Sitting here reflecting on the military’s impact on my family has made me realize that it has been a driving force in my life since its very beginning. My parents and eventually, my military service have all guided me throughout my life and have been invisible protagonists in nearly all the major events I’ve lived through. I believe that this is not an uncommon experience amongst military “brats” and service members. The decision to join the United States military completely overhauls one’s lifestyle and can affect relationships with immediate and extended family. My story is one of the millions of examples of this commonality. My mother and father met while enlisted in the army. They both originally came from small towns and sought a stable career in which their merit and hard work paid off. They were both stationed on Oahu, Hawai’i, an island whose large military presence greatly affects even the civilian community. Not long after my birth, my mother decided that she would not renew her enlistment and dedicate herself to my upbringing. My father, still serving, bought our home, with the help of VA benefits, and that’s where I spent the bulk of my childhood. Unfortunately, they divorced when I was a child, and my father moved off the island where he was eventually promoted to officer status. He was stationed in the Pentagon, an accomplishment that brought me and much of my paternal family an immense amount of pride. That pride would turn into our biggest nightmare on a September morning in 2001 when a plane crashed into his workplace. I learned about the incident the morning of. I remember going to school that morning, the morning after my 10th birthday, when another kid ran up to me and said, “Your dad works in the Pentagon, right?”, to which I affirmed. He then, with the complete lack of tact that could only come from a child, blurted out, “Did you see the news? It just blew up!”. I refused to believe it until I entered my classroom, and my teacher quickly approached me and told me I needed to go to the counselor’s office. I, along with my sister, was told we were allowed to go home and be with our family until we received news of my father’s state. We didn’t hear anything about my father’s status for the longest two days of my life. Fortunately, he survived unscathed and the lack of communication was due to him not being able to share information about what was happening, but it was at this point that I realized that being in the military was more than just a mere job. Being a veteran is something that places you in the middle of major world events. You become a part of something greater than yourself and join a corpus that can influence the direction economics, politics, and culture go over the years to come. It is something that can cost you your life, or place you in a situation where your actions can save the lives of countless others. My father’s military service placed him in an incredibly impactful situation, not only for himself or even my family but for the world at large.

Kids with mental illness deserve a fighting chance to succeed in life. My goal is to make sure they have it.