Military’s Gold Star families often feel disconnected
Jane Horton wears a small Gold Star pin honoring her husband, Christopher, who was killed by Taliban gunfire four months ago.
“It’s like an outward expression of a burden carried deep inside,” Jane says about an emblem Congress created after World War II for those who lost loved ones to war.
Except that no one today seems to know what it means.
“I’ve never been asked about it. Ever,” she says.
As the 26-year-old widow of an Oklahoma National Guard soldier killed in combat, it is another reason Jane says she feels a world apart from other Americans.
She sensed it standing on an airport tarmac as her husband’s body was unloaded from the belly of an aircraft. She could see the faces staring down from the jetway windows above, parents holding children and pointing.
“I definitely feel there’s a disconnect,” she says.
National leaders and advocacy groups say they see a widening rift between a military at war and a public at peace, distracted by a sputtering economy and weary of hearing about Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Not every American knows what a … Gold Star family is,” first lady Michelle Obama said recently when she unveiled a Gold Star Christmas tree at the White House.
“Americans … often don’t realize that these people are right here among us,” says Ami Neiberger-Miller, a spokeswoman for Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), a non-profit that helps military families who lose loved ones.
Public displays of gratitude and generosity can be seen throughout the country: the lines that greet deploying troops at an airport in Bangor, Maine; initiatives to build specially adapted homes for the severely wounded; campaigns to encourage hiring veterans. Non-profit groups, such as the Wounded Warrior Project and Semper Fi Fund, that assist injured troops have sprung up.
But much of what the military endures is lost on the public, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now-retired admiral Michael Mullen told a West Point graduating class this year.
“I fear they do not know us,” he said.
Fewer than 1 percent of Americans are in the military today, compared with 10 percent during World War II. “Things were so different then,” says Marie Speer, 90, whose husband, Pvt. Edward “Eddie” Jordan, was killed fighting in Germany in 1944, when she was 23.
Gold Star banners hung from countless homes and Americans were keenly sensitive to the meaning, says Speer, who founded Gold Star Wives of America in April 1945. “Everybody was involved in the war and it was something uppermost in everyone’s mind.”
War syncopated the rhythm of life back then: victory gardens growing in backyards, scrap drives, gasoline rationing and celebrities selling war bonds.
Today, 83 percent of Americans say veterans and military families “have made a lot of sacrifices since 9/11” while 43 percent of Americans say the same of the public’s sacrifices since the attacks, according to a recent Pew Research Survey.
However, the survey shows that fewer than half (47 percent) of Americans say the military has sacrificed more than the public, and of those 71 percent say the sacrifice of servicemembers is part of being in the military.
And while a majority of Americans say they have expressed their admiration for veterans directly, 84 percent of veterans say the public does not understand the problems faced by servicemembers or their families — and the public (71 percent) agrees.
To have a family member serve in the military, much less be wounded or killed in combat, is a growing rarity in American society. Pew Research found that among Americans ages 18 to 29, a third say they have an immediate family member in the military. Researchers attribute the trend to the nation’s shrinking forces, as a smaller share of Americans currently serve in uniform than an any time since the peace-era between World Wars I and II.
Last month, when an intercollegiate legislature met at the Oklahoma state Capitol to honor Christopher Horton, delegate Philip Jackson noticed Jane’s pin after it was pointed out to him.
“That’s the Gold Star,” he said. “I had no idea.”