We Broke Our Promise to Take Care of Gold Star Families
Military.com | By Jennifer Barnhill
Published May 24, 2024 at 9:49am ET
Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.
There is an unspoken promise America has whispered to service members and their families for centuries: If something happens to you, we will take care of your family.
And in many ways, as individuals, we honor this promise. Military spouses line up meal trains and show up to sit with families in grief. Commands go above and beyond to remember the fallen and to embrace their families. Service members pull all-nighters driving in their dress blues to deliver the worst possible news to unmarried partners because the military doesn't have a process to notify anyone other than the next of kin. We do our best to honor this promise, and we hope that others would do the same for us.
Because we don't often talk about this promise, we don't have to face up to the fact that, as a nation, we have not kept it well. Instead of living up to President Abraham Lincoln's promise to "care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan," we have left the widows, widowers and orphans to battle bureaucracy alone.
"I just remember talking to him on that Friday. ... I could just hear the smile in his voice. He was happy. He was doing what he wanted to do. And then on Sunday is when they knocked on my door and told me that he was gone," said Marcie Robertson, whose husband was killed in combat while deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.
Robertson had met her husband, Army Sgt. 1st Class Forrest Robertson, when they were in preschool. They dated throughout high school and got married a few days after 9/11 at a DMV temporarily housed in a JCPenney department store. Their military marriage was tested by the birth of children and countless wartime deployments.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/05/24/we-broke-our-promise-take-care-of-gold-star-families.html
