Follow the troops

Sgt. Johnny McDaniel of Englewood called his family four times a week during his 18-month deployment to Iraq to assure his children that he was safe.

Still, his daughter, Amber, 15 at the time, cried often and stopped watching the news on television.

“Too much Iraq,” she said.

His son, Marcus, who was 9, filled his room with pictures of his father, but the photos only made Marcus miss his dad more.

McDaniel, 52, a full-time member of the National Guard, returned from Iraq in November 2005, and his family says that the emotional roller coaster they experienced while he was away brought them closer together.

The 2800 New Jersey Army National Guard soldiers who will be deployed to Iraq in September will leave behind nearly 800 children. It’s the largest deployment of troops from the state since World War II.

“In past deployments, we were working with 150 kids at most,” said Amanda Balas, the state youth coordinator for the Guard’s Family Programs, a resource and referral center at Fort Dix.

Since the call up, Balas has been visiting Family Assistance Centers at armories around the state, tutoring soldiers on how to prepare their children for the deployment.

Her emphasis, she says, is on keeping the lines of communication open between parents and children.

“There will be so many emotions — happy, depressed, angry,” she said. “There are no right or wrong feelings. It’s how we deal with them.”

When dealing with infants, Balas encourages stay-behind parents to cater to the child’s sense of smell and hearing. Put a soldier’s favorite T-shirt in the crib, she suggests, or spread some of their favorite cologne or perfume on the child’s blanket.

“There’s the potential that some children won’t know the soldier when he returns. … That tends to hurt the soldier, and it can be heart-wrenching,” Balas said.

She also recommends that parents record book readings by the soldier, so the child remembers the soldier’s voice.

Popular children’s show Sesame Street has also recognized the importance of reaching the children of military families, launching two successful “Talk, Listen, Connect” DVDs that feature characters Elmo and Rosita, and deal with deployments and homecomings.

“We discovered there is very few material, if any, around for young children helping them cope with the issue of deployment,” said Jeanette Betancourt, vice president for Outreach and Educational Practices at Sesame Workshop.

On the day Sesame’s second DVD, “Talk, Listen, Connect: Deployments, Homecomings, Changes,” was launched, the military ordered 43,000 of the 500,000 copies that will be distributed free to military families nationwide.

The New Jersey Army National Guard has ordered 300, Balas said.

Sgt. Eliezer Viera, 41, of Wallington, said the DVD has helped comfort his 4-year-old son, Ethan.

“When he sees me put on the uniform, he knows I will be gone for the weekend, possibly longer,” said Viera, a postal worker in Paterson. “He gets really sad.”

Viera’s unit, Charlie Company of the 250th Brigade Support Battalion, which is based in Jersey City, will be deployed in the fall. It will be Viera’s third deployment.

“[During] my first deployment in the Gulf War, there was no e-mail, strictly writing letters,” Viera said. “The second time, at Camp Speicher in Tikrit, there was e-mail availability and Webcam.

“It made it a little easier to see my son, but it’s not the same as being there, touching him, feeling his breath when he was 7 months old. I missed his first steps, his first words.”

Viera is not sure his son will comprehend his yearlong deployment.

“He asks, ‘Will you be coming home soon?’” Viera said.

“Yes,” Viera tells him. “Before your sixth birthday.”

During her father’s tour in Iraq, Amber McDaniel, now 18 and a nursing student, said she couldn’t even talk to her best friend about the war.

“People don’t know what to say when you tell them,” she said. “For me it was frustrating, they just didn’t understand.”

But she found she could bond with the children of other soldiers at the Teaneck Armory.

“That’s why I went to the armory, we could talk about stuff like [the war],” she said.

McDaniel’s wife, Sonja, a teacher at the Teaneck Community Charter School, said she watched Amber mature before her eyes while her father was away.

Amber spent more time at the armory, and was the armory’s representative at a symposium for military children in Kansas.

Even Sonja, already a member of the armory’s Family Readiness Group, began taking a lead role at meetings.

“I was one of those women who said I am not discussing my personal business with these people — I’ll just go to the meetings for the kids,” she said.

“But it actually turned out to be therapeutic for the entire family,” she said. “There were children there going through the same thing as my kids … and women going through the same thing. Because of that, I formed lasting relationships.”

E-mail: bautista@northjersey.com