Tough wait back home

MOUNTAIN HOME AIR FORCE BASE, Idaho – Feelings like worry, panic, excitement, relief or general anxiety experienced by children when Mom or Dad is a wartime soldier can make it tough for the youngsters to concentrate on little things like school.

“I had a little guy last year who lost an uncle in Baghdad,” said Karen Ford, a fourth-grade teacher at Mountain Home Elementary School. “At the time, his Dad was over there – and I looked up in class and saw tears just running down his cheeks.”

Ford took the boy into the hall, asking him what was wrong. When she learned the child’s uncle had died, she asked if he would like to go home for the day.

“He said, ‘No, I wanna be here. It’s too sad at home,’ ” Ford said. “We’re the constant, safe place for kids, and they depend on that.”

Indeed, a parent’s deployment is sometimes the first real lesson a military kid gets in the unfairness of life. And, at times, kids face a battle of their own to keep stress from overtaking hope.

“It’s a way of life here,” said Ford, who has taught on the Mountain Home Air Force base for 25 years. “Yes, kids are upset. We do have kids that act out when parents are gone – they don’t like to get their work done, which is just a way of acting out. Other kids are proud of the fact and work harder while the parent is gone to make things easier at home.”

As deployment dates near, teachers sometimes ease up on homework or are a bit more lenient, Ford said.

“The parents are good about letting us know that one of them is going to be gone, and we give extra time to that student. We give them a shoulder to cry on, a little extra TLC,” she said.

Children on the base have a world of resources compared to those living in town, said Shelly Rose, also a fourth-grade teacher at the school. She previously taught off the base and said students there seemed to have less support when a parent was deployed.

But most kids understand the danger of war, she said.

“You’d be surprised what the kids, even in fourth grade, bring up. It’s amazing how much these kids understand and what we give them credit for,” Ford said. “You really get a sense of their feelings around Christmas, when we have them all make cards to send to their parents. It’s not unusual for them to put in there, ‘Please be careful and don’t get killed.’ These kids think about death.”

The adjustment may be even harder for children of reservists because they are not used to having a parent gone, said Grace Wittman, technology and military program assistant in Idaho for 4-H.

Wittman helps administer Idaho Operation Military Kids, a partnership between 4-H, the University of Idaho, the National Guard and the Idaho Army Reserve. Operation Military Kids offers programs to support children of National Guard and Reserve soldiers. Wittman said it’s funded by a $100,000 federal grant.

“The youths are having to take on more responsibilities at home: making dinner, getting brother and sister to after-school activities, cleaning house because a lot of parents are having to readjust their work schedules,” Wittman said. “A lot of youths are going to work to help bring in the income, or just to be able to pay for things themselves so Mom doesn’t worry about having to pay for extracurricular activities. That’s all added stress.”

Boise resident Lisa Thomas said she’s noticed changes in her two children and two stepchildren since her husband, James, was deployed to Fort Bliss, Texas, with the Idaho National Guard’s 116th Cavalry Brigade.

Thomas said it’s especially hard on her 15-year-old stepson, Adam, and 11-year-old stepdaughter, Jamie, because they live with their biological mother and sometimes miss the calls their father makes home.

And 12-year-old Drew, who just started his first year of middle school, is struggling to take on more responsibilities at home while handling the stress of having his father gone.

“I think probably the biggest struggle that I’ve seen with the kids is the lack of being able to do some of the things that we’ve done before. My husband is an avid motocross rider, but I can’t pack up four kids and four motorcycles and take them riding or camping,” Lisa Thomas said.

“The kids are acting out. My 12-year-old – this is his stepdad – is a straight-A student, very responsible, a very good kid. But he’s really struggling now, day-to-day,” she said.

The 4-year-old, normally a sweet, quiet little boy, now behaves like “spawn of the devil,” she joked.

Things have settled down somewhat since her husband was deployed in July. She said for the first few weeks, everything that happened seemed to touch a raw nerve.

“Just typical kid things, friends being mean or things most kids can shrug off, would make my 12-year-old break down. We’d get down to the bottom of it, and he would say, ‘It’s just not fair that my dad is gone,’ ” she said. “We had to get to the point where we can’t use that for an excuse anymore. Life can’t be terrible just because he’s gone.”

Still, there are good days and bad days, she said, and the past week has seen its fair share of bad. She anticipates more when her husband is shipped to Iraq in November.

“The reality is that right now, he’s still safe in everybody’s mind. Once he’s not on American soil, that will be a concern for the three older kids,” she said.

“There’s lots of tears, lots of fighting, and Drew and I butt heads quite a bit, where we never did before. But it’s certainly survivable. I don’t want to make it out to be a horrible experience,” she said.

Lisa Thomas helped her kids gain some perspective by focusing on others, she said.

“We did a lot of talking about why Dad has to go, and why it was important for the soldiers to be in Iraq, and what a disadvantage that country was in,” she said. “By our kids sacrificing their dads for 18 months, someday children in Iraq will hopefully experience the freedoms that our kids experience every day. So that, hopefully, set the foundation for our kids.”

For Drew, there are moments – at dinnertime or during the break in his lacrosse games – when he still half expects to see James. Those moments are the hardest, he said.

“I expected it to be a lot worse than it is. But it’s different having him gone, especially when you first come home,” he said. “I’m watching my little brother have to wake myself up in the morning and get myself up on my own.”

Drew has a few friends with deployed parents, he said, but between sports and school he has little time to talk to them about such weighty matters. Instead, he turns to others in a National Guard youth group for support.

“We do really cool activities like going to concerts, taking road trips or theme parks. But it helps because everyone knows what you’re going through. Everybody helps out if you have a problem,” he said.

Meanwhile, Drew tries to pass on the support to his younger brother, Jason.

“We read the letters from Dad to him and share the news and stuff, but most of the time he doesn’t understand,” Drew said.

But though he understands the least, perhaps the strongest lesson on being a wartime family came from little Jason.

“I was putting him to bed and he went and turned on the porch light,” Lisa said. “He said, ‘I’m turning the light on so Dad can see when he gets home.’

“My older kids were going, ‘He just doesn’t get it, does he?’ and we all were crying except for Jason. He just sees it as making sure Dad can see when he gets home,” she said. “And it’s a real healthy thing there, that at least he knows that Daddy will be back.”

It’s a message he repeats every night for the family, she said, stopping by the front door on his way to bed and turning on the porch light for Dad.