The Bush-Obama War on the American Military Family

"The effects of military deployment on the youngest children are only just beginning to be understood," writes Faye Fiore — When Daddy's gone for a whole year. "With the nation at war for eight years, one of the longest stretches in American history, a generation of military children is growing up with a parent in combat," she writes. "War demands a price from military families. Sometimes it's a life, sometimes a limb, sometimes a marriage. But experts are becoming acutely aware that it can also be the well-being of children." She reports:

According to the Department of Defense, about 2 million children in the U.S. are growing up in military families; an estimated 200,000 have a parent at war at any given time.

The Pentagon offers programs to help [sic] young families, but the strains of this war are unique from wars past. Deployments are longer and more frequent; some families are on their fifth tour. The stress of the mission is greater across the board — there are no noncombat assignments in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Rates of divorce and child abuse have climbed. Even in families that appear to be holding up, there is concern over the consequences of interrupting early parent-child bonds, when the service member is gone for a year, home for a year, then gone again. A single deployment can be half a toddler's lifetime.

Remember that Bill Kauffman, who told us in his book Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism that "[w]ar... is good for nothing a genuine conservative might cherish," observed at the beginning of these fool wars that "the first casualty of the militarized U.S. state is the family" — George Bush, the Anti-Family President.