Decade of deployment

As the year begins, we are just months away from the ten-year anniversary of a day that changed our lives. Sept. 11, 2001 – much like Dec. 7, 1941 – is a date that marked our national psyche and initiated a conflict that shaped an era. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history.

On the news, pundits discuss the Afghan and Iraq wars academically, from political and economic viewpoints. Some in the U.S. prefer to ignore war altogether in favor of reality TV – whatever that means. America’s national memory is way too short if we can forget conflicts that are not over yet.

After nearly a decade of war, the American military family does not have the luxury of detachment or forgetfulness. We live with the after-effects of past deployments on our family relationships. We are aware of the potential for more deployments to come. Some military families are living lives irrevocably changed by loss, through death or injury to mind and body.

Many young troops and families have never known any military life but this demanding, high ops-tempo world. Some of us remember different times, even a different war, but our children do not.

My children are old enough to remember the events of Sept. 11, but they don’t remember much about military life before that day. They do remember that their father has been deployed four times. The chapters of our family history are marked, not just by our moves to various states and countries, but by whether Dad was home or away and which birthdays and Christmases he missed.

A price is paid by active duty troops and secondarily by their families.

“The move was harder than I expected,” a friend wrote me recently. “It’s been complicated by the fact that his latest Afghanistan deployment took a toll on him, which, as you know, means it’s taking a toll on me.”

Another friend, after seeing her husband deployed early in the war, now faces the deployment of her youngest son, who was a middle-schooler in the fall of 2001.

“It’s a whole different story when your child is going over there,” she said.
She’s not alone. Many spouses of deployed members are becoming parents of deployed members as the years pass, and another generation goes off to war.

These years and countless news stories have given us new terminology: Shock and awe, embedded journalists, traumatic brain injury.

Now, after a few years of flag-waving, yellow ribbons and bumper stickers, is civilian America tired of supporting the troops, of hearing war stories and seeing flag-draped coffins?

“I don’t care if they think it’s in the news too much,” said Jocelyn Green, author of several inspirational books for military families.

“I’m tired of hearing about teenage celebrities and their rehab programs,” she said. “I would rather hear about the teenagers who are serving our country overseas.”

I’m with Jocelyn. When it comes to soldiers fighting overseas and paparazzi fighting over Snooki, I have a strong opinion about which is awe-inspiring and which is yawn-inducing.

News on the home front is not all bad. Since 2001 much attention has been given to military family issues, perhaps more than ever before, with positive results.

Concerns over veteran’s health issues, education programs and family support have been addressed with fervor in Washington. Studies have investigated long-term effects of deployment on military children, in the interest of developing strategies to ease those burdens.

Exploring military family life in Spouse Calls in 2011, I want to discover how far we’ve traveled in the years since 9/11. What have we endured, and what have we learned from it? What resources do we have that we did not have just a few years ago, and how well are those resources meeting our needs?

I hope that readers will help me answer some of these questions and others, namely: Have these years and these experiences made us stronger?

I think we already know the answer to that one.

Author's note: In a past column, "Return home requires adjustment," I referred to my husband having been deployed five times, and in this column I mention that our children remember four deployments. This is not faulty math or memory. My husband's first deployment was in the Gulf War in 1991, when our oldest child was an infant.

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