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Military kids tell how tough deployments can be

Jun- 3-2008 » Filed Under: Homefront

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MICHAEL GILBERT, The News Tribune

Emi Geye likely knows at least as much about how combat deployments affect soldiers’ children as the psychiatrists, school counselors and pediatricians who filled the room around her Monday.

Her Army dad has been deployed three times since 2002 – twice for 15 months, and once for 12 – and he just left their DuPont home Monday morning for another three-week assignment in Iraq.

So the experts who gathered at McChord Air Force Base for a three-day summit on behavioral health issues for military children and teens hung on the 16-year-old’s every word.

When a parent is sent off to war, Emi said, the remaining parent and the kids need separate places to go when they’re driving each other crazy.

“And afterwards, there has to be a mandatory rehabilitation cycle,” she said.

“Deployment is a handicap that needs to be rehabilitated. An appendage of your family has been lost, and now you have to figure out how to work with it again,” she said.

Just the kind of “concrete, specific, actionable items” that Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army’s top psychiatrist, said she and the service’s medical leadership are looking for out of the McChord summit. About 150 people from across the Army and other services as well as academics and civilian counselors and school officials are attending.

In the last year, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health and others have all called for increased attention to the behavioral health needs of military children.

“I think we all know that this is such an important subject,” Ritchie said. “We need to really move out on it and stick to it.”

This week’s meetings, sponsored by Madigan Army Medical Center, follow a statewide conference last November aimed at increasing public awareness of military children’s issues. [...]


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