Where Talk of War Includes 'Mom' or 'Dad'

By Sara Rimer
New York Times Staff Writer

FORT BRAGG, N.C., February 14, 2003 - Club USA, with 14 third and fourth graders, was in session at Holbrook Elementary School here. The club is for children whose fathers or mothers are in the Army and have been deployed abroad, many of them now to the Persian Gulf or Afghanistan as part of
the war on terrorism.

Maryann Williams, the guidance counselor who runs the club meetings as group counseling sessions, asked the children to talk about their fears.

"Sometimes I worry about what's going to happen to my mom," said Brittney, 9, whose father is holding down the family now that her mother has joined the troops abroad. "Will she ever make it back?"

In a voice so soft that Mrs. Williams had to strain to hear him, Jacob, 8, volunteered, "I'm worried my dad's going to be shot and killed."

Seated around tables in a classroom hung with paper snowflakes, the youngsters were quiet. What Jacob worried about, they finally agreed, was pretty much what they all worried about.

Such discussions are routine these days at Holbrook, as well as at the six other elementary schools, one middle school and one junior high school here at one of the largest military installations, home to the 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Operations Command. With 6,000soldiers from Fort Bragg reported to be deploying to join the war on terrorism, the front pages of the post newspaper, The Paraglide, and The Fayetteville Observer are filled with photographs of men and women in desert camouflage saying goodbye to their families.

In the schools, deployment is intensely personal.

"My brother cries at night," Shea Smith, a fifth grader at Irwin Middle School, said about her brother Nolan, 6. "He says, `What if daddy has to go?' "

Their father will probably be sent out soon, Shea said, though she does not know the details. As the oldest child in a military family, having already moved from Fort Hood, Tex., to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to Fort Bragg, Shea knows what is expected of her. "My mom's like, `You've got to be a big girl,' " she said on a break in her after-school homework group.

Shea conceded that lately she did not always feel up to the job. "Sometimes at night I just cry," she said. "I don't tell anyone. I don't like getting lectures - about what we have to do. I've heard it 100 times. `You can't be slacking off. You have to stay on task.' "

Club USA and support groups like it at the other schools are nothing new here. The children learn early about the risks involved in their parents' line of work. They are accustomed to their fathers or mothers, or sometimes both, being away on training missions or being sent to places like Germany, Italy or Kosovo or South Korea.

Ten years ago, the 82nd Airborne fought in the gulf war. But for these children, who watch CNN and are all too aware that soldiers from Bragg have been killed in Afghanistan, a parent in Afghanistan and Iraq is new territory.

"In Kosovo, my dad was just there for peacekeeping," said Anthony Kelley, 9, a member of Club USA whose father left on Jan. 21 for Afghanistan. "This is the first war I've been in in my whole life."

The post schools are operated by the Defense Department's civilian-run education agency. The civilian teachers, counselors and administrators are trained at working with the children of enlisted men and women. They know whose father or mother is has gone, whose parent is about to go
and whose parent is coming home.

The staff monitors children closely to see whether they need counseling or extra time for homework or another chance at a test they may have done poorly on because they are upset about an absent parent. They are familiar with what Judith Norris, director of student services for the Bragg schools, calls SPMS, sad, proud, mad and scared, the predictable emotions of children whose parents have been deployed. Children are encouraged to express their feelings. At Devers Elementary School, second graders whose parents have been sent out recently wrote letters to President Sadaam Hussein of Iraq and Osama bin Laden.

A pupil wrote: "I hate wars. My dad is leaving. I miss my dad, I love my dad. Take a hot bath."

Schools at military posts are available just to families who live on the bases. At Bragg, with 40,000 residents and 4,500 students in kindergarten through ninth grade, the waiting list for post housing is long.

"You do what you can to get on a post school," said Alane Bray, whose husband, Col. Arnold N. G. Bray, commands the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, and whose son Arnold N. G. Jr., 12, known as A. J., is a sixth grader at Irwin.

The Bragg schools, like most other post schools, go out of their way to involve parents. Students tend to be disciplined and motivated. Everyone understands the consequences of bad behavior. School officials can contact parents' commanders.

With salaries generally higher than their counterparts off post, teachers at post schools tend to be more experienced. Student achievement is high.

Researchers say the success of the post schools may be linked to how entwined they are with the post community. Children at these schools cannot be anonymous. The researchers, from the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt University, found that post living was "a contemporary version of the mill town of a century ago in which work, family, commerce and schooling embraced all members in a cohesive, self-contained, social structure."

An author of the study, Claire Smrekar, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at Vanderbilt, also found that because of the strong school support students whose parents were sent out coped better than might be expected.

For Bragg children, who are told from an early age that when their parents leave it is to serve their country, patriotism often collides with need.

"I want my dad to come home and help me with my homework," said Ashlee, a kindergartener at Devers whose father is in Afghanistan, and who was talking at a meeting of her group for kindergarteners with deployed parents.

After the Club USA meeting at Holbrook, Anthony Kelley, 9, recalled a talk that he had with his father before he left for Afghanistan.

"I said, `Dad, why can't you stay here and not go to Afghanistan?' " Anthony recalled. "He said, `My job is to protect the country.' "

Anthony peered solemnly out from behind the long brown bangs and wire-rimmed glasses that give him a resemblance to his hero, Harry Potter. "I said," he added, " `Your job is to stay here and protect us.' "

The school superintendent, Dr. Tom Hager, 54, is a former marine who remembers being a fourth grader when his father went to fight in Vietnam. Transience is a part of military life, and with one-third of the students moving every year, the post schools provide needed stability, Dr. Hager said. With the new troop movements, he said, the school routine is more important than ever.

Even as fathers and mothers depart for a war that seems increasingly certain, the children at Holbrook, Devers and the other elementary schools are preparing for the standardized Terra Nova tests in April.

This afternoon, after the third and fourth graders in Club USA had brainstormed about how they could ease their worries about their parents - "talk to a grown-up," "play with the dog" and "read a book" - Mrs. Williams gave everyone St. Valentine's Day cards and chocolates.

A. J. Bray, 12, was in school just hours before the departure of his father, Colonel Bray, who would say only that his brigade was joining Operation Enduring Freedom.

How long will he be gone? Mrs. Bray, who as the wife of a brigade commander has been fielding calls from anxious wives for weeks, shrugged. "Dial 1-800-RUMSFELD," she said.

A. J. recently took third place for his school science project, an ambitious investigation into how light reflects off color and surfaces. Colonel Bray, whose wife refers to him as "the project man," had spent hours helping his son with it. The night before he left, between fielding telephone calls from his brigade on his cellphone and escorting his wife to a brigade ball, the colonel huddled with A. J. at the dining room table over how to improve the
science project for entry in the regional competition.

"Home run, Dad," A. J. said, praising his father's suggestion for displaying the project's explanation.

Father and son had a talk that they had had many times before. "What's the worst thing that can happen to me?" Colonel Bray asked.

"You can die," A. J. said, looking down at the table. "But you go up."

Colonel Bray nodded and said, "If you live right, death is a promotion by God."

A. J.'s next school project is for Black History Month. His mother says she will be filling in for her husband on this one.