.. ..Wreaths and nutcrackers adorn nearly every room in Wesley and Rebecca Thomas’ home, and the smell of deer jerky wafts from the kitchen. Their cabin-style house sits just outside Summerville on 900 acres of fields, forests and cattle.
During last year’s holidays, the decorations were displayed in all the same places. The Thomases’ six children — boys ranging from ages 6 to 21 — were all happy to have time off from school. At a glance, the scene looked the same except for one important thing.
The chair where Wesley Thomas usually sits was empty last Christmas. The head of the household was not home.
Instead of handing out presents to his family, Thomas spent Christmas distributing candy, fruitcake and Cokes to troops guarding nearly 400 miles of Iraqi highways.
Everything looked the same, but nothing truly was.
Thomas was in the middle of a 21-month deployment that began in 2004. His unit, the 108th Armor, 48th Brigade Alpha Company, is base
Hamilton Thomas wears the backpack he got while participating in an Operation Military Kids event Dec. 1. Contributed photo by Tom O’Connor |
d in nearby Calhoun. Deployment is tough for all soldiers and their families, but for families of National Guard and Reserve troops, the situation is complicated by walking away from one’s full-time job and leaving loved ones with no real support system.
“I left my wife with a cattle farm and six boys,” Wesley Thomas said. “We’re not on a base. Families have no support whatsoever.”
The Thomas family is just one example of a growing trend in Georgia and the United States — “suddenly military families.” These families are different because of their isola
Rebecca Thomas works with Operation Military Kids, a program to help support National Guard and Army Reserve families throughout Georgia. Contributed photo by Tom O’Connor |
tion. Even though active-duty families must make significant sacrifices as well, they often live on or near military bases, where there is help with childcare and transportation, and kids as well as adults are able to talk about their fears with others who truly understand.
Suddenly military families, like the Thomases, often don’t live near a base or any other resources for military families.
Leaving a life behind
Along with leaving the farm and children, Thomas left his wife one piece of advice when he was deployed in January 2004: Don’t watch the news.
“Wesley didn’t want us to watch the news because he said things weren’t as they seemed on TV,” Rebecca Thomas said. “But we knew where he was going, so we always listened for that area or for the 108th.”
For their son Garrett, 11, watching the news and listening for news of his father’s battalion became “an obsession,” according to his mother. Reading and watching the news was not only routine at home, where his mother could monitor him, but also at school, where reading the newspapers was part of his gifted education class.
“Other kids would ask him about his dad every day,” Rebecca Thomas said. “He would watch TV and read the papers. I know he was just waiting for bad news.”
The worst news about Thomas’ Iraq service came not on TV or in the newspaper, but through a phone call in July 2005.
“I saw it was an Atlanta number calling, one that I wasn’t familiar with,” Rebecca Thomas recalled. “They told me Wesley had been hit by an IED (improvised explosive device) and that he was injured and being treated, but that’s all they could tell me. I didn’t know how badly he was injured, whether he was still in Iraq or transported to Germany ... nothing.”
After the phone call, she told the kids what little she knew about their dad.
“I let the kids know he’d been injured but really downplayed it so it wouldn’t upset them so bad,” Rebecca Thomas said. “We all sat down and wrote cards to him and talked about it.”
Because Thomas was not stationed at a base where computers and telephone service were readily available, weeks sometimes passed before he replied to messages from his wife and children. On this occasion, the Thomas family waited for two days that felt longer than two months.
“When he told me he was going to be OK, I was actually mad,” Rebecca Thomas remembered. It turns out Thomas called his wife after the attack but did not inform her of what took place. “He said ‘Once I heard your voice, I just couldn’t tell you what happened.’”
Meanwhile, back on the farm, Rebecca Thomas also worried about the impact his absence had on her sons and the family business. Being a single parent even temporarily was tough.
Each child responded differently and needed something different. While Garrett worried about bulletins from the front, second-oldest son Matthew, 17, asserted himself and seized a major role overseeing the farm and managing the cattle. Their youngest child Hamilton, 6, no longer wanted to sleep by himself and insisted on sleeping with his mother. Known for his cheery disposition, young Hamp, as they call him, became anxious about his father’s absence.
“I really worried about them,” Rebecca Thomas said. “We didn’t know any other kids going through the same thing for them to talk to. Other parents didn’t understand either.”
Challenges of suddenly military families
Although every family is different, the practical and emotional challenges faced by Rebecca Thomas and her sons are shared, one way or another, by most other reserve and guard families.
“For these kids, their mom or dad probably puts on a suit or something non-military and goes to work every day. Their community connections are non-military,” said Carolyn
Stevens, Family Member Program Specialist for the Air Force Reserve Command in Warner Robins. “Their whole point of reference is not connected to the military at all. They really don’t have anyone readily available to talk to.”
Not only that, but the mechanics of childcare and the economic impact of deployment are not the same as for active-duty families.
“Bases have childcare and after-school programs, and reserve families do not,” Stevens said. When it comes to pocketbook issues, hazard pay causes income to rise dramatically for active-duty families — only to fall when the soldier returns home. A family whose guard member is the family’s biggest wage earner, on the other hand, may see a substantial decline in earnings during deployment.
For the children of volunteer soldiers, the “suddenly military kids,” deployment can very easily be a traumatic event.
Because the alarm about the global War on Terror has been sounded so incessantly since 2001, “there is a flood of information children can’t quite get away from,” Stevens said. “The world has become a smaller and more dangerous place because of it.”
Help on the way
Operation Military Kids is stepping up to try to make the world a friendlier and safer place for children whose lives are turned upside down when their parent is here today and gone tomorrow.
“We look to help a family that is not attached to resources and support systems because they are not on a base,” said Sharon Gibson, extension specialist for the Children, Youth and Families at Risk initiative based at the University of Georgia. “We simply see what can be put in place to meet these needs. Our primary purpose is to find a way to help suddenly military families in isolated communities across the state.”
Gibson oversees the program in Athens alongside Casey Mull, state military coordinator for Georgia 4-H. Mull said the program was developed nationally as a result of suddenly military families’ lack of base resources.
“These people don’t view themselves as military families,” Mull said, “but they need the same support, which base families receive. We try to lay the groundwork so there are support systems in each county for these families to rely on. Then, we try to inform the families of these resources as well as inform civic groups and school administrators there are families in their communities dealing with these things.”
Georgia 4-H has received funding for a second year to continue the work of focusing on “military families in our own backyard.”
The program is a collaborative effort, sponsored by the federal Department of Agriculture and Georgia 4-H. It’s funded by U.S. Army Child and Youth Services and administrated out of the University of Georgia’s Department of Family and Consumer Sciences.
Operation Military Kids, which started in a handful of states four years ago, has now expanded to 34 states with promises of increased coverage in 2007. In Georgia, OMK started in October 2005 and looks to build a ground-up approach to supporting the kids of Georgia’s volunteer soldiers.
“The program is really instituted on a local level,” Mull said. “Some communities have great resources in place that we connect to. Others need more brick and mortar to build support systems. At the end of the day, each county’s extension agent is key in seeing that the program is run in their county. They just let us know what they need.”
Wearing 2 hats
And 200 miles away from the Georgia 4-H headquarters at UGA, Rebecca Thomas is intimately familiar with Operation Military Kids — but not because outreach workers from Athens identified her family during her husband’s deployment.
She’s the 4-H extension agent for Gordon County.
Rebecca Thomas recently held an Operation Military Kids day camp for about 60 children at her office. Once the kids walked in the door, Rebecca Thomas and her assistants led activities including games and nature walks. They even participated in the “Walk to Baghdad,” in which participants walk and add all of their miles together in an attempt to promote healthy lifestyles.
The most important benefit of a day camp like this is that it “gives the kids a sense of belonging,” Rebecca Thomas said. Her main objective was to connect these kids and families to show they are not going through this alone, if only for the afternoon.
The younger Thomas children participate in Operation Military Kids. Hamp looks forward to a chance to make new friends and “march around like my Dad.” Garrett has outgrown some of the activities but helps his mother plan and supervise them. As a senior at Chattooga High School, Matthew has undergone public speaking training and gives talks about the needs of suddenly military kids.
Advocacy is a key part of the Operation Military Kids mission, Rebecca Thomas said. She’s spoken to administrators and teachers at local schools to raise awareness of challenges these children face. And she’s talked to civic groups that have taken up the cause and spread the word more and more widely. Some people are so touched by what they learn about suddenly military kids that “they just want to change the world,” she said.
Rebecca Thomas’ dual perspective on the issue makes her unique among Georgia’s County Extension Agents. “Sometimes in this situation it’s hard to be an extension agent and a wife and a mom,” she said, “but these kids need someone to talk to, not just their parents. They need to make friends like them that understand.”
Even though Thomas and the 108th returned home in 2006, Rebecca Thomas’ work with Operation Military Kids isn’t finished. She continues helping families cope with the emotional and practical stresses that accompany both deployment and reunion.
And she has a lot to do at home as well. Along with her husband and children, she’s getting ready for a full house on a memorable Christmas Day. Although the Thomas family has traveled many miles since last year — both physically and emotionally — this Christmas marks a return to normalcy down on the farm.
