News From the Cause

September 10, 2011

Jaelen Gadson was a second-grader when he heard his mom on the phone about 5 a.m., crying.

He knew something was wrong. But he didn’t know that the events unfolding thousands of miles from his family’s home in Hawaii that Sept. 11 would change his life completely.

Like the 2 million other children whose parents serve in the military, Jaelen’s childhood was shaped by war.

Deployments to Afghanistan, then Iraq. Saying goodbye to a father who left for war showing no fear. “Have a good day at school. I’ll see you later,” he’d tell his kids before leaving.

This was the final goodbye for thousands of kids who lost a parent to war. Jaelen got his dad back.

But when he saw his big, strong, Army linebacker father after his second deployment, he was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

There aren’t too many 17-year-olds who can claim to have a “mom sense.” But Jaelen, a football player at Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, can’t look at a sidewalk without instantly assessing the rocks and dips, the ramps and the rolls that would make it a smooth ride for his dad’s wheelchair.

His nurturing instincts were something foreign to him before, because for most of Jaelen’s life, his father was this hulking, real-life action figure who played football at West Point, formed battalions of men and went off to war.

And then in 2007, somber men in uniform came to the Gadson home in Kansas and sat down in the living room. And his mother cried. And his sister cried. And Jaelen’s life changed yet again.

He’s part of a generation of military kids for whom wartime isn’t the new normal. It’s just normal. It’s what they’ve grown up with. And the sacrifices they’ve had to make since Sept. 11 are just as sobering as those of their parents.

“Military families have shouldered the response for that horrible day,” says Joyce Wessel Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association in Alexandria. Click here to view more

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