thedrifter
02-08-09, 06:35 AM
Heavy burden of conflict falls not only on those in uniform, but also on their families
Shouldering the weight of eight years of war
By Scott Hadly (Contact)
Sunday, February 8, 2009
The Navy doesn’t give out medals to kids like 4-year-old Layla Fuentes, or her 2-year-old brother “Junior.”
And their mom, Deandrea, and the tens of thousands of other military family members like theirs, won’t be decorated for heroism at home anytime soon either.
They may not be in uniform and fighting on foreign soil, but military families are shouldering a heavy load after eight years of war.
Layla’s father, Alfred Fuentes, a Navy Seabee who has been deployed in the Middle East for the past six months, has missed two of her four birthdays because of service overseas.
She has a picture of him by her bed and says a prayer for him every night.
At Christmas, her mother took Layla to see Santa. She only had one thing on her list.
“She asked if he could ‘bring my daddy back home in his red sack,’” Deandrea Fuentes said. “That was kind of hard.”
In pigtails and carrying a Dora the Explorer backpack, Layla knows what she’ll say when he does finally come back in a few weeks.
“I’ll say, ‘welcome home, Daddy.’”
Keeping families together
Eight years into the nation’s “War on Terror,” the burden for the conflict falls hard not just on those in uniform but on their families as well.
Earlier this year, after watching her husband take the oath of office, first lady Michelle Obama said she’d make helping those families her priority.
“When our servicemen and women go to war, their families go with them,” she said.
As yet, Michelle Obama hasn’t said what she’ll do, but the first thing military families would like to see is that she understands what they go through.
The military, which in the past had an attitude, as one military wife put it, “If they wanted you to have a family they would have given you one at boot camp,” has embraced the notion that keeping quality men and women in uniform requires keeping their families together.
There are now robust unit ombudsmen programs, Family Readiness Groups, and counseling programs all geared toward taking care of family concerns. There are conflicting accounts on whether long deployments are also causing spikes in divorce rates; a 2007 Rand study says there was no spike, while year-to-year data has shown jumps in divorce rates. But there is little debate that the long, regular separations stress families and relationships.
The big question is whether those repeated and long deployments — the Army will continue to send soldiers out for 15 months for the next two years — will break the backs of some families.
“There is such a growing weariness among spouses,” said Beth Wilson, the wife of a Navy enlisted man who has worked as an ombudsman for families in her husband’s unit. “You have eight years of multiple deployments, and it takes its toll.”
Wilson, who said it took some time to get used to military life, said the first step Michelle Obama should take is to simply draw attention.
“Don’t hold up a football player as a hero or a stupid actor making millions of dollars; they’re not heroes,” said Wilson, who also writes about military family issues and runs a blog and Web-based talk show called “Homefront in Focus” and “Navy Homefront Talk.”
“It’s such an invalid definition of what a hero really is. A hero is a wife holding her pregnant belly as her husband goes off on another deployment. It’s the child waving goodbye to their daddy three weeks before Christmas. It’s their daddy who keeps re-enlisting.”
Moving from base to base
Remaining at home while your loved one is in Iraq or Afghanistan is the most difficult part of military life, but it’s not the only issue, Wilson said.
Earlier this month, Wilson had a few women at her house and they talked about Michelle Obama’s pledge.
There was skepticism at first, but then ideas started flowing. There were the small changes — increasing the weight limit for moving families based on the number of kids — to bigger ideas about extending college loan programs to spouses, to the pie-in-the-sky.
“Some pointed out that they sometimes give prisoners conjugal visits,” said Donna Monzingo, whose husband is a Navy petty officer.
“Some wives were like ‘we just don’t want any deployment anymore,’ said Monzingo. “Well that’s just not going to happen.”
But the military could do more, she said, giving those in uniform a chance to go home for the births of children, for example.
The Army, because of its long deployments, offers soldiers a two-week leave. The Navy and Marines, which have deployments that typically last six to eight months, don’t. But all the services have made strides at making it easier for service members to stay in touch, through phone and Internet connections even in the most remote locations.
The discussion also brought out other issues about how difficult it is for spouses to find and keep jobs when they are constantly moving from base to base, said Monzingo.
Support for men as well as women
It’s not just wives who are coping with deployments either.
Cory Weatherby, a Navy Seabee, is now home taking care of his 14-month-old son, Brady, while his wife serves in Kuwait.
“You’d be surprised how many other guys are doing this,” said Weatherby, who was deployed last year. “If you’re a man, it’s different because there’s not the same network as the wives have.”
Robin Hodge, who is married to a Navy diver and has a two children younger than 5, said there are a lot of programs to help families, but there is room for improvement.
Among the things she’d like to see is more support for military personnel who are also single parents, better and more flexible child care that takes into account the odd hours worked during training, and money. Though she works and her family is doing OK on two incomes, younger enlisted men and women are just getting by, she said.
Aracely Cantu, whose husband is in the Air National Guard, said members of the National Guard and the Reserve face an entirely different set of issues. Because the citizen soldiers are often not stationed at specific bases, when they deploy the families can become very isolated.
Cantu, who is part of the Family Readiness Group for the 146th Airlift Wing at the Channel Islands Air National Guard station, said her job is to reach out to those families.
“When you have long deployments and still have to work full time, the biggest fear is losing your job,” said Cantu, who also works as an administrative assistant for a hospital in Los Angeles.
You have to be able to rearrange your schedule, work fewer hours and find child care, and employers sometimes just don’t want the trouble of having to accommodate those requests, she said.
‘I already miss him’
Families say it’s often the last few weeks before deployment and the first few weeks back from a mission that are the hardest.
Jodi Dolan has somehow figured it out. She and her husband, Jim, a career Navy chief petty officer and the operations chief for Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3’s Delta Company, have five children — 18 month-old John, Jaydie, 4; Jayke, 7; Chayse, 13, and Kylie, 15.
“I feel like I’m seasoned,” said Jodi Dolan. “It’s sort of like I have an on-and-off switch. Sometimes I need to be mother and father. Sometimes I’m just mom.”
Her kids adjust to the separations but not without an impact. Her oldest daughter now balances out some of the domestic duties but confronts her mom about it.
“My eldest is pretty disgruntled,” she said. “It upsets her. I tell her we’re all a family and we’re going to have to make sacrifices.”
The younger kids always ask about their dad when he’s gone.
Her husband returned in October from about seven months in Iraq and, as usual, she had to get used to having him back.
“You have to get used to realizing that you don’t have to do everything,” she said.
Friends who aren’t in the military just don’t get it, she said.
Her approach is that when he’s gone she takes over and stays busy, shuttling her kids to sports, dance classes and afterschool kids club.
For his part, Jim Dolan said he has longtime friends and a network of support among other families in the battalion who can help his family if they need it.
As for his relationship with his wife, “It takes hard work.”
“You have to be able to work at it long-distance,” he said.
Joy Hinojosa, a Navy petty officer with a 6-month-old daughter, is getting ready for a six-month deployment aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Her husband, Enrique Hinojosa, also a Navy petty officer, will remain home with their daughter.
“Being away from my daughter, my mind will always be on her, wondering if she’s OK,” she said.
She said the Navy is making sure that she and her husband don’t deploy at the same time, and the service gave her an extended period of time home while she was pregnant and after her daughter was born.
She and her husband go back and forth about whether or not they’ll stay in the Navy.
Rebecca Martinez Rodriguez, who is preparing to ship out to the Middle East next month with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 5, doesn’t have any great options. A single mom to Emmanuel, who is 1 1/2, Rodriguez dropped her son off with the boy’s father’s mother in Detroit two weeks ago.
“I already miss him,” she said.
“I talked to him about it and tried to get him ready, but he’s so young now. I hope he’ll remember me when I get back.”
Ellie
Shouldering the weight of eight years of war
By Scott Hadly (Contact)
Sunday, February 8, 2009
The Navy doesn’t give out medals to kids like 4-year-old Layla Fuentes, or her 2-year-old brother “Junior.”
And their mom, Deandrea, and the tens of thousands of other military family members like theirs, won’t be decorated for heroism at home anytime soon either.
They may not be in uniform and fighting on foreign soil, but military families are shouldering a heavy load after eight years of war.
Layla’s father, Alfred Fuentes, a Navy Seabee who has been deployed in the Middle East for the past six months, has missed two of her four birthdays because of service overseas.
She has a picture of him by her bed and says a prayer for him every night.
At Christmas, her mother took Layla to see Santa. She only had one thing on her list.
“She asked if he could ‘bring my daddy back home in his red sack,’” Deandrea Fuentes said. “That was kind of hard.”
In pigtails and carrying a Dora the Explorer backpack, Layla knows what she’ll say when he does finally come back in a few weeks.
“I’ll say, ‘welcome home, Daddy.’”
Keeping families together
Eight years into the nation’s “War on Terror,” the burden for the conflict falls hard not just on those in uniform but on their families as well.
Earlier this year, after watching her husband take the oath of office, first lady Michelle Obama said she’d make helping those families her priority.
“When our servicemen and women go to war, their families go with them,” she said.
As yet, Michelle Obama hasn’t said what she’ll do, but the first thing military families would like to see is that she understands what they go through.
The military, which in the past had an attitude, as one military wife put it, “If they wanted you to have a family they would have given you one at boot camp,” has embraced the notion that keeping quality men and women in uniform requires keeping their families together.
There are now robust unit ombudsmen programs, Family Readiness Groups, and counseling programs all geared toward taking care of family concerns. There are conflicting accounts on whether long deployments are also causing spikes in divorce rates; a 2007 Rand study says there was no spike, while year-to-year data has shown jumps in divorce rates. But there is little debate that the long, regular separations stress families and relationships.
The big question is whether those repeated and long deployments — the Army will continue to send soldiers out for 15 months for the next two years — will break the backs of some families.
“There is such a growing weariness among spouses,” said Beth Wilson, the wife of a Navy enlisted man who has worked as an ombudsman for families in her husband’s unit. “You have eight years of multiple deployments, and it takes its toll.”
Wilson, who said it took some time to get used to military life, said the first step Michelle Obama should take is to simply draw attention.
“Don’t hold up a football player as a hero or a stupid actor making millions of dollars; they’re not heroes,” said Wilson, who also writes about military family issues and runs a blog and Web-based talk show called “Homefront in Focus” and “Navy Homefront Talk.”
“It’s such an invalid definition of what a hero really is. A hero is a wife holding her pregnant belly as her husband goes off on another deployment. It’s the child waving goodbye to their daddy three weeks before Christmas. It’s their daddy who keeps re-enlisting.”
Moving from base to base
Remaining at home while your loved one is in Iraq or Afghanistan is the most difficult part of military life, but it’s not the only issue, Wilson said.
Earlier this month, Wilson had a few women at her house and they talked about Michelle Obama’s pledge.
There was skepticism at first, but then ideas started flowing. There were the small changes — increasing the weight limit for moving families based on the number of kids — to bigger ideas about extending college loan programs to spouses, to the pie-in-the-sky.
“Some pointed out that they sometimes give prisoners conjugal visits,” said Donna Monzingo, whose husband is a Navy petty officer.
“Some wives were like ‘we just don’t want any deployment anymore,’ said Monzingo. “Well that’s just not going to happen.”
But the military could do more, she said, giving those in uniform a chance to go home for the births of children, for example.
The Army, because of its long deployments, offers soldiers a two-week leave. The Navy and Marines, which have deployments that typically last six to eight months, don’t. But all the services have made strides at making it easier for service members to stay in touch, through phone and Internet connections even in the most remote locations.
The discussion also brought out other issues about how difficult it is for spouses to find and keep jobs when they are constantly moving from base to base, said Monzingo.
Support for men as well as women
It’s not just wives who are coping with deployments either.
Cory Weatherby, a Navy Seabee, is now home taking care of his 14-month-old son, Brady, while his wife serves in Kuwait.
“You’d be surprised how many other guys are doing this,” said Weatherby, who was deployed last year. “If you’re a man, it’s different because there’s not the same network as the wives have.”
Robin Hodge, who is married to a Navy diver and has a two children younger than 5, said there are a lot of programs to help families, but there is room for improvement.
Among the things she’d like to see is more support for military personnel who are also single parents, better and more flexible child care that takes into account the odd hours worked during training, and money. Though she works and her family is doing OK on two incomes, younger enlisted men and women are just getting by, she said.
Aracely Cantu, whose husband is in the Air National Guard, said members of the National Guard and the Reserve face an entirely different set of issues. Because the citizen soldiers are often not stationed at specific bases, when they deploy the families can become very isolated.
Cantu, who is part of the Family Readiness Group for the 146th Airlift Wing at the Channel Islands Air National Guard station, said her job is to reach out to those families.
“When you have long deployments and still have to work full time, the biggest fear is losing your job,” said Cantu, who also works as an administrative assistant for a hospital in Los Angeles.
You have to be able to rearrange your schedule, work fewer hours and find child care, and employers sometimes just don’t want the trouble of having to accommodate those requests, she said.
‘I already miss him’
Families say it’s often the last few weeks before deployment and the first few weeks back from a mission that are the hardest.
Jodi Dolan has somehow figured it out. She and her husband, Jim, a career Navy chief petty officer and the operations chief for Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3’s Delta Company, have five children — 18 month-old John, Jaydie, 4; Jayke, 7; Chayse, 13, and Kylie, 15.
“I feel like I’m seasoned,” said Jodi Dolan. “It’s sort of like I have an on-and-off switch. Sometimes I need to be mother and father. Sometimes I’m just mom.”
Her kids adjust to the separations but not without an impact. Her oldest daughter now balances out some of the domestic duties but confronts her mom about it.
“My eldest is pretty disgruntled,” she said. “It upsets her. I tell her we’re all a family and we’re going to have to make sacrifices.”
The younger kids always ask about their dad when he’s gone.
Her husband returned in October from about seven months in Iraq and, as usual, she had to get used to having him back.
“You have to get used to realizing that you don’t have to do everything,” she said.
Friends who aren’t in the military just don’t get it, she said.
Her approach is that when he’s gone she takes over and stays busy, shuttling her kids to sports, dance classes and afterschool kids club.
For his part, Jim Dolan said he has longtime friends and a network of support among other families in the battalion who can help his family if they need it.
As for his relationship with his wife, “It takes hard work.”
“You have to be able to work at it long-distance,” he said.
Joy Hinojosa, a Navy petty officer with a 6-month-old daughter, is getting ready for a six-month deployment aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Her husband, Enrique Hinojosa, also a Navy petty officer, will remain home with their daughter.
“Being away from my daughter, my mind will always be on her, wondering if she’s OK,” she said.
She said the Navy is making sure that she and her husband don’t deploy at the same time, and the service gave her an extended period of time home while she was pregnant and after her daughter was born.
She and her husband go back and forth about whether or not they’ll stay in the Navy.
Rebecca Martinez Rodriguez, who is preparing to ship out to the Middle East next month with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 5, doesn’t have any great options. A single mom to Emmanuel, who is 1 1/2, Rodriguez dropped her son off with the boy’s father’s mother in Detroit two weeks ago.
“I already miss him,” she said.
“I talked to him about it and tried to get him ready, but he’s so young now. I hope he’ll remember me when I get back.”
Ellie