Jeff Horton: When Your Child Comes Back from War
Jeff Horton who is Alex Horton’s father (Alex is our drinking buddy from the Army of Dude and currently one of the gurus of social media at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs) writes a great advice piece today at Alex’ VAntagepoint entitled “When Your Child Comes Back from War“.
Many of my readers have watched their kids slog off to fight their generation’s war, as we participated in our generations’ adventures, and will probably see a bit of themselves in Jeff’s piece;
Every morning when I hit my office I would bring up my e-mail, hoping that Alex had enough time during my nighttime to dash off some news. In kind of a perverse way, I felt quite excited and alive and engaged in the whole affair, watching events from afar but able to keep in pretty close contact with Alex through e-mails, his blog postings on “Army of Dude” and even the occasional phone call. When Alex would mention that he would be going offline for a few days for one mission or another, I got a little nervous but I had a great deal of confidence in his training, skill level and the ability of his fellow soldiers to take care of each other. I just checked my e-mail frequently until he finished his mission and dropped a quick note of news. Then I would breathe a big sigh of relief.
Where I depart from Jeff is when he says the war ended for him when Alex came home. If anything, I became more engaged with the conduct of the war when my son, Paul, came home, probably because I wanted all American families to feel the same joy I felt when he came safely.
I’ll grant that my son, the Air Force surgical technician, wasn’t in the same danger that Alex, the Army infantryman, faced, but I knew that he faced dealing with the aftermath of the terrible battles and casualties on both sides of the war and the stress relief for Jeff was much greater than mine, but we have a responsibility to the folks who are still engaged over there and their families here who daily sift through the spam to find messages from their heroes.
Alex has gone on to serve his friends and comrades, and we, the parents have the same calling to answer for our fellow parents of military members.
But you should go read the whole thing.
Category: Terror War
Some things a man should keep to himself or, perhaps, share only with his wife. The stuff in Horton’s piece qualifies, at least in my book. I’ll say no more about his writing, lest the judgmentalism in me jump out.
The dirty little secret every combat veteran of every war has to deal with is that battle is probably the most exciting, exhilarating thing he will ever do in his life. But we don’t have a permanent full-time warrior class anymore, or perpetual war to occupy them. We, as a society, send out our young men (and now our young women, too) to fight, and then we (as veterans) are expected to come home and go back to being good peaceful citizens. And you know what? Most of us do. But we can’t forget.
Not all scars show.
All I’ll say is that, after watching my own son deploy, I understand some how my own father must have felt when I left, and his father for him, and on up the chain.
It’s one thing when I was the one serving. It’s an entirely different perspective when it’s your own son.
When my son graduated from Basic & AIT the speaker, whose rank I forget, told the parents assembled that he had a son who was deployed and said “let me tell you, it is a lot tougher having a child who is deployed than it is being deployed.”
I recognize the sentiments of the father – and think it is a good thing to share with other parents. For me the war did NOT end when my son returned, because I also have former Scouts and Venturers in the various branches who are deployed in harms way still. I suspect that what he intended to convey was that the intensity of interest in the war diminishes on the return of your own child from the front.
I no longer scan every news story and every photograph looking for signs of my son. I don’t have that urgency of knowing that it my son who is in harms way.
But the issues of a son who has deployed with a father who never did are the same. He has to tell us what he can, when he can – knowing that some things we cannot fully appreciate.
One thing I did find, was that my 2-volume set of Bill Muldoon comics from WWII, when my father served in Europe behind a .30 machine gun, caused him to laugh in recognition of how some situations have not changed between his grandfathers’ time and his.
Hearing him laugh at those was, to me, priceless.
“One thing I did find, was that my 2-volume set of Bill Muldoon comics from WWII, when my father served in Europe behind a .30 machine gun, caused him to laugh in recognition of how some situations have not changed between his grandfathers’ time and his.”
Ah, now there’s some truth. It is always a curiosity to me how in so very many facets of life, each generation seems to think it is unique or somehow vastly different from those which preceded them. It just ain’t so. The military removes that misplaced sense of uniqueness and provides cross-generational connectedness like nothing else that I know. Fatherhood is a close second.
My father was always a bit twitchy about me when I came back. Before my dad died, my brother was playing Black Hawk Down with the volume pretty high. I asked him to turn it down a little. My dad freaked out and yelled at my brother to turn it off then apologized profusely. He was always worried that I would melt down. I wonder how many other parents felt that way.