Military kids at Fort Hood share hardships

Children of Conflict
Since 9/11, more than a million kids have had a parent deployed. Their childhoods often go with them.


By Jessica Ramirez NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 6, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009

The Harding girls have their own name for the local Applebee's—"the bad-news place." The last two times their father was sent to Iraq, he took his young daughters there and broke it to them as gently as he knew how, over a sampler platter and soft drinks. "I just tell them, 'Here's what's going on in the world, and this is what I have to go do'," says Sgt. First Class Sean Harding. Since the Army doesn't say just when a deployment is supposed to end, he offers his best guess with a three-month margin of error: "?'If everything goes right, I'll be back sometime within these 90 days'." He says other things, too. He tells the girls that they have to help their mother take care of the house and each other, that he may not come back, and that if he doesn't, each daughter will get a last letter from him. He won't discuss the contents, but in essence the letters would give his final wishes and try to say how much he loves them. "We all started crying," says Courtney, 14. "Nobody wanted to hear that he might not come back."

Of the troops deployed since 9/11, roughly 890,000 have been parents. Their children know firsthand the sadness and worry that the Harding girls live with every time their father is in Iraq. Repeated 12- to 15-month deployments are an ordeal not only for the troops, but also for their families. In effect, an essential piece of those kids' lives has been sent off to war, although the children themselves haven't volunteered for anything. The personal sacrifices of military kids can go unnoticed amid the grown-ups' struggles, in part because the scars they may sustain aren't necessarily the visible kind. But they are real and long-lasting, and they are not diminished by the fact that levels of violence in Iraq have dropped or that U.S. troops are no longer taking the lead on combat operations there.
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