Toll of War in Middle East

A Fearful Price

Bob Herbert

New York Times

December 8, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/opinion/08herbert.html?_r=1

I spoke recently with a student at Columbia who was enthusiastic about the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way to truly win the war.

He was a very bright young man: thoughtful and eager and polite. I asked him if he had any plans to join the military and help make this grand mission a success. He said no.

There was an article in The Times on Monday about a new study showing that the eight years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking an emotional toll on the children of service members and that the difficulties increased the longer parents were deployed.

There is no way that the findings of this study should be a surprise to anyone. It just confirms that the children of those being sent into combat are among that tiny percentage of the population that is unfairly shouldering the entire burden of these wars.

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again — for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours — is obscene. All decent people should object.

We already knew that in addition to the many thousands who have been killed or physically wounded, hundreds of thousands have returned with very serious psychological wounds: deep depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and so on. Other problems are also widespread: alcohol and drug abuse, family strife, homelessness.

The new study, by the RAND Corporation, was published in the journal Pediatrics. The children surveyed were found to have higher levels of emotional difficulties than their peers in the general population.

According to the study:

“Older youth and girls of all ages reported significantly more school, family and peer-related difficulties with parental deployment. Length of parental deployment and poorer non-deployed caregiver mental health were significantly associated with a greater number of challenges for children, both during deployment and deployed parent reintegration.”

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

To say that this is a national disgrace is to wallow in the shallowest understatement. The nation will always give lip-service to support for the troops, but for the most part Americans do not really care about the men and women we so blithely ship off to war, and the families they leave behind.

The National Military Family Association, which commissioned the RAND study, has poignant comments from the children of military personnel on its Web site.

You can tell immediately how much more real the wars are to those youngsters than to most Americans:

“I hope it’s not him on the news getting hurt.”

“Most of my grades dropped because I was thinking about my dad, because my dad’s more important than school.”

“Mom will be in her room and we hear her crying.”

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

I don’t think our current way of waging war, which is pretty easy-breezy for most citizens, is what the architects of America had in mind. Here’s George Washington’s view, for example: “It must be laid down as a primary position and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal service to the defense of it.”

What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it.

*************

Deployments Taking Toll on Military’s Children

James Dao

New York Times

December 7, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/us/07study.html

After eight years of war, children with parents in the military are reporting signs of emotional wear and tear from long and repeated deployments, a new study shows.

The study by the RAND Corporation found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in the general population. The researchers also found that the longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the more likely their children were to have difficulties in school and at home.

Those difficulties included things like missing school activities, feeling that people did not understand their problems, having to take care of siblings and struggling to deal with parents returning from deployment.

The study, which was to be published Monday by the journal Pediatrics, is considered the largest on the subject, and was based on telephone interviews with nearly 1,500 children, ages 11 to 17, and their primary caregivers. It was commissioned by the National Military Family Association, a nonprofit support group.

Anita Chandra, the primary investigator, said she was surprised by the correlation between the months a parent was deployed and the problems reported by their children. “We thought the challenges of deployment would wane as the deployment went on,” Ms. Chandra said in an interview.

Almost all of the families in the study, 95 percent, said a parent had deployed in the previous three years; those deployments lasted on average a total of 11 months.

The researchers found that children in families that lived on military bases tended to report fewer difficulties related to deployment than children who lived off post.

“Potentially, people living on post are more connected to support services,” Ms. Chandra said, adding that 70 percent of military children live outside military bases.

The study also found that many families encountered difficulties adjusting to the return of a deployed parent, a period known as reintegration.

For instance, Ms. Chandra said, the researchers found that caregivers who worked were more likely to report that their children were having problems during reintegration than caregivers who did not work. The vast majority of those caregivers were women.

Ms. Chandra said it was possible that the strain of reintegration was compounded by the stress on the family of a nondeployed parent’s job. But being employed is generally considered good for the mental health of a caregiver during deployment, she said.

The study found that girls tended to have more problems than boys during reintegration, and that older children struggled more during and after deployments than younger children. The researchers speculated that the pressure on girls and older children to assume household responsibilities might be one reason for the difference.

Ms. Chandra said the study suggested that the military should consider directing services to families during the later stages of long deployments, when more families report problems.

She said one potential shortcoming of the study was that its subjects were selected from applicants to a free camp sponsored by the National Military Family Association, called Operation Purple. She said it was possible that those families were not representative of the average military family.

**********

Views from the Home Front

The Experience of Children from Military Families

Rand Corporation

December 7, 2009

http://www.militaryfamily.org/assets/pdf/Rand-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Research has begun to document the challenges faced by members of the U.S. military in deploying for war and reintegrating into life at home. But little is known about how wartime experience and parental deployments are affecting the children from military families. A RAND study commissioned by the National Military Family Association addressed this issue. The research is among the first to explore how these children are faring academically, socially, and emotionally during an extended period of wartime. Results show that children from military families studied may be experiencing above average levels of emotional and behavioral difficulties, relative to national norms. Further, longer periods of deployment were associated with greater levels of challenges both during deployment and afterward.

RAND researchers surveyed 1,500 military children (applicants to Operation Purple® summer camps, a program of the National Military Family Association for children of military service members) as well as each child’s non-deployed parent (or other primary caregiver) by phone. The children’s average age was 13 (range 11–17 years); 47 percent were girls. Approximately 57 percent of children had a parent in the Army, 20 percent in the Air Force, approximately 17 percent in the Navy, and the remainder were in the Marine Corps or Coast Guard. The majority of the military parents were in the Active Component, with approximately 37 percent in the National Guard or Reserve. Ninety-five percent of children had experienced at least one parental deployment in the last three years, and nearly 40 percent were experiencing a parental deployment at the time of the interview.

Analysis of the data showed the following:

■ Children in military families experienced emotional and behavioral difficulties at rates above national averages.

■ About one-third of the children reported symptoms of anxiety, which is somewhat higher than the percentage reported in other studies of children.

■ Self-reported problems varied by age and gender: Older youths and boys reported more difficulties with school and more problem behaviors, such as fighting; greater numbers of younger children (compared with older children) and girls reported anxiety symptoms.

The results also revealed challenges posed specifically by deployment:

■ Longer periods of parental deployment (within the past three years) were linked to greater difficulties in children’s social and emotional functioning, at least based on caregiver reports.

■ Deployment-related challenges varied by age and gender: Older youths experienced greater school- and peer-related difficulties during deployment; girls experienced greater difficulties during the period of reintegration than did boys.

********

Children on the Homefront: The Experience of Children From Military Families

Anita Chandra, Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo, Lisa H. Jaycox, Terri Tanielian, Rachel M. Burns, Teague Ruder, and Bing Han

Pediatrics 2010;125:13–22

December 7, 2009

Note: the entire report can be seen here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/peds.2009-1180v1

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Although studies have begun to explore the impact of the current wars on child well-being, none have examined how children are doing across social, emotional, and academic domains. In this study, we describe the health and well-being of children from military families from the perspectives of the child and nondeployed parent. We also assessed the experience of deployment for children and how it varies according to deployment length and military service component.

METHODS: Data from a computer-assisted telephone interview with military children, aged 11 to 17 years, and nondeployed caregivers (n = 1507) were used to assess child well-being and difficulties with deployment. Multivariate regression analyses assessed the association between family characteristics, deployment histories, and child outcomes.

RESULTS: After controlling for family and service-member characteristics, children in this study had more emotional difficulties compared with national samples. Older youth and girls of all ages reported significantly more school-, family-, and peer-related difficulties with parental deployment (P <.01). Length of parental deployment and poorer nondeployed caregiver mental health were significantly associated with a greater number of challenges for children both during deployment and deployed-parent reintegration (P_.01). Family characteristics (e.g., living in rented housing) were also associated with difficulties with deployment.

CONCLUSIONS: Families that experienced more total months of parental deployment may benefit from targeted support to deal with stressors that emerge over time. Also, families in which caregivers experience poorer mental health may benefit from programs that support the caregiver and child.