Blog Posts tagged with "separation"

The life that a man or woman experiences while serving in the military is often one of sacrifice, hardship and honor. A normal day is often long and stressful. Families aren't perfect outside the military and they are no different inside except the normal stressors on a military family are extraordinary. Families break all the time. Some breaks are permanent, some temporary, some caused by the stressors of a military life. Now throw in deployments to overseas locations where families cope with strong cultural challenges, language barriers, and being a thousand miles from their own homeland. Now we have to throw 9 years of combat operations into the mix. Deployments mean more sacrifice, hardship and places fragile families in danger of breaking and solid families endure loneliness, depression and loss of intimacy.

How do we do it? How do families survive intact? How does a service member come home after long separations under harsh conditions and perhaps with battle fatigue, now called post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), thrown into the mix? How does a father come home and hold his daughter again or listen quietly to his wife talking about her day; how does a mom come home and retake her role as mom. How do the children cope at home, at school on the playground? How lonely might it be for the single soldier coming home to a barracks room? All the while the future appears to hold fast to an appetite for even more deployments and combat operations.

Do we just ignore it and hope for the best? Do we create check the block programs that make might make some leaders sleep better knowing that they put money into a program that seems to address the issue of the day ... Or do we listen and think and work and develop a plan that addresses these issues, tenaciously follows the flight of each one until we conclusively and satisfactorily bring these issues into the light of day, and work them at all levels and with all military departments and if necessary through OSD and into the halls of Congress.

Well that's what's happening in Garmisch this week as delegates from around the European theater push through the fog of war and bureaucracy and emerge with tangible deliverable issues and recommendations for the EUCOM and Service Component Leadership to take on in the months and years ahead. It is the EUCOM annual Quality of Life Conference and it developed issues raised by the grass root delegates.

This precious conference is unique to Department of Defense; no other COCOM has a comparable program. It has had many past victories that support the health and welfare of our forces, and our families and many yet to come.

Army COL Michael Godfrey
Director, ECJ1 (Manpower, Personnel and Administration)