Many United States service members are away from home this holiday season.
December is a month when many of us in Plant City celebrate holidays. Christmas is big. Hanukkah, Ramadan and Kwanzaa are important for particular faiths, and there are many, such as the winter solstice, that are not tied to religion. It’s a time for families to give gifts and sit around a table filled with wonderful food, fun and fellowship.
It’s also a time to remember when our family had to celebrate without us. About 13% of all living adult Americans have served in the military. For those from 60 to 90 years old, who served in wars such as World War II, the Vietnam War and the Korean War, that number ranges from 40% to 80%, according to Gallup.
Every week in the bulletin at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, the names of members who are serving in the military are listed. That list reminds those of us who have served what it was like to be stationed in far places around the world, away from family.
One Plant City native who is doing just that this Christmas is Greg Futch.
A member of the Plant City Futch family, Greg, an Air Force dental surgical assistant, and his wife, Lizzie Schmidt, also of Plant City, were stationed in Germany before Grew was deployed to the Middle East.
I immediately identified with the fun experience Greg and Lizzie have had, because when we were very young my wife and I did an Army tour in the Panama Canal Zone. We can testify that, for a young couple, overseas military service in an area of the world not experiencing combat can be exciting.
But in a military only 40% of the size that it was during the height of the Vietnam War, according to Historian David G. Coleman, the need for our service members to be assigned to Middle East combat tours without their families caught up with Greg and Lizzie. Not only was Greg sent to the Middle East, he had to leave his dental tools behind and pick up the rifle for force protection. He has become a front-line soldier in the defense of our country’s mission to support allies in the fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Making the best of a difficult situation, Lizzie has returned to Plant City and accepted a job in teaching. I empathized with Lizzie about what our country has asked her and her husband to do. We compared it to my 1971 Christmas in Vietnam, where Susan and I had only snail mail and unreliable communications toos: MARS radio and landline telephone. Today’s modern tools consist of Skyping and email. I was glad for those improvements when Lizzie told me that she and Greg were missing not only Christmas together, but also their two December birthdays.
We fell back on the old standby of counting the days remaining on Greg’s deployment, until the January date of his expected return from overseas.
This Christmas, when you talk to the Gregs and Lizzies of our world, thank them for their service. This country is blessed by the willingness of our fellow Americans, separated by half the world, to spend a lonely Christmas for us.
Felix Haynes is a co-owner of the Plant City Times & Observer.
