Chicago Sun Times February 29, 2004
Grasping for help at home
By Chris Fusco
SPRINGFIELD -- The talk among the soldiers' moms inside the wood-paneled VFW hall begins as you'd expect.
My son doesn't seem like himself. I wish he'd e-mail more. I miss him.
Then one of the women starts to cry.
Within seconds, they're all crying.
Their sons began rolling into Baghdad last Easter with the Army National Guard's 233rd Military Police Corps -- part of what has become the biggest combat deployment of reserve and National Guard troops since World War II.
Maybe they'll be home in two months. No one knows for sure.
And that makes the waiting even worse.
When, they ask, will it end? The loneliness, the strain of raising children, the worry over bills. Always the worrying.
"This is the first time we've been in an extended conflict with a volunteer force. We're learning as we go," said John Goheen, director of communications for the National Guard Association of the United States, a lobbying arm for the Guard in Washington. "Problems are being identified. Situations are being identified. Family support is an enormous issue."
Some of that support is now coming from a first-of-its-kind effort in Illinois.
Volunteers from the psychiatry department at the University of Illinois at Chicago are teaming with Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn's staff on a fledgling program to reach out to military families who often don't know what mental health services are available to them or are too embarrassed to seek treatment.
The extra help is particularly crucial for the families of Guard members and reservists who don't have the support network that relatives of career soldiers usually have at military bases.
Since launching a Web site called operationhomefront.org in April, Quinn's staff has been fielding at least a call a week from relatives of Guard members and reservists. Mostly the callers simply want someone to complain to. But the volunteers hope even that will keep families from being overwhelmed.
Late last year, a Downstate woman -- left alone to care for her three children when her husband was sent to Iraq -- tried to shoot herself in front of her kids. The attempt was unsuccessful, and the woman and her family have since been getting treatment.
"I've got one woman down in southern Illinois . . . the kid is coming home from school every day saying, 'Daddy's dead,' and the father hasn't even left the country yet," said Eric Schuller, a senior policy adviser for Quinn and a former guardsman. "And so they went and saw him [at his U.S. base], thinking it was going to solve the problem. It actually made it worse because the [5-year-old] had a second separation from his father in a very short period of time."
Military leaders and Quinn's staff emphasize that such cases are rare, but they're worried that more might spring up. By the end of May, Guard and reserve troops are expected to comprise 40 percent of the full-time fighting force in Iraq and more than 60 percent of troops in Afghanistan.
As of December, 192,000 Guard and reserve troops had been called up nationally, leaving behind 311,951 spouses, children and other dependents. In Illinois, there were 4,759 call-ups affecting 7,491 dependents.
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A week ago, about 125 family members of the 233rd Military Police gathered as they do each month at the Northenders VFW Post 10302 in Springfield. They ranged from a 5-month-old to an elderly woman walking with a cane.
The meeting started with the Pledge of Allegiance and a hard-to-follow discussion about what services are available for the troops when they return home, hopefully in April.
After a break for soda, coffee, chili and cookies, the meeting took an unusual turn.
"There's a major battle going on that doesn't get any publicity," said Steve Marcy, a Vietnam veteran and vice coordinator of the 233rd's Family Readiness Group. His 23-year-old son Brad has been in Iraq since April.
"That battle is the one that every one of you has been involved in. During the past year, you've been asked to carry on while your partner is away. . . . It's pushed you out of your box a little bit. How many of you have gotten a phone call late at night and been upset about it? How many times has a news report hit hard?"
"Every day," someone responds.
Marcy sets the stage for Ronald Davidson, a UIC psychologist who heads the school's Mental Health Policy Program. Davidson introduces Forrest X. Brown, a nurse in the program, and Nelda Scott, a UIC psychiatry resident. The people in the room are asked to break into three groups so the mental health professionals can work with them.
Only half of them do. Brown, whose 32-year-old daughter is a former member of the Guard's 933rd Military Police Corps based in Chicago, lands four moms of the soldiers in his group: Mary Hundsdorfer, Judy Victor, Rita Calbow and Marcia Bauer. Also in the group is Calbow's daughter Tracy.
The discussion starts as most would among people who don't all know each other very well. It doesn't take long for it to get emotional.
Hundsdorfer described how her son Larry, 32, has been twice deployed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. She experienced another loss just before that.
"I lost my husband in June just before [my son] left [in September]. It was really hard on me and hard on him," said Hundsdorfer, whose son was redeployed with the 233rd a year ago.
Victor's son Marc, 26, is on patrol with him. "His sister's been engaged and married while he's been gone," she said.
Marcia Bauer recalls a chilling exchange during a conversation with her son Adam, 23. "He called me on Mother's Day night. He said, 'You know we get shot at.' I said, 'Yes, I know,'" she said.
A few tables away in Scott's group is Monica Hildebrandt, 24, a native of northwest suburban Gilberts who now lives in Downstate Bethany. Her husband, Sgt. Paul Hildebrandt, 27, was called up Feb. 7, 2003, just two weeks after the couple learned Monica was pregnant with their second child.
Paul Hildebrandt was able to come home for two weeks in October to meet his daughter, Julia, now 6 months old. His son, Caleb, is 20 months.
Monica Hildebrandt has gone on leave from her job as a firefighter-paramedic to take care of her children. She has found the best sounding board for her feelings to be Tricia Mitchell, the girlfriend of her brother-in-law, Keith, who also is in Baghdad with the 233rd.
"My partner is gone," she said after the meeting. "I have no one in my home to talk to when I'm losing it, and I don't want my children to pick up on it when I have my moments when I want to throw something at the wall.
"He doesn't get to come home; I don't get to flip out."
Hildebrandt also has fears about when her husband returns. She hasn't broached the idea with him about talking out her feelings with a counselor, but she's considering it.
"I'm now married to somebody I don't know in a way," she said. "Over the past 15 months, he has lived a completely different life that I cannot get near. And he will never understand the things that I have experienced since he's been gone.
"I've been married 41/2 years, and I'm going to have to get to know my husband. That terrifies me a little."
Hildebrandt said she found her "support group" discussion in which she aired those feelings "a godsend."
"The counselors that came down from Chicago, that is going to be a huge asset to all military family members in this state," she said. "We were blasted with this deployment. . . . It's good to know you're not alone."
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But reaching out can be the toughest part.
Most families don't like to admit they need help, despite the increasing publicity about soldier suicides in Iraq -- at least 22 last year -- and research about post-traumatic stress disorder.
"The people don't even know how to get [help] because they are traumatized and scared to death," said Floyd "Shad" Meshad, a Vietnam veteran and psychiatric social worker who heads the National Veterans Foundation in Los Angeles. "Let's just say it: War is a macho institution. The military is interested in getting soldiers over there. They aren't really concerned about all the touchy-feely emotional stuff."
Lt. Col. Alicia Tate-Nadeau of the Illinois National Guard disagrees, noting that several programs exist to help military families.
But she admits, "It's a difficult job for us to get out to these folks, and one of the ways we do that is through the [family readiness] support group meetings. It requires the individual to ask for that help, and a lot of folks for whatever reason are reluctant to do that."
The Guard, Tate-Nadeau added, welcomes any help Quinn's office and UIC's psychiatry department can provide.
Dubbed the "family resource network," the UIC volunteers hope to train a staff of volunteers who can join them at Family Readiness Group meetings and eventually run support groups of their own.
In the long term, they hope to launch a toll-free hotline that people can call.
"What this program is hopefully going to do is fill cracks," said Jim Frazier, a senior policy adviser for Quinn. "It's not going to be a massive mental health care program."
How the military handles this long deployment could affect recruitment, experts say, though the Guard is meeting its goals so far.
Still, "I think the Army leadership understands with profound clarity that they're running the risk that they're going to break up the National Guard by having too many service members deployed overseas for extended periods of time," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a group that analyzes defense policy. "People did not join the Guard to go to Iraq."
© Copyright 2004, Chicago Sun Times
