Deployments are one of those things that affect people differently. Some of us look forward to the lack of military gear in the house, while others enjoy having complete control of the remote. This isn't unique to military families based in the United States. Kim Mills, author and blogger at She is Fierce, is a Canadian Army spouse and mother. She recently shared how an act of kindness brought her family joy.
Deployments often mean a break from acronyms and "military talk" over the dinner table. Before my husband left for deployment, I had gotten used to hearing the voices of his favorite military podcast hosts while riding with him in the car. The podcast became comfortably familiar for both of us, though I thought those voices would go silent when he was gone.
But they didn't. When our 17-year-old son Caleb mentioned he had been listening to various podcasts himself, his dad, who was headed out the door for a half-year or so deployment overseas, suggested he start listening to one of his favorites: ZeroBlogThirty.
This, it turned out, would mean that I was back to listening to the same veterans chatter, this time from the screen in the living room as Caleb and his two younger siblings got ready for school -- which led me to write a quick Tweet from bed one morning.
This came after being woken up one morning by the voice of a former SEAL, who was explaining his detailed and ambitious morning routine while I browsed Facebook in bed. The post ended up being retweeted by the podcast itself, and then seen by a military veteran and current college student named Jesse all the way in West Virginia. When Jesse read it, he decided to respond with an offer for Caleb: a ZeroBlogThirty shirt.
After a short exchange over a private message on Twitter, I gave him a chance to take back his offer. Caleb lives in Edmonton, and his deployed dad isn't an U.S. soldier, but a Canadian one.
Jesse's response was simple: "Different countries, same military family as a whole." He figured deployment was hard on a kid, no matter the military. And he was right.
Jesse didn't know that this kid's dad was on his fifth tour. Or that he had missed everything from his first birthday to his Basic Training graduation (you can join the Candaian Reserves at age 16) and this year's high school graduation. He didn't know that Caleb had been a rock star of resiliency through it all, but that it still sucked lately.
Jesse didn't know how much this kid could really use a win. But as a veteran who saw a kid clinging to a podcast so he could feel closer to his dad, he wanted to help him feel even more connected, just because he could.
After an exchange of info, in which I sent a photo of the snow pile that was over my head, Jesse convinced me he was a safe person to whom to give an address because he was too lazy to travel somewhere that cold (no one blames him). A few weeks later, the shirt arrived.
The world feels a little smaller, and a lot kinder.
Different countries, same military family.
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