DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer
Terri Tarricone - the wife of Michael Tarricone, an Army National Guard captain who recently returned from Iraq - with sons John (left) and Miles at their home in Manahawkin, N.J.
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The Hidden Home Front
The loved ones of U.S. service members have always learned to adapt, but deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq are testing their resiliency.
The boy looked at his coach and said: "You smell like my daddy."
That night in their updated ranch-style home in Manahawkin, N.J., "there was no consoling him," John's mother, Terri, recalls.
Terri has had her disconsoling moments, too, like the time after the Tarricones had booked a vacation for Michael's return from his first Iraq deployment in 2007.
She had heard rumors that National Guard tours were going to be extended, but the family got no official notice. Son Steven, 14, ended up learning about the longer tour in a newspaper while sibling Miles, 15, heard it from a friend.
"When we found out he was being extended, that was a really bad time," says Terri, 42.
Miles adds that his mother was "really out of it and moping all the time, walking around zombie-like."
The separation also weighed on Michael Tarricone, 42, who recently returned from Iraq, where the unit he led out of Camp Bucca escorted convoys and protected civil-affairs officers.
Michael Tarricone is making up for his absence now. He attended Miles' junior ROTC graduation and will personally deliver his wife's anniversary gift.
"It's been great," Michael Tarricone says. "We've been out paintballing. We have a couple shows in Atlantic City we've scheduled to see. I'm going to make my 25th high school reunion next week."
Lila Guy of Twin Oaks, near Chester, spent two years in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, where the U.S. Army sergeant's duties included escorting supply convoys.
She recalls aching most as she lay down to sleep and thought of the three children she had at the time with her husband in Chester. She especially yearned for Izayah, then a year old.
"When it was time for me to go to bed, I would hold my pillow in front of me like I was holding my son," she recalls. "I really missed him."
Guy still recalls how, in Iraq on Mother's Day 2005, the chaplain at a Sunday service asked mothers to rise.
"I stood up and they were clapping for me," Guy says, "and I cried then, because I really didn't feel like a mother. I had left my kids."
Guy, 29, got a hardship discharge in 2007, one year shy of serving her full three-year contract. She and her husband had separated - being a long-distance couple was a problem - and Guy needed to devote her time to the kids. The family, including the couple's youngest daughter, 8-month-old Lauryn, now lives with Guy's parents as she works toward a nursing degree at Widener University through a Veterans Affairs program.
When she returned from Iraq, Guy met with her children's teachers to see how the kids were doing. The teachers told her that Leila, then 6 and who suffers from epilepsy, and Harrison, then 7, both had trouble concentrating in class.
"Harry was all over the place and wouldn't pay attention," Guy says. "Leila would be just fine and then, all of a sudden, she would cry."
The kids are calmer now, though Leila clings to her mother when talk of military services comes up at the kitchen table. The girl throws her slender arms around her mother's neck and buries her head in Guy's shoulder. Leila's hands are clasped tight in the embrace, as though not letting go will keep her mother in their kitchen forever.
Children's fears that a parent may leave again for military duty are not uncommon - which is all the more reason to study more deeply the impact of deployment on children.
The military routinely assesses its service members' condition in battle zones, says Charles Figley, an expert in combat stress and a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans.
