Community exploration

I grew up in a military family. My parents as well grew up in this environment, and knew all the warning signs themselves, so we managed to stay relatively healthy mentally and physically. My dad was the one deployed all the time. My mom was in the Royal Air Force, but retired long before my oldest brother was born. My father was took off for a year at a time, and then was home for a year, so he was home as much as he was away, but this never stopped him from being a good parent. He knew the troubles some of the other guys were having at home, and was determined to not have the same issues sprout up at his home. He kept us in line growing up, and taught us responsibility and respect. My mother spoiled us rotten but kept us in line, so we had a pretty balanced out childhood. Some kids I knew from base were in broken families who never really learned to function on their own. I know a few kids I grew up around addicted to pain killers, heroin, meth, or worse. Most of those families had divorced parents, cheating on each other and using the kids as pawns to tug at each other’s heart strings and leave them twisting in the wind. That, I am told isn’t even the worst of it. Apparently the worst of the feelings are those when a parent talks bad about the other parent to the child, weather is be that they are divorced or still together. My parents were old fashioned so I didn’t have to deal with a lot of this. I heard the stories, however, and they were not good. I can relate to some of those problems, but I find myself reluctant to talk about them. They aren’t nearly as measurable to the things the others went through, but I do understand that problems like that manifest in other ways.

            My life has been sheltered from a lot of problems that I should have gone through, but I do understand them nonetheless. I intend to explore these issues in the next few months from my first-hand accounts and the second hand descriptions given to me by people, who have lived that way, lived the absolute worst case scenario of my community. These problems are worse than they should be, and I will also explore other options in fixing these issues. There are lots of social institutions set up to help soldiers and their families through these hard times, but most times the soldiers do not want to seek out this help through fear that they will appear weak. If they do go to these support groups or social work they run the risks of being put on report and have their active duty status taken away. There is nothing worse to a soldier who wants to keep working then the idea of being put behind a desk.