Over the past few decades, technology has evolved and completely changed how we communicate. Beginning with the initial letters sent during basic training, communication in the military community is a vital topic. I had the pleasure of interviewing a mother/daughter duo who have both had the experience of being military spouses: Julie Terry, a spouse from 1978 to 2016, and Julianne Braudis, who not only experienced the life of a military child, but has been a military spouse for 16 years.
The Evolution of Communication Technology:
“I think one of the biggest differences for us is video connection and visual connection. My kids did a deployment when they were much younger and I feel like that development in communication was quite vital to them. My daughter knew who he was when he got off the plane,” Julianne says.
Nowadays we have a multitude of ways of communicating with our spouses when they are away. However, it has not always been that way. Communication when a military member was away from the home was often sparse and sporadic. Julie recalled being “patched in” to her first satellite phone call with her deployed spouse in 1983.
Julie also received training from ACS in 1994 on typing emails during a deployment. As a child, Julianne experienced AOL coming onto the scene and recalled that “there might have been an email” when her father was away, noting that you had to take your email to ACS and back then they thought that it was so “high tech.’’
On the day of the interview, I texted my husband just to ask what he wanted for dinner. In fact, I was able to virtually interview Julie and Julianne while the three of us were in two different countries across three different time zones. The evolution of technology has greatly impacted the means through which we communicate as a military community. But how we communicate as a military community has also changed in the past four decades.
How We Communicate as a Military Community: Going From No SFRGs to Receiving Reintegration Training
“No one understood back then (the late 1970s and 1980s) the connection between strong families and operational readiness,” said Julie, reading a quote from her veteran husband.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, phone trees and coffee groups were the primary way of receiving information as a military spouse as to training schedules or what was coming up within the unit. There was no FRG/SFRG.
In the past couple of decades, especially in the 2010s, the military has very much amped up its focus on communication with the family as well as communication within the military family itself. Julie has an intriguing insight as to what aided in this shift that occurred after Desert Storm:
“As the military became more integrated with women, you saw a gradual shift. I think women brought something more to the table about mental health…and that was a good thing.”
Julianne noted how she and her husband have always done some form of reintegration training after he was away from home for an extended amount of time. It was through initial reintegration training that Julianne received at Fort Bliss that she learned not only what to expect when her spouse returned, but also how to (better) communicate with him upon returning. When asked if anyone forewarned her about the struggles after her spouse’s initial deployments in the early 1980s, Julie slightly smiled and shook her head no.
How we communicate as a military community has shifted greatly over the past 40 years as there has been additional focus from the military on the impact to the family. Even with all of the technical advances, how we communicate with each other can be just as important as the means through which we communicate. When asked about how she communicates with her husband in today’s world, Julianne responded,
“It takes a lot of creativity to communicate, it takes a lot of grace, it takes an extra type of perspective to move forward in this life.”
How about you? How do you communicate with your spouse and how has that changed since the service member joined? What communication military resources do you utilize?
