Deployment Challenges Quotes

I have visited classrooms near military bases to learn more about what schools were doing to support their military kids. I met with teachers overseas to learn about the particular needs they face thousands of miles from America. And I listened to my own granddaughter, who dealt with her father's yearlong deployment to Iraq.

Increased demands on the members of the Iowa National Guard often means increased time away from home and increased responsibility for those left behind.

I'm trying to raise the awareness of the troops that, when they deploy and go to war, it's not just them at war - it's also their family. Their family is having to go through all the hardships and the stresses.

Life does not stand still for families and local communities when our brave men and women are deployed, but we can make their time apart more bearable by recognizing their sacrifice and fulfilling our commitments to them.

I'll tell you what they're all going to face, whichever one of them becomes president on January 21st of 2009. They will face a military force - a United States military force that cannot sustain - continually sustain 140,000 people deployed in Iraq and the 20-odd or 25,000 people we have deployed in Afghanistan and our other deployments.

I think life is hard at the combat outposts, and anything that distracts us from supporting them, in my mind, is something that we shouldn't do.

And I think right now I'm just enjoying finding something such as One Weekend a Month where I can really resonate with this woman's history and her situation.

Military families become familiar with trying to contort their lives around deployments and separations.

So, it was really important that I go do the necessary research. In doing the research, I spent time with a lot of medics and women down at Fort Bliss. I went through an intensive medical course there, with other medics. And then, I really sat down with all of the women that had been deployed, or were getting ready to deploy again. The common thread for them was family, and what a struggle it was for them to come home and face their children and flip a switch.

Something has to give during a deployment and for me it's often punctuality.

At the current rate of 28 miles of SBInet [Secure Border Initiative network] technology every 4.5 years, it would take 320 years - or until the year 2330 - to deploy SBInet technology across the Southwest border. That statistic would be comical if the subject matter were not so serious.