With a Parent Off Again at War, a Holiday of Pride and Isolation

From the NY Times on Christmas Day:

As everyone prepares for Christmas tomorrow we should all think about the children whose parents are deployed and consider the toll the last 11 years has taken on military children and all the holidays and birthdays that have been missed because their parents are serving our nation.  Freedom is not free and so many children are also paying the price.  But we should also be proud of their strength.

V/R

Dave

With a Parent Off Again at War, a Holiday of Pride and Isolation

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/us/with-a-parent-at-war-a-holiday-deepens-the-isolation.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Mercedes Patterson, 16, helped Tango Jackson, 17, with his ROTC uniform tie in the hallway at Fort Campbell High School at the Army post in Kentucky. More Photos »

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: December 24, 2012

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Signs of the season have been everywhere at Fort Campbell High School over the last couple of weeks: a student soloist sang the Carpenters’ “Merry Christmas, Darling” at the annual holiday concert, a big tree sparkled in the cafeteria under the Screaming Eagle emblem of the 101st Airborne Division, and thousands of parents were deployed yet again in Afghanistan.

It is nothing unusual for Alexandra Alfield, a 17-year-old senior whose father, a Special Forces soldier, has been gone since August and for six of the last nine years. “I do miss him,” she said, “but I’m just so accustomed to it.”

As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 66,000 American troops from Afghanistan, the parents of Fort Campbell students are still going off to war.

Nearly 10,000 men and women from the 101st Airborne, a third of the active-duty troops based here, are either in Afghanistan or getting ready to go. Still more parents here have been deployed with units like the Fifth Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, whose members piloted the helicopters in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

That has made the high school, which is run by the Defense Department and is one of only four secondary schools on military bases in the United States, something of a window into the pain, pride and resentment felt by the families of the all-volunteer military force, which has borne the burdens of 11 years of war.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/us/with-a-parent-at-war-a-holiday-deepens-the-isolation.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all