Houston has its oil refineries. Kansas City houses meat packing. Chemicals and beer are the staples of St. Louis. And you can still find a few steel mills in Pittsburgh.
But Washington, D.C., doesn’t make anything. Of course, there’s some manufacturing here, to be sure. But the real “product” of Washington is policy — thinking about policy, influencing policy, writing about policy, making and implementing policy. It’s an abstract kind of enterprise, dominated by politicians, lobbyists, media types, and powerful people whom we call, for lack of a better term, “opinion makers.”
When President Obama announced last week, after long deliberation, that he is sending 30,000 additional combat troops to Afghanistan, all of the above were out in force: debating, excoriating, praising, pontificating, prognosticating — and then, most likely, going home and watching themselves on CNN and MSNBC.
What rarely gets talked about, amid these rarified debates and discussions, are the people who are actually fighting our wars — or, to put it more broadly, the families that are fighting our wars. But a new report from the RAND Corporation sheds light on what military children are going through, and the results are sobering.
According to the study, published Monday in Pediatrics, children from military families are more likely to report anxiety than their peers in the general population, and the longer one of their parents is deployed, the more prone they are to having problems at home and in school. Girls struggle the most, the report says.
That’s not surprising. In the May 2008 ASBJ, I wrote a cover story called “Children of the Wars” after talking with families at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Camp Pendleton, Calif. I also wrote a blog about what it must be like for deployed parents who have to leave young children. My daughters were 6 and 3 at the time; now they’re 8 and 5. I couldn’t imagine leaving them for a few weeks, let alone for the 12- to 15-month deployments that are typical for today’s military and National Guard.
Newspaper editors have a term for the people I interviewed for that story, a silly and somewhat condescending one. They called them “real people” (as if the other people I mentioned, yes, even the politicians, pundits, and journalists, are any less “real”) and urged us reporters to try to fit as many of them into our stories as possible. But, awkward as their attempts might have been, these editors were on to something. Policies, especially those that concern war and peace, have consequences, and not just in terms of Obama’s political fortunes. The wars — one seemingly winding down in Iraq, the other escalating in Afghanistan — are real. And throughout the country, in places like Fort Bragg and Camp Pendleton, military families are paying the price.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
