Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > November > 11 > Entry
For Veteran’s Day: teleconferencing and one military family
My dad was in the Air Force; he’s retired now, but for years and years, his service defined my family’s life — we got used to living in one place no more than a few years. Though at the time, I always hated leaving behind friends and adjusting to new schools, I now look back on my time as an Air Force brat (especially several years we spent in West Germany just as the Berlin Wall was coming down) as the most more formative of my life.
Whenever I see people embracing technologies like Skype and webcams to keep in touch with loved ones, I always remember how cut off we felt living overseas. We didn’t see the rest of our family for years at a time and had only phone calls and mail to keep us connected.
Alison Buckholtz, a Washington D.C.-based wife of a Navy pilot, offered to write a guest entry for Digital Savant today, including an excerpt from her book, “Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War,” reprinted with permission from Alison and from her publisher, Tarcher/Penguin. She writes about how mobile technology and teleconferencing are changing the military family experience. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll take the time to read it.
On this Veteran’s Day in particular I think we’re all thinking about those who protect us and the constant stress and danger they face.
I think about my husband Scott, an active-duty Navy pilot currently serving a 12-month deployment in Baghdad, every day — Veterans Day is no different. But today I do reflect more deeply on the experience of American military spouses throughout history. During this deployment and my husband’s many other absences, when I am left to care for our two young children, many people have asked me “How do you do it?”
I always answer with one word: “Technology!” Military spouses of the past depended on out-of-order letters, unreliably delivered, to convey news as profound as the birth of a child or as mundane (but important) as that child’s first tooth.
Today, however, my husband and I keep in touch via phone, e-mail (with plenty of photo attachments), and video teleconferences. He may be far away, but he watched our four-year-old daughter get her first haircut, courtesy of my iPhone. Modern technology means that he’s closer to home than previous generations of service-members have been in a time of war.
Although many URLs are off-limits to service-members now (like photo-sharing Web sites), and Internet connections sometimes prove too slow to be useful (as with Skype), technology allows us to experience day-to-day life as a family. My husband won’t return a stranger to us. And as for my daughter’s first haircut, I learned that sometimes there’s no substitute for the postal service after all: I mailed him one of her curly locks that very day.
Excerpt from Chapter 23 of Allison’s book: In this section, I talk about a video teleconference that my son Ethan (age 5) and daughter Esther (age 3) and I had with my husband, Scott, who was then in the middle of a seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. My children and I then lived near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island (Washington).
Technology is amazing, and the way the military has exploited technology to help deployed troops and families communicate with each other was a revelation to me during Scott’s deployment. I got the first e-mail about our video teleconference (or VTC) from the squadron’s senior enlisted Sailor, the Command Master Chief, who worked hard to make sure all of the enlisted sailors signed up for slots first. (They had more limited access to e-mail than the officers, since many of them — metalsmiths, mechanics, electricians and ordnance technicians — do not routinely sit at a desk or have easy access to a computer.) Once sailors signed up, the officers had their chance. And before the week was up, Ethan, Esther and I found ourselves driving to base.
“You’ll get to see Daddy on TV, and talk to him, and he’ll talk to you,” I clumsily explained to them on the way over.
“I want him to come out of the TV,” Esther objected.
“Why won’t he come out of the TV?” Ethan asked.
“He’s still on the boat, but you can see and talk to him and show him stuff. Ethan, what song are you going to play for him?” Ethan brought his violin along.
“I’m going to show him my plucking. I am really good at plucking,” Ethan said.
“That’s great. Esther, what do you want to show Daddy?”
“My new black shoes,” she said. “And my new tights. They’re just like a Mommy wears.”
“And I brought my planet puzzle,” Ethan added. “I want to do the puzzle for him while he’s watching.”
“OK, but we have to remember we only have ten minutes, then we have to let someone else have a turn.”
“But I want him to come out of the TV,” Esther repeated.
“I know, me too,” I said. “I’m mad about it.” That was my new strategy. Whenever the kids seemed to be angry about Scott’s absence, I told them I was angry too. Ethan especially loved to see me pumping my fists in the air in an exaggerated pantomime of infuriated motherhood, so he picked up on it right away during our drive to the VTC.
“That stupid boat!” he exclaimed.
“Stupid boat!” Esther echoed.
“Daddy hates that boat, right?” Ethan asked. “He wants to be with us instead.”
“Daddy wishes he could be home with you,” I said. “But he’s really good at his job, and they need his help. That’s why we’re so proud of Daddy, because he does such a great job.”
“Stupid aircraft carrier driver,” Ethan muttered, ignoring me. “I wish he would turn that boat around.” We’d hit upon his favorite theme. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t the aircraft carrier driver’s fault, Ethan always heaped the full force of his hatred on that poor helmsman, whoever he was. He craved a target for his anger.
“We’re almost there, guys,” I said. “Let’s just remember to take turns talking to Daddy.”
The VTC technician warned us there would be a couple-second delay in the audio and video feed, which she thought might confuse the kids. But it wasn’t the kids I was worried about; I was far jumpier than I had anticipated. It had been such a long recovery since Scott walked out the door that dark morning in November. From the time I first heard about the VTC, I felt shaky, as if Scott took a step toward us only to back away again. But it was easy to push those anxieties away as my excitement at seeing him carried me forward. I spent so much time wondering about his life on the boat, and how he coped. His e-mails to me were frequent, loving, and supportive, but very short — just a few lines at most. Whenever I asked how he was doing, he simply said he was tired.
So I turned to poetry, my old standby, to get a sense of Scott’s experience. I found “Here, Bullet,” a collection penned by one of the first warrior-writers of the Iraq war, an infantryman named Brian Turner. He didn’t let me down:
At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights
blacked out under the wings and America waiting,
a year of my life disappears at midnight,
the sky a deep viridian, the houselights below
small as match heads burned down to embers.
Scott and his squadronmates flew six-to-seven hour missions nearly every single night around that time, logging so many hours above the norm that they required written waivers and interviews with the air wing flight surgeons. I re-read that poem, “Night in Blue,” whenever I thought Scott might be in the air. I especially liked the middle section, because I remember how long it took for Scott to explain to me his impressions of the war after he flew in it the first time, in 2003, and how disjointed and difficult those conversations were for him.
…What do I know
of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have
to say of the dead - that it was worth it,
that any of it made sense?
I have no words to speak of war.
I knew the VTC would usher in no great revelations, and no talk of war, especially. I wasn’t quite sure what I would say. Life during deployment mirrored the enjambment of Turner’s poem as events, impressions, thoughts and questions ran from line to line, day to day, without a break or even a cue for a breath. None of that mattered, of course. I just wanted to see how Scott looked, and watch him smile as he took in the kids’ antics.
“Daddy, come out of the TV,” Esther shouted as she ran into the conference room. Scott’s face hovered on a monitor across the room. My heart leapt as it had on our first date, when I opened the door and saw him standing there, patiently waiting for us to begin the rest of our lives together. We seated ourselves around the conference table. The kids and I spotted ourselves in the picture-in-picture screen on the monitor, so we knew Scott could see us. There was the smile I’d been waiting for. He looked so handsome in his desert flight suit, though he seemed thinner and had more gray hair, especially around his temples. But he seemed in great spirits, and he reconnected with Ethan and Esther immediately as they scrambled to exhibit their special things.
“Daddy, watch! Daddy, watch!” They overlapped each other as Ethan plucked away on the violin, then hurriedly put it down, picked up a pen, and wrote his own name while Scott oohed and aahed. In the months since Scott left, Ethan, then four and a half, began reading and writing, and he was excited to show off. He threw down the pen, and grabbed his planet puzzle, frantic to fit it together under Scott’s approving gaze and within the time constraint.
“Daddy, watch! Daddy, watch!” Esther, then two and a half, sank deep into her seat so she could prop up and display her new black patent-leather shoes on the conference table. Then she stood on the chair and pulled down her tights to show Scott her “big girl underwear.”
At minute eight, the kids finally calmed down and turned to other curiosities in the room, examining the microphone and leaving Scott and me a moment to connect. We forgot our own rules, mistaking the delay for real-time pauses, talking over each other, then giggling and both insisting, “No, you go ahead” at the same time. It didn’t matter. There was nothing we had to say that we hadn’t already said in scores of e-mails, dozens of letters, and a few staticky phone calls.
The VTC coordinator cracked open the door to the conference room. Even the kids knew what that meant.
“Daddy, come out of the TV! Now!” Esther insisted, a new urgency aflame in her tone.
“I can’t, baby,” he said sadly.
“We just got our one-minute warning,” I told Scott.
Esther jumped out of her chair and ran toward the monitor. She wrapped her arms around it, pressed her cheek to the screen and closed her eyes.
“Esther, where’d you go?” Scott called. “I can’t see you anymore.”
“She’s hugging you,” I said.
Photo of Alison Buckholtz and her kids. Photo provided by the author.
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By teleconferencing services
November 20, 2009 3:47 AM | Link to this
Kids looking very happy they came to meet there father who is working in Military, US army has provided with a great solution, so that army people can stay in touch with there families through video conferencing.
By Jaime
November 11, 2009 1:14 PM | Link to this
Man, that's good stuff. Honestly I usually just skim blogs, but I read and re-read every word this time. Well done Alison, and thank you Omar for giving her an outlet to share her story. :)