'We Serve Too': Some People Get It

I recently saw “Brothers at War,” a powerful new documentary by Jake Rademacher. As I exited the theater I quickly put on my sunglasses. I’m sure it was just allergies…macho undercover FBI agents don’t cry…but my eyes were misting up. What really moved me were the deployment scenes. This documentary “got it.” I’m not sure Hollywood has captured the impact of a combat deployment on our military men and women and their loved ones.

Since April is the “Month of the Military Child” maybe it’s time we all “got it.” Living in San Diego, the news often covers units returning from overseas deployments. We attend a church where several young families are in the military and my wife is active in a group called MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers)…no, we are long past the preschool stage but my wife is a “mentor” mom. Military families are represented in that group as well. As I’ve shared before, our Marine son, who is stationed on the East Coast, is deployed. Maybe because I was a Marine and our son is on active duty, we have taken an interest in families with deployed spouses.

I took a husband to Camp Pendleton at midnight so he could say his good-byes to his family at home and avoid the tears in front of his men. I sat through dinner with elementary-age school children who spoke of their deployed dad being a hero. I’m familiar with a twenty-month-old who waves at every military Humvee calling it “a daddy truck” and calling for his father, even though his dad is half-a-world away in Afghanistan. I’ve watched a little boy sit almost mesmerized viewing a video of his dad holding him the night before his father left for a combat deployment. Or how about a one-year-old who cries out to a Marine dressed in desert cammies, thinking the man is his daddy because his father has been gone for several months and his only memory is of a man dressed in such a uniform.

It isn’t easy explaining to a child why his parent has to leave for months at a time. My wife and I found a book that tries to make the explanation simple, “We Serve Too” by Wee the People Publishing. The book is designed to ease the burden of the non-deployed parent explaining why dad or mom is serving. It makes the children a part of that service, since they too are sacrificing and serving our nation, more than we may ever know. We bought a carton of books and gave them to deployed families. Wee the People Publishing “gets it.”

I hope you will too.

Semper Fi.