Two Marines and Our Military Children
By: Kevin Schmiegel
Tags: Military Spouse, Military Family, Veterans, Military, Military Children

Writing about military kids isn’t easy for me, because it evokes raw emotion and conjures up painful memories. It is difficult to personally convey their courage and selfless sacrifice to anyone outside of my immediate family. This is why I’ve asked my best friend and fellow Marine, Paul Cucinotta, to help me find the right words.

Reflections from Two Marines about our Military Kids

We have been close friends for 25 years. Our kids grew up together. As Marines, we served in the same artillery battalion together. As military husbands and fathers, and as retired Veterans with more than 47 years of active duty service between us, we’ve shared similar experiences both on and off duty.

We hope that in telling our stories, we not only inspire you to say “thank you,” but we also create a better understanding about the strength and resilience of military kids, like ours, and build empathy for the burdens so many of them must endure.

Between us, we have seven wonderful kids who moved a dozen times, changed schools more than 30 times between them, and parted ways with too many friends to count. Oftentimes in having to “start over,” they were isolated and only had each other, their brothers and sisters, and other military families to lean on.

Collectively, the two of us spent 2,000 nights apart from them — nights when we didn’t eat dinner with them, hear about their days, or tuck them into bed. We missed their soccer games, teacher conferences, sad and happy moments, proud accomplishments, as well as important milestones and events in their lives.

We were absent for birthdays, special occasions, Mother’s and Father’s Days, Holy Days, and Holidays. Our kids laughed without us and cried without us. Some years they even grew up — physically and emotionally — without us.

Deployments were the most challenging, more for them than us. We had our mission to keep our focus. Imagining what we were experiencing and the “not knowing” often became a negative distraction for them. They found refuge with each other and the military community surrounding them, but unfortunately the community outside the gates didn’t really understand what they were going though. On a rare occasion when Paul picked his daughter Marissa up from school, her friends remarked, “we didn’t even think you had a dad. Why is he gone so much anyway?”

We don’t share this with you to elicit sympathy or pity — quite the contrary. In a lot of ways our children are better human beings as a result of the challenges they faced as military kids. These experiences have helped them grow into strong, independent, resilient young adults because of their experiences, not in spite of them.

Instead of sympathy, we hope you will think of your own family’s life experiences and consider. what it might be like to walk in the shoes of the thousands of children of deployed troops who are without their father or mother right now. In the same way, think about what it must be like for the service members themselves who just missed Easter and Passover with their children and spouses. Now, think of your own experience and what you might like to share with these military families.