This article is one of a series of feature-length news stories I wrote for Fall 2008 Advanced Newswriting at Newhouse.  My beat of mental health and wellness allowed me to examine these evergreen issues in the context of  events happening in and around the Syracuse area.

3:00AM.
John Saraza’s shrieks slice through the night. The five-year-old’s mother, Lynda, tears through her house: her son lay in bed, his small body convulsing. Frantically, Saraza tries to talk to her son. She tries waking him.
No luck.
The next morning, the boy remembered nothing.
Lynda Saraza wondered what was wrong with her son.
“It seemed like his body was possessed,” said Saraza, 32, of Fort Hood, Texas. “The doctors said it was just night terrors, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was something more.”
She knew it was because her husband was fighting in Iraq.
John Saraza is one of more than 700,000 thousand children who, according to Pentagon data, must deal with the psychological ramifications of a parent’s deployment. According to the Department of Defense, 46% of active military members are parents – a number higher than in other wars, thanks to the growing number of National Guard members and women serving in the military. Together, the children of these military personnel share the difficult knowledge that a parent is absent, and the unspoken burden of understanding that he or she might not return.
“Children know that this is not a game,” said Judith Cohen, Director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents in Pittsburgh, Pa. According to Cohen, children often display a broad range of psychological, emotional, behavioral and physical symptoms directly related to the stress of a parent’s deployment.
Cohen said that some of the more common psychological manifestations include depression, irritability, apathy, and anxiety.
“Kids can demonstrate any emotional reaction you can think of in response to stress,” she said. “You have the whole spectrum.”
Unfortunately, many pediatricians remain uneducated about the extent to which deployment-related stress can impact a child’s health, she said.
“If a six year old is irritable, angry, running around, refusing to sleep – that sounds a whole lot like ADHD,” Cohen said. “So doctors put the kids on Ritalin. And then their fathers come home, and the symptoms magically disappear. It has nothing to do with ADHD. It’s stress.”
For some children, the emotional stress of a parent’s absence can even lead to physical illness. Some of the more common physical manifestations of stress in children include headaches, stomachaches, and vomiting.
“On a psychological level, they want to be sent home from school… so that at least one parent is home,” Cohen said. “At least one parent is safe.”
Not every child suffers so palpably. For many, a parent’s absence affects the family in subtler ways.
That’s the case for Jade Freund, 24, of Clayton, N.Y. Freund and her three children – four-year-old Noah, two-year-old Chloe, and seven-month-old Logan – are currently coping with Chris Freund’s third deployment to Iraq.
Freund said she struggles with how much to tell her children about their father’s absence. She says that they know where their father is, but don’t fully understand the meaning of his absence.
“Daddy’s in Iraq,” Chloe Freund will say.
“Yeah, daddy’s shooting the bad guys,” Noah responds.
“No, honey,” Freund says. “Daddy’s making sure the bad guys stay away from us.”
Freund said her children don’t fully understand how far away their father is.
“They’ll be playing video games,” Freund said, “and we’ll get a call from him, and I’ll say, ‘Do you want to talk to daddy?’ And they say, ‘We can’t talk to daddy, we’re playing.’ They don’t realize that he can only talk now.”
For a moment, Freund is silent.
“That breaks his heart.”
Many miles away, in Fort Hood, Texas, Lynda Saraza says that she understands what it’s like to have a child fail to understand the nature of a parent’s absence. Her youngest, Gabriel, remembers his father by the green Ninja Kawasaki motorcycle he rode to work every day. Saraza says whenever Gabriel heard the familiar rumble, he would think that his father had returned.
“Gabriel would hear a motorcycle coming down the street and yell, ‘Daddy’s home!’” Saraza said. “Then he would run to the door and wait for it to open. Every day, I would have to say, ‘Daddy isn’t here.’ It went on that way for months.”
Several longitudinal studies indicate that the pain of a parent’s absence often extends well past childhood.
“The ramifications of this kind of war go on for years and years,” Cohen said. “The people who were kids during Vietnam – they’re still affected, forty years later. They are still suffering the consequences of those parenting disruptions. These kids will be impacted for years to come.”
Putting long-term consequences aside, parents say it’s hard enough to keep their small families together in the here-and-now. For frightened children and frazzled mothers nationwide, a parent’s deployment to war often means a daily battle to maintain normalcy in a situation that is anything but normal.
Often, there is only one true solution to the stress caused by a parent’s deployment.
John’s Saraza’s harrowing nightmares, which doctors insisted would dissipate over time, vanished only when his father returned home from Iraq. When he was redeployed several months later, John’s nightmares returned.
About one week later, Lynda Saraza received a rare evening phone call from her husband. The two had barely started talking when the familiar shrieks pierced the house.
“You need to talk to our son,” she told her husband. She raced to the boy’s bedroom. She put her husband, 7,000 miles away, on speakerphone.
“John, what’s wrong? You need to talk to daddy.” At the sound of his father’s voice, the boy’s body stopped convulsing. Whatever possessed him loosened its iron grip.
“Daddy, are you okay?”
“I’m fine… what’s wrong?”
“I had a dream that you got hurt. I had a dream that you’re dead.” The boy started to sob. “I don’t want to not have a daddy.”
“I’m fine, and I’m going to come home to you,” he consoled his son. “I promise.”
Upon hearing this, Lynda Saraza said she fought the urge to chastise her husband for saying those words.
“Promises you keep. You do not break promises to children, ever,” she said.
“I understand the possibility that someday I may get a knock on my door, and someone will be standing there, saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to inform you…’”
She pauses.
“I pray to God that it never happens. But, on some level, the children have to understand it, too.”