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Caring for One Another Unitarian Coastal Fellowship November 12, 2006 ©Rev. Sally B. White Years before I was born, my father was drafted into the United States Army. He was a college student at the time, living at home and studying engineering. After three student deferments, he was called into service, trained in the Engineer Corps at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and shipped to Hawaii as a construction engineer. On Sunday morning, December 7 1941, he was eating breakfast when Japanese planes attacked the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. As a child I heard the two or three sweet or funny stories my father would tell about his wartime military experience. There was his description of embarking for Hawaii; the solemn and awesome beauty of sailing through the Golden Gate and into the Pacific. There was the one about putting ketchup on his scrambled eggs at that fateful Sunday morning breakfast, and how he would never dare try that again, not after what happened on that morning. And there was the romantic story of how he met my mother, at a New Year’s Eve party when he was stationed in Scotland: how he could not forget the young Scottish girl with the poetry in her soul, and how he brought her to the States after the war to marry him. All this happened years before I was born. What I never experienced, have never experienced, is what it is like to stay at home when someone I loved went away to war. I can only imagine how the love, the loneliness, the pride, the worry, the uncertainty, the fear must feel. I can only imagine, even though I live within fifty miles of Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune. I can only imagine, even though every day, on the street and in the stores and offices where I do business, and in the neighborhood where I live, I encounter active-duty military personnel and their families. I can only imagine, even though more than one family in this congregation includes a serviceman or servicewoman, and more than one of you has lit candles of love and concern for loved ones serving overseas in Afghanistan or Kuwait or Iraq, and even though I have talked with you, and asked you how it’s going and how you feel, and listened to your brave and hopeful and painful and fearful stories. I can only imagine, even though more than once in the past three years a young military wife has come to this church as a visitor, and introduced herself in a voice shaky with tears and fear and desperate courage, looking for a community to help support her while her husband is overseas – and each time, she has soon stopped coming. I can only imagine, and it turns out that in this I am not alone. “Most Americans no longer personally know what it’s like to send someone you love to war.” [Kristin Henderson. 2006. While They’re At War. p. vii]. My authority for this statement is Kristin Henderson, a journalist, a Quaker, wife of an active-duty Navy chaplain serving with the Marines who has served in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I want to check to see whether it is true here. Will you raise your hand if you, like me, have never waited at home while someone you loved went away to fight in a war? [I expect lots of raised hands] Kristin Henderson has recently published a book called While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront, which offers an intimate look at her own experience and the experiences of a number of other military families, and the issues they face, and the resources they may or may not draw upon before, during and after the deployments of their loved ones. I read the book this past week, and found it heartbreaking and unsettling and inspiring and profoundly moving, and I recommend it to each one of you, and especially to those who raised their hands with me. Many of the stories Kristin Henderson tells are stories of families at Fort Bragg; she herself was at Camp Lejeune. They have the ring of absolute truth, and absolute honesty. And the book is predicated on the following premise, which I quote: “Despite the fact that America is once again engaged in major combat operations overseas, most Americans have only a limited grasp of what it means to go to war, and no wonder. The Persian Gulf War and the Iraq and Afghan Wars a decade later are the first major wars in America’s history that have been fought without broad-based conscription to mobilize all levels of American society. Going forward, this is a potentially ominous development for our democracy. In a country of nearly three hundred million people, only two and a half million serve in the active-duty armed forces, the Reserves and the National Guard. Only these warriors and their families are experiencing the day-to-day sacrifices, small and large, that war requires. Yet in our American democracy, the warriors themselves don’t get to decide when those sacrifices are to be made. Civilians make that decision. It’s up to our civilian congress to declare war. It’s up to our civilian president to send the troops into battle. And it’s up to the civilians who elect those leaders to pay attention, to make sure that the cause of the hour is worth the sacrifices being made on their behalf.” [end of quote] [Kristin Henderson. 2006. While They’re At War. p. 4] She wrote the book to offer to civilians like me some insight into the nature of those sacrifices on the part of troops and their families. I came away from the book, and from my own conversations with more than one military family, with some ideas about how we, as a religious community, might respond to those sacrifices by making ourselves available to some of these military families. There is much we might offer in the way of what I would call “practical” support. In Rolesville, North Carolina, Angel Meyer’s National Guard unit was activated and she was deployed to Iraq. At home, her husband Ken would box up a care package every week and send it to her; the clerks at the grocery story came to recognize when it was an “Angel shop night.” People in town, and in Oxford where the National Guard unit was based, and in Ken and Angel’s church, began offering and then collecting snack foods, sports equipment, magazines, sunscreen, hygiene products, socks, shipping boxes and cash for postage to send the stuff to Iraq. Operation: A Bit of Home flooded Ken’s home with 250 pounds of donations every week. [pp. 143-145] You, or I, or we, could send a care package or take up a collection, or sponsor one here in town. (When we asked for donations of used shoes for Afghan civilians a couple of years ago, we nearly got more shoes than we knew what to do with.) You, or I, or we, could adopt a unit, or support our members and friends who are or will be deployed. It has been suggested to me that we could donate phone cards, and send them those deployed, giving them and their families the gift of a conversation, of the voice of a loved one. When you’re in the military, you’re dealing with the government, and that means rules and regulations, details and paperwork. Before, during, and after deployment, there are legal issues and forms, and there are financial issues (military pay is rarely enough to support a family, and military families are easy prey for predatory lenders and exploitative business practices). Many military families use food stamps and WIC supplements to eke out the food budget. In case of casualty, a shocked and grieving family must then negotiate what Kristin Henderson calls “a rabbit hole of benefits changes, paperwork deadlines, legal issues, insurance payoffs, and financial decisions – a maze” [p. 77] that can be absolutely overwhelming. It occurs to me that someone who’s patient and good with details, or someone who is a lawyer or a counselor or a psychologist or an accountant might learn their way through that maze, and be able to offer guidance, advice, or at least support as families negotiate it. And I came away from the book, and from my conversations, with a dawning recognition of a yawning gulf of experience that separates these families from me and from all of us who have never sent a loved one off to war. Kristin Henderson puts it this way: “…for those of us who have waited for our loved ones to return from a combat zone, it’s like joining a secret society – when you encounter another member of that society, not much needs to be said.” [p. 4]. And not saying, not excavating those delicately balanced feelings is, for so many, a key part of their coping strategy. And so offering emotional support to families on the homefront is a much more delicate proposition than offering what I call “practical” support. Being here, being available and responsive as a church community can make a big difference. Military spouses, partners, families, some of them living on or near bases thousands of miles from parents and grandparents and extended family support systems, may seek a church family. On Fort Bragg Chaplain James Hartz sees military families coming to services week after week. “If you’re known there, and people come up to you on a weekly basis and ask how you are, you feel understood,” he observes. And Kristin Henderson adds, “Even though they’re not military, their concern and your shared faith can help you feel like you’re not in it alone.” [p. 136]. And I would add that it really has to be personal. The feeling of being understood has to be rooted in trust, and trust takes time and respect, and how much time and respect is enough is an entirely individual thing. This, I think, is why some of our visitors have come only once, and some have come four or five times and then just not come back. If we’re not military, even our concern and our caring may jeopardize a precarious emotional balance. With this in mind, you, or I, or we can be here, and maybe we can help. In schools on or very near military bases, teachers and administrators can help students and their parents adjust to the stresses of deployment. School can be a refuge – and island of structure and predictability in a sea of unpredictability and worry. Children are often more vulnerable, more fragile, than adults, and Kristin Henderson heartbreakingly likens children to “pigeons in the desert,” the Middle Eastern equivalent of canaries in coal mines, sensitive to dangers (in this case emotional dangers) at levels that most adults can still rise above. Teachers can learn to recognize the signs of anxiety, of overload, and can serve as a safety-net for students and for their families, sharing with parents what they see in the behavior and the responses of students, offering support, creative response, referrals. And the vast majority of military children attend public schools; what Kristin Henderson calls “a lot of stressed-out kids sitting in the classrooms of civilian teachers who really don’t know what they’re dealing with.” [p. 165]. What they’re dealing with is uncertainty and anxiety; trauma and grief; dislocation and compensation (children who try mightily to fill an absent parent’s shoes, or try to become Superchild, or Superstudent). Perhaps some of us can learn to recognize these signs and responses. Perhaps some of us can offer ourselves as resources to military children and to their families, in school or daycare; after school or on weekends or in the summer. As foster grandparents, or homework buddies, or play dates, we might offer welcome time and attention to children, and a welcome respite to parents who are trying to manage their own uncertainty, anxiety, dislocation, compensation, trauma or grief. In the absence of such resources, the stresses sometimes prove too great for military families to handle. Spouses who are isolated, depressed, overworked, under-nurtured, sleep-deprived, touch-deprived, overwhelmed sometimes reach a point where coping skills and parenting skills break down. “When sixteen years of child homicide data were gathered in North Carolina,” Henderson tells us, “two counties stood out with more than double the rate of any other county: Onslow and Cumberland counties, home to the state’s two biggest military installations, Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg.” [p. 180] . And children are not the only victims; re-entry and readjustment after a deployment takes a tragic toll on military personnel and spouses and marriages, too. Addressing life and death issues like these is not a job for amateurs. But those who care about and those who care for military families can notice changes in behavior: growing stress, withdrawal or isolation; can ask a question or reach out a hand. Sixty-five years ago, when my father went into the Army, a sermon like this would have been redundant. Nearly every family in town, nearly every member of the congregation would have known first-hand the experience of sending someone they love to war. Today’s reality – that so few of us know and so many of us can only imagine – is our blessing and our curse. On this Veteran’s Day weekend, how will you, and I, and we, respond to the challenge and the opportunity this reality offers to us: at once to pay responsible attention, in the words of Kristin Henderson “to make sure that the cause of the hour is worth the sacrifices being made on [our] behalf,” and also to pay compassionate attention to those who make the sacrifices. Take time now, in the gathered silence, to consider this holy paradox, and the response it calls forth from you. The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out… Bell Silence Music May it be so.
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