Here's
another comment from a military spouse. I am going to keep running these until
the little grasshoppers begin to grasp that stresses
on the military family may be what breaks the all-volunteer force.
By
Alison Buckholtz
"Has
your dad been killed yet?"
My
seven-year-old son recently revealed that a well-meaning, worried friend in his
class asks him this question nearly every day. My husband is a Navy pilot
serving a one-year deployment in
the Middle East, and first graders at the school have written him letters and
seen many photos of him; he even dressed kids in his flight gear during career
day.
When
my son repeated to me his friend's question, I started to wonder about the
drawbacks of our outreach to the civilian community. Usually, I go out of
my way to facilitate contact with non-military groups because I believe that
greater public awareness of servicemembers' lives can help close the
civilian-military gap in perception that has widened since the abolition of the
draft. I work to bring civilians closer to the experience of military families
in a time of war, with a memoir and a monthly column about our current
deployment.
But
it wasn't hard to convince me that the Congressional Military Family Caucus, a
new group which takes a much different approach, is an important national step
forward. The Congressional Military Family Caucus aims to create
legislation and shape policies that will benefit military families. A
combination of legislation and public awareness on behalf of military families
can build morale and ease roadblocks like spouse education and employment, tax
inequities stemming from residency requirements, and federal services for
military children with special needs. If legislators craft policies that
lighten the burden of their constituents -- in this case, military moms and dads -- America benefits from retention of the best people the Armed Forces can attract.
The
connection between a strong military family and a strong military force has
long been documented; in the current Administration, Michelle Obama's outreach to military families has anchored
her agenda as First Lady. But the Caucus aims to formalize the connection
between a strong family and a strong force. It launched last fall, and recently
held its first Military Spouse Summit to help set its priorities. I was an
invited speaker at the Summit, and stayed to participate. My son's
comments were still fresh, and still hurt. I wasn't sure if I should
share them with the group.
Seventy
military spouses (chosen from an application pool of 500) from around the
country traveled to the Cannon House Office Building for the event -- some of
them at their own expense, others supported by their local Navy League, USO or
a veterans' organization. All of the services were represented, but each
spouse's name tag listed her (or his) first name only, and participants were asked
not to mention their partner's rank or job.
Speakers
on diverse topics such as PTSD and military-friendly voting initiatives
alternated with brainstorming sessions, but I was struck most by the research
findings presented by Purdue University's Military
Family Research Institute MFRI's director, Shelly M. MacDermid Wadsworth, stressed that "the story of today's military families is still
being written," but noted that the psychological stress and unpredictability of
a servicemember's combat deployment is a "corrosive influence" on family
life. Many of us in the audience nodded with recognition.
I
also detected a measure of silent satisfaction -- because bringing a research
specialty into the mainstream is an important step toward acknowledgement that
challenges exist in the first place. Military spouses tend to be as stoic
as their servicemember, so it can be hard to share struggles and challenges
with each other, or determine anecdotally how serious or widespread a problem
is. Rooting the Caucus' priorities in research (MFRI estimates that over
1,000 studies on military families are underway) is critical to its
success.
To
me, however, the most significant moment of the day never appeared on the agenda. During a lull, one of the military spouses at my table pulled that day's copy
of USA Today from her bag. The
headline read, "Military
Health Care Costs Booming," and the story below it revealed that surging
costs are prompting the Pentagon and Congress to consider the first hike in
out-of-pocket fees for military retirees and some active-duty families in 15
years. Among the factors driving up costs were these two:
-
Behavioral-health counseling sessions for troops and
family members rose 65% since 2004. The Pentagon paid for 7.3 million visits
last year -- treatment of 140,000 patients each week.
-
Many
new patients are children suffering anxiety or depression because of a parent
away at war. Children had 42% more counseling sessions last year than in
2005.
The
newspaper passed from hand to hand at our table, and each spouse frowned. I finally told a few of the women what my son's friend said to him, because
several years' worth of similar comments have prompted me to seek out family
counseling at various crisis points. Our visits were certainly folded
into those statistics, and legislators' comments reported in the article seemed
to rebuke us. It appeared that military families were being doubly punished:
first by sending a family member off to war, and then for utilizing the
resources made available to manage the ensuing trauma. Overusing these
benefits -- though no one has ever specified what this overuse might be -- might
now result in limited offerings, or higher costs for families who had been
promised this care in exchange for their years of service.
The
irony of reading a story about Congress cutting military family health benefits
while attending a meeting of the Congressional Military Family Caucus escaped
no one. The power of legislation to change lives was clear to all of us
in that moment. Only one spouse spoke. "Promises have to be kept," she
said. Her words might well serve as the Caucus's motto. Because if the
Congressional Military Family Caucus succeeds in ensuring that the promises
made to America's military families are kept -- through legislation, public
awareness, or any combination of the two -- it will strengthen our forces as
well as our families. Including seven-year-olds.
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