We Talk a Lot As a Nation About Service Members and Veterans. What We Don’t Do Well Is Include Them.
Gestures of support for military families often miss the mark.
JULY 10, 2024| VALERIE SUTTEE
Andrew waited long enough to be born a North Carolinian. After weeks in an Extended Stay America in Jacksonville, North Carolina, our family finally got a move-in date for our tiny base house—and the belongings we’d long been parted from moved back in with us.
As the sky darkened on a late July day spent almost entirely on my swollen feet, I waddled down the staircase from the girls’ room and mentally prepared for the next day. Boxes to unpack. Groceries to buy. We would start with the kitchen and go from there. Now that we’d made it into the house, I needed to pack a hospital bag too. I reached the third step from the bottom, and I knew.
My third child, Andrew, reported for duty at 6:39 a.m., 10 days early and on day two in our new home. He arrived six months before Y2K, joining a peacetime Marine Corps where deployments were for training, not combat. That would soon change, but he would never remember the time before.
We moved to Virginia when Andrew was two years old and then on to Australia when he was five, returning to North Carolina three times before he entered high school. I would say he’s Tar Heel born and bred, but he would not like that. He’d decided as a young teenager, standing in the sports team section of our local Kmart, that he preferred the Wolfpack red of North Carolina State University to the distinctive Tar Heel blue of its rival.
https://thewarhorse.org/military-and-veteran-family-support-often-misses-the-mark/
