Chestnuts Roasting Over Mortar Fire
Bringing the home front to the battlefield is tricky business!
This is an edit and re-write of a much earlier blog entry — back when I was first blogging — about dealing with deployment and particularly around issues of morale. I have in the past couple of weeks received a few emails from military parents, so I thought I would pull this one back up and spruce it up a bit.
It has been my experience that parents’ involvement in their soldier’s Family Readiness Group FRG is hit and miss. I have met some parents who are deeply involved. They are connected and get frequent communication, and yet some of us have never received anything outside of an initial email (if even that!). I am the latter parent, and it has made this entry into supporting my deployed son difficult at times. There were times in the beginning where the grief and fear were nearly paralyzing. I felt all alone, but I knew there were others going through the same emotions. I simply did not know how to find them and connect with them. Fortunately I started to blog and that lead to some of my online family friends, and I found a couple of support boards for parents of deployed soldiers. I really do think that a variety of support portals for families is good, and it encourages involvement. If you do not get what you need from one community you go to the next — until you find what you need.
If you have any chance of being involved in your soldier’s FRG I highly recommend it! If it is a well organized group with people who are seasoned with deployment experiences then you are going to find a wealth of information as well as fellowship with those either on the same journey you are on, or those who have journeyed there before! The stories I hear from parents who are blessed to have a well run FRG are simply wonderful!
So what exactly is “morale?”
There is a fine line between telling my soldier how much he is loved and missed, and becoming a burden to his heart and mind by fanning the flames of homesickness or planting worries for him to ponder. I really do not have any answers that will clearly show exactly where that line lies. There will never be “one answer” for such a complex topic, but sometimes muddling through a topic helps me to at least establish some parameters in my own mind around a given topic.
This concept of support and morale has been a topic hard discussed on some family support boards. It is not just parents asking the questions, but wives and friends of soldiers as well. Ultimately, as I have stated before, the concept of support can be fairly diverse. What one family and soldier may deem as supportive, another family and soldier may not. Regardless of your familial practice and expression of support, and the way it has become defined within the culture of your family there are a few things that we must practice as families to keep our soldier’s mind and heart safe; and that means unburdened and uncluttered from the civilian world while he is on the battlefield.
The online dictionary defines morale as:
mo·rale
n. The state of the spirits of a person or group as exhibited by confidence, cheerfulness, discipline, and willingness to perform assigned tasks.
[French, morality, good conduct, from feminine of moral, moral, from Old French. See moral.]
SYNONYMS morale, esprit, esprit de corps. These nouns denote a spirit, as of dedication to a common goal, that unites a group: the high morale of the troops; the esprit of an orchestra; the esprit de corps of the swim team.
Considering what this definition says and how that effects what the troops encounter on the battlefield I can only imagine why getting care packages, cards, letters and well wishes from home are so vital to the spirit of the Troops. I also have to wonder about the families left behind when it comes to the need for morale. Maybe I can write about family morale at a later time. It is a vital component, because when the main person(s) offering morale become discouraged with the news around the war, tired, anxious, or depressed it will come through on the other end of the line of communication. Your soldier will need regular communication letting him know that all is well on the home front. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to him about the hard things. I think that timing is vital though when you are needing to talk about the heavy.
So, what if all is not well on the home front? How should that be communicated? Even when you are struggling and having a hard day it is important to end your note or chat with him, with reassurance that you are alright and all will be handled just fine. There is nothing wrong with talking normally to your soldier (as a matter of fact you should!!) I think I am trying to emphasize here that when you write or talk with him make sure you do not leave him wondering or leave room in his mind to worry. Since communication can become sparse and erratic at times it is important to tie up the loose ends of the conversation before saying good bye if at all possible. Don’t bite off more than you can chew either. If he has 10 minutes to talk before he heads out on a mission, now would not be a good time to bring up anything that he would need to think too deeply on. It would be no different than telling a brain surgeon 10 minutes before he is to operate that something tragic just happened in his family, but he has to operate anyway. I wouldn’t want to be the patient under that knife, and I do not want my son (or the soldiers’ he is with!) to be distracted from their mission — lives are on the line in both scenarios!
I know that a lot of this is simply common sense, but to be perfectly honest it is easy to want to cram so much life and living into a 10 minute phone call that simple mindfulness can easily go out the window. It is not out of selfishness or carelessness, but it is easy to miss your soldier so much that when you hear his voice you want him to hear what’s going on! His absence is a daily hole in your world, and sometimes that phone call is the only relief you may get for a while. It’s a little different for those who are able to communicate regularly with their soldiers. Not all soldiers are able to call home that frequently, so that definitely compounds the problems where communication is concerned.
So far our conversations, both on the phone and over, are pretty much focused on things here at home. He really does not want to talk much about what is going on around him. I don’t blame him! I never push for information. I really don’t want to know anything that he is not ready to share. He knows I am here and I can handle it. That is what matters. When we chat we talk about old times, his friends, his brothers, our Church news, etc. I pretty much let him lead where the conversation will go. I am here to provide for him a safe and soft spot in the world he is in right now. I will do all that I can to make sure that those times of communication are a respite, a solace and a refuge. He does not need any undue stress from the home front. He has enough stress in Baghdad to last him a lifetime (and believe me I am painfully aware that it may!).
If you experience an emergency and your soldier needs to be contacted right away, then contact your FRG and/or The American Red Cross in your neighborhood. If you are unaware of who you should contact or the number to your local ARC, please look the information up now. Remember the old adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!” It never hurts to have some emergency contacts listed out so that if you are faced with a crisis you are not having to try and figure it out in the moment.
In the meantime, I certainly wish you all happy communication. I hope and pray that your chats and discussions keep you all close and growing together through the good times and the tough times. Keep packing those care packages with tastes of home, a little fun, a lot of necessity and more love than the box can hold. Every care package and letter sent will have very special meaning for your solider — and it will always mean so much to you knowing you are encouraging him and helping him from afar.
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