The Military's Newest Recruits: Stay-at-Home Dads

Meet the military's fastest-growing new group of recruits—dads who stay home while Mom goes to war.

A New Role
Before Christine left for Afghanistan, Clinton Collins slept dead to the world. Now his sleep is fitful as he listens for his little girls in the middle of the night or an unexpected phone call from his wife. He wakes up every morning at six, lets the dogs out, starts the coffee, picks up scattered toys, and checks his e-mail, in the few quiet moments before the girls come looking for him. Kennedy, 12, rises first, andhits the shower. Four-year-old Taylor staggers down the hallway, wiping sleep from her eyes, with Reagan, two, tottering behind.

At the kitchen table in their home on Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas, the four crowd around the laptop, their morning ritual. Reagan knows the Skype ringtone now and runs toward the computer, yelling, "Mommy! Mommy!" when she hears it. Christine appears on the screen. It's evening in Afghanistan, and her face is drawn after another 12-hour shift as an Air Force trauma nurse at Bagram Airfield hospital. Taylor, working at a bowl of Cookie Crisp cereal, breaks into a wide smile. "Hi, Mommy!" she says. Kennedy leans over her dad's shoulder for a better view. This is the last time they expect to see Christine for nearly a month. She leaves the next morning for remote villages in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As she has confided to her husband and oldest daughter, this will be a dangerous mission. Kennedy knows what could happen and says she's "freaked-out." Collins worries but hides it, just as he hides his concern over yesterday's suicide bombing at the entrance to Christine's base. If the girls see that he's anxious, they'll wonder why and grow anxious too. Christine wipes away tears. "I miss you, my girls," she says softly, trying not to wake her roommate. She has told her daughters this many times, but she tells them again.

Christine's face disappears. Collins sends Kennedy out the door to the bus stop down the street and loads cereal bowls into the dishwasher while the family's three dogs—a German shepherd, a terrier mutt, and a long-haired Chihuahua—wrestle and nip underfoot. The doorbell rings, and a neighbor, also a nurse, drops off her four-month-old baby, whom Collins watches once a week. The neighborhood on the base is a close-knit community, with ranch-style homes, shade trees, and immaculate lawns. Most neighbors know one another, and by now Collins has developed a reputation on his cul-de-sac as the babysitter they can go to in a pinch. "We take care of our own," he says of the Air Force, in which he served for almost eight years.

He slings a red-and-gray Eddie Bauer bag over his shoulder, picks up the baby, and herds the other kids toward the door. "This is not a diaper bag. This is a man purse," he says, laughing. "Nobody has to know what's in it." He straps the kids into car seats and drives toward Taylor's preschool, across the sprawling desert installation, where F-15s take off from nearby airfields and roar overhead on training flights above the craggy mountains that ring Las Vegas. "A lot of moms look at me and say, 'Haven't you gone crazy yet?' They're implying that I shouldn't have made it as long as I have," he says.

A New Trend
The stay-at-home wife-and-mother who runs the household while Dad's at war has been the norm in military families for generations. But today, women account for about 200,000, or almost 15 percent, of personnel, and men are stepping into the caregiving role. "This is a new thing for the United States military," says Linda Spoonster Schwartz, Connecticut's commissioner of Veterans' Affairs. Schwartz is a Vietnam-era veteran who rose to the rank of major in the Air Force during a time when mothers were not allowed to serve. "There were some women deployed during Desert Storm. But never so many and never for so long [as now]. We haven't faced this issue before."

Even under usual circumstances, war zone deployments are phenomenally stressful for those left behind. They may be even more challenging for war dads. In the past three decades, the military has created a vast support network to assist wives and their families, providing counseling, child care, even lawn care. But the few men who have attempted to plug into the system say they feel awkward and often unwelcome.

"It's no different than in society," says Charles Figley, a Tulane University psychologist who has testified before Congress about the challenges that deployments place on military families. "Nursery schools are set up for moms; most child-care workers are female. Supermarkets are geared toward women. These are relatively minor things, but collectively they send a signal to men that says, Go away—you're out of place."

His Daily Routine
Collins arrives at Taylor's preschool, the Nellis Child Development Center, and wades through a throng of mothers dropping off their children. Of the caregivers for the 98 kids who attend, five are men whose wives are deployed. It's been five years since Collins left the Air Force Security Forces as a staff sergeant so that Christine could pursue her nursing career. He's been staying home with the kids ever since. Collins knows that some of his old Air Force buddies on base are puzzled by his choice. Sometimes they shake their heads and tell him they don't know how he does it. "They want to talk guns or Ultimate Fighting with me, and here I am carrying a Barbie doll in my hand."

At Taylor's preschool, parents are offered a "break" night once a month, when staff will watch kids for several hours. But Collins says he has never used one or joined any of the support groups available. "I've never felt too comfortable hanging out with a bunch of women, sitting down to talk," he says. Christine's deployment is "difficult," he acknowledges, "but I know it's only temporary, and I can press through it on my own."

Collins's reticence is hardly unique. Taylor's teacher, Amina Simmons, says none of the other dads partake of break nights either. A recent comment from one father she invited was, "No no no. I'm fine." "He was dragging. He had rings under his eyes," Simmons says. Men "do a really good job, but they don't want help from anybody."


Brenda Kadet
Before Brenda Kadet deployed to Afghanistan last year, she stopped in at the base's spousal support group at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and asked one of its leaders, Crystal Durso, to help convince her husband to join.

She found a willing ally. "It's hard enough when you have someone helping you out," Durso says. But playing all those roles—cook, nurse, housekeeper, disciplinarian—can be overwhelming. Several men, including Durso's own husband, who recently returned from his third Iraq deployment, have told her that the combat zone was easier. "He said he'd rather dodge IEDs [improvised explosive devices] than come home to screaming kids and try to figure out homework assignments and give them baths."

Kadet's 15-month deployment left her husband, Jerry Hollo, to care for their son, Nick, 5, and her stepson, Kyle, 16. "It's much harder for our spouses than it is for us. We grab our bags and we're gone. We get to focus on this," Kadet, a command sergeant major, says from Afghanistan. "The transition for the spouse at home is hard. You start from scratch every time you relocate. You don't know anyone. Jerry's now doing everything himself and trying to be a mother to my sons."

It took Durso months to get Hollo to participate in the support group. "I beat that bush forever," Durso says of her cajoling. When Hollo finally agreed to attend events, women in the group told Durso their husbands didn't want them to participate because Hollo would be there. Indeed, after Durso herself chatted with Hollo one day in the grocery store, word made it back to her husband in Iraq that she had been seen socializing with another man. Hollo has dealt with similar jealousy on several Army posts. "I feel discriminated against," says Hollo, who received a medical discharge from the military in 1999 after a parachuting accident. "A lot of guys are jealous. I'm not allowed to have women as friends."

Jealousy is only natural for spouses who realize that while they are gone, life at home proceeds without them. Back in 2005, Connecticut VA commissioner Schwartz held a panel outside Hartford with military women who had just returned from stints abroad. When she asked them to name the most frightening experience they'd had overseas, domestic issues were right up there next to brushes with death. One command sergeant major noted that when she called home, she heard that her husband had learned to do her daughter's hair. "That was really frightening!" she said.

Jerry Hollo
Jerry Hollo was handling most of the household and child-rearing work even before his wife deployed. He would have preferred to stay in the Army and rise through the ranks, too, but the parachuting accident broke his back and both legs and ankles, and ended his 11-year career as a military policeman. While Kadet has moved through a steady progression of assignments—Washington, D.C., Japan, Texas—her husband has adjusted to his new role.

As Kadet's overseas deployment stretches on, her absence is keenly felt. On a spring evening at Hollo's house, just outside Fort Campbell, Nick colors and watches cartoons. He squeezes a stuffed turtle's flipper, summoning his mother's voice: "I love you more than anything in the whole world. You're the best little boy ever."

"He used to squeeze it constantly," Hollo says, then adds, only half joking, "I was afraid the batteries were going to die while she was over there." Nick doesn't squeeze the toy quite as much these days.

"We Googled Afghanistan, and I saw where Mommy is," Nick says. "You can fly in an airplane and in about 50 hours, you'll be there."

"Nicky, what does Mommy do in Afghanistan?" Hollo asks.

"Fights the bad guys," Nick says.

"Usually he says, 'Kills the terrorists,' " Hollo says, turning to Nick. "You said it the politically correct way."

Hollo explains that his son gets moody sometimes, especially lately. When he gets into trouble, he says, "I want Mommy. I want Mommy." Still, that's an improvement from when Kadet first left. Nick, she says, "was crying every day at school, waking up with nightmares. Jerry was telling me this on the phone, and I said, 'Don't tell me that, seriously, because I can't do anything about it.' It just breaks my heart. And I feel so selfish for being here. I know my son is making a sacrifice. I'm just hoping I teach him service to somebody other than himself, that other things are important too."

Good News
There is an upside to all of this. Collins says his relationship with his children is now deeper (though he has not yet mastered hair braiding). "My 12-year-old was getting to an age where she was relying a lot on her mom for girl talk," he says. "Now she's more open to discussing things with me, like what boy she thinks is cute in school. We're becoming better friends."

Gary Trout, who retired from the Army in 2005, stayed behind at Fort Campbell when his wife, Irma, deployed to Afghanistan as a personnel officer last year. Though he complains that he's lost 20 pounds because he misses Irma's cooking, he's grown closer to his son, Christopher, 20, who is living at home while attending college. "We hang out more together," Trout says. "We've been to a lot of car shows and swap meets. We didn't really do that before she left."

His Daily Routine
After dropping off Taylor, Collins heads to the track at the base. By the time he's put Reagan and the baby he's watching in a double jogging stroller, Reagan is wailing. Successive roars of F-15 fighter jets taking off drown out her cries. She has fallen asleep by Collins's third mile. Collins, who runs up to 40 miles a week, is training for a half marathon. "Christine is the ultimate motivation," he says. "If she can do what she's doing, I can run around the track one more time."

To add a little variety to his day, Collins sometimes takes a different route home after picking up Taylor and breaks up the afternoon with a walk to the mailbox. "You got a letter from Mommy," he tells Taylor. "One for Kennedy and one for you." Taylor snatches it from his hand and races back to the house. They sit on the couch, and Collins reads it aloud. "I have been taking care of a lot of little kids your age," Christine writes. "Every time I hold these kids, they remind me of you and your sisters."

Kennedy comes home from school and reads her mother's letter on a swing in the backyard. "It's hard. Sometimes you need your mom, not your dad," Kennedy says. She wishes her mother were around for shopping trips, for advice about boys, to take care of her when she's sick. "I just want my days to be normal again," she says.

Before she left for Afghanistan, Christine encouraged Kennedy to keep a journal that they could share when she returns. Christine began a journal as well. Soon she started e-mailing the entries to her husband so he could understand her life in Afghanistan.

On January 19, she wrote:
As I sat in my dark, quiet room, I began to cry as I thought about the 34-year-old man who lost his life two nights ago. He died, and there was nothing we could do about it.

I am sure at the start of his deployment, he kissed his children goodbye and told each of them that he loved them more than anything in this world and that he would think of them every second of every day, promising he would come home to love and hug them again.

It reminds me of my own goodbye to my own children and husband, saying the same words I am sure echoed throughout his home. Then I think, What makes me so different? When tragedy hits, we always say, Why me? Why me? With everything that I have seen and experienced in such a short time in Afghanistan, I now think, Why not me? Why not me?

"My biggest fear is her emotional stability when she comes home," Collins says. "I don't care how strong you are—when you go and do what she's doing, you're going to be affected. The true horrors of war are seen by the doctors and nurses."

He spreads a layer of sliced apples into a piecrust. Kennedy and Taylor watch television in the living room. Reagan naps nearby in her high chair.

Earlier, he had checked his e-mail and found a message from Christine. "If something happens over the next three weeks," she wrote, "just remember that I'll always love you and I'll always love the kids and I'll never forget you guys."

Collins sometimes lets his mind drift to dark places, imagining the worst. Then he pushes away those worries, those things he can't control, and focuses on the day's tasks.

"She's got a job to do over there," he says. "I've got a job to do here."

He heats a pot of water for the pasta. He slides the apple pie into the oven and makes Kennedy's lunch for tomorrow. Soon it will be dinnertime, and bath time, and bedtime, and another fitful sleep for Clinton Collins.