Columnist explains to the kids what her fighter pilot husband actually does.

The phone call from Baghdad came at the appointed time, and Ethan was ready.

“Daddy, I’ve been thinking more about your next job,” Ethan said, as if tidying up loose conversational threads. In fact, I’d never heard our 6-year-old mention any concerns about his father’s possible future career; in the four months since my husband left, he had never mentioned it to me.

“I decided you should be a fireman. Or a policeman. Or—I know! A trash collector. Something that really helps people. Don’t you want to help people, Daddy?” It was as if Scott had spent the last 19 years of his career as Bernie Madoff’s confidential assistant, rather than as an active-duty Navy pilot with multiple deployments to war zones.

I didn’t hear my husband’s response, which I assume was pleasantly noncommittal. But I was horrified and apologized to Scott as soon as Ethan handed me the phone. In military marriages, the service member’s spouse typically takes on the role of pep-talk-giver. When the kid is sad about Dad’s absence, wonders why Dad has to be away for so long, or demands to know why someone else can’t do the job, Mom responds encouragingly that service members help people wherever they go, and that they are heroes we should admire.

Did I fail at my job somehow? I am heart-burstingly proud of American service members. The simple fact that they sacrifice their time to a cause greater than themselves makes them heroes to me. But I’ve always resisted telling my children any details about their father’s job. I’ve never mentioned war to them because I fear it will haunt their dreams and hound their days. Our 4-year-old daughter, Esther, has already asked me several times if Daddy is dead—though at that age, as I have discovered, children don’t have a clear concept of death. They equate it with absence and separation rather than a permanent end. But still. It’s not a fun conversation.

So I’ve always told both children that Dad was flying his plane far away, and that although he hated to be apart from them, it was part of his job. They never asked further questions, and I never volunteered more.

Ethan’s phone chatter convinced me that I’d been too vague and needed to reassess what they were ready to hear. Summarizing a complicated situation for small ears isn’t easy, as any parent knows, but I now realized that if I said nothing, both of my children would become even more worried and insecure. We have 10 months to go until Scott’s deployment is completed. To a child, that’s forever.

A military chaplain I am friendly with suggested that I talk to the kids about specific aspects of Scott’s job they can visualize. “Use me,” he urged. “Tell them my story.” I’d already been considering that. In 2003, this chaplain was on an assignment in Iraq with the Marines when the unit was caught up in a bitter firefight with local insurgents. Scott’s Carrier Air Wing had been assigned to fly overhead, providing air support and protection. The chaplain’s life was saved by a Marine who later received a Bronze Star for his bravery.

The dramatic particulars of the story are breathtaking, and the fact that Scott was flying over our friend that day (which we discovered only recently through an offhand remark) has prompted me to rethink the nature of chance. The chaplain, who believes not in coincidence but in divine intervention, has urged me to tell my kids that Scott was his “guardian angel.” Since Ethan and Esther have both met this chaplain, sketching the outlines of his story made sense. I could then ease my way backward into a child-appropriate explanation of what Navy pilots do, and let the children come to their own conclusions.

Ethan and Esther were electrified by the story of the chaplain and their father flying overhead. “Tell it again,” they begged me, over and over and over. Their hunger for this morsel of their father’s life away from them convinced me that I’d starved them far too long.

A few weeks later, I was talking to Esther’s teacher about her progress at school. My daughter still clung to me every morning, sobbing, even after more than a month. I reflexively blame all of our family’s problems on my husband’s deployment, usually before I have a chance to reflect too deeply on the issue at hand, and this time was no different. “Is she still saying that Scott’s dead?” I asked.

Tags: deployment diary, Iraq, Military Wives, telling kids about deployment

Alison Buckholtz is the author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War.

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