What Matters Most - Life in a Military Family

To set the macro- and micro-stage for where I was in Fall 2017, when I was applying?to business schools, it's important to understand where I was - Camp Hovey, Republic of Korea, roughly 15 km from the Demilitarized Zone.

I was also facing one of the hardest personal battles I never could have anticipated. My soldier had passed by suicide and I was blaming myself constantly.

Finally, I was applying to business schools, looking for my next step after the Army. One application asked an essay question:

“What matters most to you and why??

Woof. What mattered to me most at that moment was getting through our nine month rotation to South Korea at this point.

Then I started to think, what mattered most to me was my family, who I missed very much, but not just that they were my family.

Going back to August 2018, when I started at McCombs, many of my classmates asked each other two questions -

"What is your name?"

"Where are you from?"

...the second being a question I used to get across the aisle at every new school.

For me, it’s complicated.

???????? While many children spent their entire lives in the same school district or even the same house, every few years my family was uprooted for my father’s military career.

“Well, where are your parents from?”

The next option was finding a common location for my parents’ upbringing. My father spent most of his childhood in New England, whereas my mother was from New Jersey. They met in El Paso, Texas, got married, and continued to move every few years. Could you imagine trying to explain this to an innocent classmate trying to be nice to the new kid?

Service to country has been in my family throughout every major conflict in United States history, dating back to my ancestor Benjamin Rowe serving as a messenger for General George Washington through Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. With only 1% of American citizens serving in the military, many experts say that a military caste has established a cycle of service in military families and has only amplified the civilian-military divide. Do military children lack options or feel forced to join the military? Why not revolt and do something different?

Being a military child means that at an early age you are exposed to things that some adults could not even imagine: your parents and loved ones leaving for long periods of time, going to a far away place, and sometimes rarely getting to speak to them, or even being old enough to truly understand. Even with technology these days, we have photos taken nearly 30 years apart of me with my father returning from Desert Storm in 1991 and my niece saying goodbye to my brother in law in 2015 that show the same level of sheer emotion that encompasses these experiences.?

Deployments aside, I was 14 years old when my father was the assistant commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. In the course of that year, he represented the unit at over 50 funerals of soldiers killed in action in Iraq, which averages out to be a funeral every 7 days. At the time, I was a selfish teenager - my main thought about the military was that it took me away from my friends and school every two years and most of the time, I would not always see my dad on the sidelines at my games. At one point, my dad asked if I wanted to accompany him a few hours away to the funeral service for CPT Kimberly Hampton, a pilot that was killed in Iraq. CPT Hampton was a former college athlete and a woman that a 14 year old like me would want to look up to. Her funeral services in her small hometown of Easley, South Carolina was noted as the biggest thing that had ever happened in Easley.?

"As a first-grader, Kimberly Hampton spent so much time playing soccer against the boys that her teacher mentioned it at a parent-teacher conference. Was she the only girl playing, her mother asked, and the teacher said she was. Was it a problem? The teacher said no: It’s nice to see the boys get beat.

When she died, she was the first U.S. female pilot to be shot down in combat, the first woman in the 82nd Airborne Division to die, and the first woman from South Carolina to die in this war." - War Comes Home in a Coffin, LA Times, Feb 2. 2004

Something about this experience has always awakened in me a sense of pride, but also great sadness. I look back on that experience when I am embarrassed by my lack of hometown. I still fight the tears as I watch families burying their parent, their sibling, their child, and think about their sacrifices. How can someone be so selfless to give up their life for a concept like “Service to Country”?

While many foreign militaries swear an oath to a leader, members of the United States military take an oath to our Constitution. I remember taking my oath as a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant on December 17, 2011 and my father serving as my first salute as an officer. Seven years later, I knew the impact of my father’s service on me, but what impact would my service have?

Years later, I recognize that I have military experience of my own, including deployments to Afghanistan and South Korea. I chose to leave the active military service that has defined my life to take a step outside of my comfort zone into the business world.? From the day I was born in New York through the eight moves before graduating high school, I witnessed my father exemplify selfless service. I have used those experiences to shape my own career in the military and have done my best to emulate him as a leader, a soldier, and person.

Without the support of my mother, I would not even be here today, as she has spent the last nearly 50 years caring for all of us, being at every significant event,? and still having the time to make sure that care packages were in the mail for us and our soldiers. At one point, she had family members deployed for more consecutive years than one could count on one hand. She was even faster than Amazon when I was in Afghanistan.

As a child, I thought not having a hometown was embarrassing and frustrating; something that made me strange and unusual. These days, I find pride in the selfless service of my father, my family, and myself.? The question has become easier to answer, but an answer that evokes more than just a place, an answer that conveys what truly matters most to me - being open about my experiences and taking the opportunity to share what it’s like to not only be a veteran, but to also be part of a family that has given everything they can to let you know that you are worth it. To help us bridge the gap between the cycle of military families and the rest of society and to take time to help veterans and military cross the bridge onto their next path.?

So now, when I get asked, “Where are you from?”

I say:

"nowhere",

I think:

“I’m from a family who has lived to support an ideal, a concept of selfless service, and for this country, so others do not have to."

and I live:

I'll do anything to bridge the military-civilian gap, to make it easier for others veterans like me.