deployment and returns of their parents to and from a war zone. 

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Center on School, Family and Community Partnership has put together a web course for teachers of military children. “Building Resilient Kids” is for school administrators, support staff and teachers to help students meet life’s challenges. Though the focus is military children, the approach is meant to benefit all children.

According to the website linked above, the objectives of the course are to increase understanding of the following: 

• Military community, lifestyle and culture
• Issues surrounding mobility and deployment
• Special challenges to families during wartime including separation, reunion, death and disability
• Strategies to improve educational, behavioral and health outcomes for all students, 
• Strategies to increase students’ connectedness to school
• Schoolwide and classroom strategies to build social, emotional and academic problem solving skills at each age level
• Best and promising practices to create a safe and supportive climate for students
• Strategies to build school, parent and community partnerships

Some of the activities in the course include learning games, puzzles and case studies; videos of students, parents, school staff, researchers and military personnel telling their stories; description of best  and promising practices; and a step-wise procedure to create a teacher's own intervention program to use on a school-wide, classroom, or individual basis.   For further information, contact michael-blum@msn.com.