COMING HOME FROM KOREA

By Robert Roberts

Robert J. Roberts served as a sergeant first class as a Survey Chief of Party with the 937th Field Artillery Battalion from January 1951-April 1952

A troop ship is not the ideal way to travel:

Smelly bodies stacked six high

On canvas beds just high enough To get in while lying down;

Two meals a day at stand-up tables Where you were lucky if your mess-mate (That’s sailor talk, they told us) Doesn’t throw up in his tray From seasickness (we’re not sailors);

Feeling your own gorge rise And running up the stairs (called, strangely, ladders) To get out on deck for fresh air;

Pulling KP, washing trays in steamy GI cans While your buddies threw up in the can next to you

(A lot of throwing-up went on) While you laughed at them You HAD to laugh or join them;

But the worst thing was the boredom

Read until your eyes hurt,

Walk the deck, nap, Play poker, canasta, cribbage,

Walk the deck, etc., etc. Did you ever spend fifteen days doing Absolutely nothing?

But then, we were near San Francisco. We saw the cloud-like shoreline, Then the coast itself, Then San Francisco, and finally

The Golden Gate Bridge.

Everyone was on deck When we went under the bridge And a cheer erupted spontaneously From a thousand throats.

We suddenly knew We had survived the war And we were home.

Sergeant First Class Robert J. Roberts

Headquarters Battery 937th Field Artillery Battalion

Unites States Army

Courtesy of accesskansas.org

http://www.accesskansas.org/kskoreanwar/stories/story_roberts2.html

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How to Prepare Your Relationship for Military Deployment

Nov 11, 2019 By Jonathan Shippey, LMFT

Geographic separation, whether it is for 6 weeks, 6 months, or longer, is inevitably difficult. The key to a successful deployment for any couple is to learn together all you can in order to prepare for your time apart.

A deployment can be a very emotional and difficult time for many couples. Just as service members understand how essential mission readiness is, couples are wise to pursue “family readiness” as deployment approaches. Making intentional plans in advance will help you cope throughout this challenging time.

Your unit will surely offer a wealth of information regarding the logistical preparations necessary for you as a couple—this article’s focus is on emotional and relational preparations that will help you weather the challenges that are inevitable with any deployment.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the Sound Relationship House. The foundational basis for all relationships is “Love Mapping.” Leading up to deployment is a great time to update your maps of each other’s inner worlds and also physical worlds.

Find out all that you can about the deployment 

Where will your spouse be? How long will the deployment last? Learning as much as you can about where your partner will be and what he or she will be doing may help reduce anxiety and uncertainty. In some cases, you may not be able to get as much information as you’d like because of security issues, so part of this love map update needs to be a discussion of how you will communicate while you’re apart from each other. Will you be able to use communication apps, phone, or email? Know in advance what security limitations there may be, and do what you can to plan for staying in touch. Geographic distance, paired with the deployment’s schedule demands, can wreak havoc on your emotional closeness unless you plan intentionally for how you will stay in contact.

Practice having a check-in with each other regarding your feelings 

Learn how to use the “Soft Start-Up” with each other to identify what you are each feeling and to learn to ask for what you need. Practice this together pre-deployment so that you’re better able to keep this experience going when you’re apart. Here is an article that explains more about this skill. 

Share fondness and admiration 

Even though you will be apart physically, you can still engage in a simple exercise together over the course of the deployment. This would be an excellent time to work through the “Seven Week Plan for Sharing Fondness & Admiration” in John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Many of these activities involve writing short notes to each other. The suggestions may help you keep communication lines open and stoke your fires of love, romance, and passion for each other while you are away.

Build and connect with your community 

Many branches of the service offer support in the form of social groups, counseling, or advice. Look into what’s available for you as a military family member. During Desert Storm, I was the company commander of the Heidelberg Army Hospital. Because of our location in Germany and the fact that our unit was made up of a wide variety of medical specialists, our soldiers were detailed out to, and then deployed with, other units one by one. Our post chaplain and I teamed up to offer a support group for the families left behind by my soldiers’ deployments and I saw firsthand how a connected, supported group helped the spouses at home to cope with and overcome feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Reach out to other people who are going through or have already experienced a deployment

Participate in any pre-deployment activities offered by your unit. Military families who have already experienced a deployment may have valuable tips and advice about handling the separation. In the landmark Deployment Life Study, which examined over the course of three years how deployment affects the health and well-being of military families, a key finding was that experience helps mitigate a deployment’s relationship challenges. The study’s authors concluded that deployments are indeed associated with lower marital satisfaction, but that the biggest drop in marital satisfaction occurs with the service member’s first deployment. Subsequent deployments showed no sign of further declines in marital satisfaction among the families participating in this study. It seems families use their experiences to foster resilience in ways that buffer against the potentially damaging effects of deployment, so learn from those who’ve traveled this road before you.

Be prepared for reintegration 

Any couple who has gone through a deployment, then experienced the highs and lows of reintegrating when you welcome home your deployed service member, will tell you that it can be a bittersweet experience. You may have been longing for the reunion, so when it comes, you may be startled to discover feelings of sadness and frustration mixed in with the joy and passion. Understand that these feelings are somewhat to be expected, due to the separate lives you’ve been leading while apart. The non-deployed partner may have learned to navigate independently and may have even thrived with childcare and home management tasks, and the service member may struggle to find a place at home once reunited. These are predictable adjustments, which those around you with more deployment experience can help you prepare for so you are not as surprised when difficult feelings come up.

Geographic separation, whether it is for 6 weeks, 6 months, or longer, is inevitably difficult. The key to a successful deployment for any couple is to learn together all you can in order to prepare for your time apart, to communicate together as often as possible, and to regularly share and listen to each other’s feelings and needs.

Courtesy of The Gottman Institute.

https://www.gottman.com/blog/how-to-prepare-your-relationship-for-military-deployment/

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WHY THIS SOLDIER WRITES

Very interesting insight describing how a soldier serving in Afghanistan used letter writing to create "order out of chaos" and get back some of his humanity. Soldiers in the Korean War certainly must have experienced the same needs and motivation. Good read.

Why Do We Write?

January 22, 2018 by Angry Staff Officer

Why do we write? That’s a thorny question for many authors. We’d rather give a terse reply and chug some bourbon rather than give an honest answer. Because posing that query forces us to look inward and ask the hard questions. And we’d rather ask those questions about other people than ourselves, for fear of what we’ll find. For me, it took a little while to pin down exactly why I jab at the keyboard several times a week while peering anxiously around to see if writer’s block is attempting to ambush me. It does that, you know. No warning and then – BAM – it takes you right down.

Being an overly analytical Army engineer, I began by trying to get at the root cause of the issue: who do I write for? That one’s easy: when I began writing as a teen, I was writing solely for myself. Which was good, because my own self was the only witness to the absolute bilge that one produces at that age. In college, I wrote for professors and cursed everything. In graduate school, I wrote for the monster named Thesis that presided over every waking hour. And when I was finally freed of this beast, I had no desire to write any more.

At least, I didn’t until I found myself in Afghanistan. It was a war that didn’t feel like a war. We wore the trappings of war – body armor, helmets, weapons – but it was more like one long board room meeting with brief moments of explosive excitement. Deployment as an executive officer and then later as a staff officer means that you have little to no control over your life. Hours are set by someone else; the mission determines where you go and what you do. You spend hours at a computer to produce orders and guidance that no one will read. For a young officer, it is a rude awakening to what the veterans who grimace into their coffee cups every day already know: it’s not the outcome that matters, it’s that the processes are followed.

I would walk back under the shadow of the towering T-walls to my five foot by seven foot personal palace, my small space of solace where I slept and sought some semblance of control. And it was here that my fingers again tentatively returned to the keyboard. Muscles in my mind – long dormant – torpidly stretched and yawned, shaking out the kinks. Slowly, and then with speed, I tapped out my first few pieces. In a sense, it was my declaration of independence. It was an attempt to state my humanity, as if to shout out to the bordering Hindu Kush mountains, “I am me, I am an individual, I am not a drone, I create.” They never seemed to care, those gorgeous and forbidding mountains.

To create. To build a sense of freedom. That is why we write. In a world where I could control very little, the ability to empty the jumbled cornucopia of my mind onto an empty page and come away with something that resembled a thesis and an argument gave me back some bit of my humanity. It was creating order out of chaos; or just creating chaos, but it was my chaos. For once, I was the ruler of my small domain.

From then on, I have written to create. Whether it is a humorous piece exploring who we are as veterans, an analysis of Star Wars tactics, or an exposition of historical events, I write to join in the communal sharing of ideas. It is an inherent desire deep within the soul to live beyond one’s self. So really, for lack of a better explanation, I write to be human and part of the human race.

And also because it’s damn fun.

About the Author: Angry Staff Officer is an Army engineer officer who is adrift in a sea of doctrine and staff operations and uses writing as a means to retain his sanity. He also collaborates on a podcast with Adin Dobkin entitled War Stories, which examines key moments in the history of warfare. You can visit the Angry Staff Officer at angrystaffofficer.com

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