Stanley Hall - Deployed: The Survival Guide for Families at War

The stories and people in this book are all fictional and compilations of military families experiences. Any similarity to living or dead persons is unintended.

Introduction

This book can help serve as a training manual for our countrys military families that have been thrown into the heat of the battle and are looking for answers and direction. The service members I talk to often share how they love their work and even the trainings and deployments, but they dont know how to handle their work and family relationships. This book is written based on my experience of what service members and their families need to hear so they can bring their relationships to a new level of excellence.

Thousands of people join the armed forces every year voluntarily. They consider it an honor to serve in our military. Their spouses, children, and families-of-origin in a way also join the military. Just as in World War II, when women and children supported the work effort through their labors, we can support our service members by learning more about the hazardsboth physical and emotionalthat try and afflict military families. The ways that families can be affected by military living are innumerable, and it would be impossible to try and outline each of them. Youll find that this book is written with guidance based on principles that can be applied to most situations. Not every principle that works is mentioned here, but this book is a good start. Other books that I would recommend to service members and their families are included in the appendix, along with phone numbers, Internet sites, and other resources I recommend. The Department of Defense has gone to great lengths in the last several decades to provide quality family services on each of its forts, bases, and auxiliaries.

I am a marriage and family therapist with over a decade of practice and have worked on the marine base in Twentynine Palms for the past four years. The principles that I learned while in school have universal application and have served me while working in an alcohol and drug treatment center, a church-based social services clinic, a community mental-health clinic, and on base in the navy hospital and the Marine Corps Family Advocacy Program. I think of each new principle that I learn as a tool to put on my tool belt. Each piece of equipment that service members are given may have many applications that they learn about in training and apply maximally in combat. Think of these principles in the same way.

Joining, starting, or creating a family is like being thrown directly into combat with only what training your family-of-origin has offered you. One concept I love and emphasize is the irony of paradox. A paradox is anything that, against ones known logic, seems to act contrary to how it should. Relationships are full of paradoxes; they seem to define relationships. They are like the Chinese finger traps that only lock down harder as you pull away and loosen as you slowly push your fingers together. For example, parents who try to force their children to get ready faster often end up slowing the process down considerably. Service members who want to provide for their families or make their families proud by joining the armed force may sometimes find themselves with opposite results if they fail to process combat fatigue and prioritize needs.

Most marriages dont work and families fall apart. It isnt because the people arent properly matched or have too different of personalities, as people like to say. It is because they dont have the skills and havent aligned their desires. Dont worry about whether the person you married is your soul mate. If you are both willing to try, then make them your soul mate. To illustrate this point, I will often point to opposing walls in my office and ask clients to imagine a long line from one end of the room to the other. Then I ask them to imagine that a little more than half the distance of that line includes all the people who dated and then broke up for some reason. The remainder of the line is all the marriages that have ever been entered into, which is cut in half again with divorces. With now only a fourth of the line left, make your best guess at how many of those marriages include people that are satisfied with their relationships. How many of them can say that they would marry that person all over again and that they couldnt possibly think of leaving? The line gets a lot shorter. Some of my clients that I share this analogy with guess that about 90 percent of the remaining marriages are actually unhappy, some say half, and Im not sure, but they are the minority of humans. Is it because they just are unusual people who were born to have happy marriages? Or is it because they are doing something unusual? I would like to believe that all of us can be in a happy relationship whether we are in the military or not. I would like to believe that the principles are the same. Sometimes being in the military is an advantage to a relationship, and sometimes it may be a disadvantage, but it certainly doesnt preclude anyone from the family of their dreams.

Parents, siblings, youth/children, and extended family members who are reading this book to better understand their active-duty family members will find that the same principles that make a happy marriage can be applied to making a happy family with kids and extended family. Dont ever give up on another human being; we all have value. The adult you see before you is in Gods eyes as precious as a newborn child.

The basic building block of good communications is the feeling that every human being is unique and of value.Unknown author

This Isnt What I Signed Up For!

Serving ones country by joining the military is an honor that is unparalleled by any other line of work. More often than not, though, it seems that young men and women sign up for the military and then are shocked by what occurs in basic training or boot camp. Even service members who knew it would be hard are shocked by the regimen. Three square meals a day and eight hours of sleep doesnt seem like enough when youre tasked to the limit each day.

One female service member described how she loved the rigors of boot camp and enjoyed the challenges of pushing herself to the limit both emotionally and physically. However, in the months that followed, she found herself struggling with sitting at a desk, learning from PowerPoint lectures, and tediously completing more paperwork once she was out of class. The monotony of formation, paperwork, and trying to get along with fellow service members are some of the hardest parts for many service members. Hurry up and wait! is a common phrase among service members who push through the paperwork and assigned tasks and then... wait. Compared to service members grandparents World War II stories, being in the military can seem like the opposite of what service members expected.

The sheer enormity of a federal organization often leaves service members feeling like small fish in a large ocean. Men who were the high school quarterback stars and hometown favorites are quickly disillusioned of their stardom when a complete stranger with a higher rank assigns them trash pickup and doesnt care who they dated in high school. This disillusionment is not so different from what happens to most people when they leave home for work or school, but in the military you cant change your mind about leaving home. Far from home and with few, if any, familiar faces, young service members must now decide how they want to cope with their choice to serve. Highly motivated service members may find that their enthusiasm will carry them a long way if they have a good commander who nurtures excitement. Support from home, friends, and a desirable job assignment (e.g., military occupational specialty, also known as MOS) can leave some members with no complaints at all, but those not lucky enough to have this combination may find themselves suffering from malaise (i.e., an underlying worry, discontent, and dissatisfaction) or worse. Sometimes these troubles are drowned in alcohol and other mood-altering activities, which only prolong the pain and compound the problems. A sign on the road leading into the marine base in Twentynine Palms reminds service members that a first offense misdemeanor DUI in California can cost upwards of thirteen thousand dollars by the time the offender gets through paying fines, attorneys, towing, and more. Paying for that on a PFC (Private First Class) salary could take years, especially if the service member is placed on restriction and his or her pay is cut in half or eliminated by command.