Military families experts at creating a home

By Zoltan Krompecher 5:47 PM Saturday, July 2, 2011

Current times force many Americans to move in search of better opportunities. Yet for some, moving is a lifestyle. In many military homes hangs a sign reading “Home is Where the Military Sends Us.”

On military posts, families brace for goodbyes before leaving places they’ve briefly called home. Witnessing luggage carriers secured with parachute cord and rolling caravans, with a Jed Clampett or Tom Joad feel, is common.

This business of saying goodbye to people who stood with you during 10 years of war is powerful stuff. We hold fast to these memories as long as we can, hoping we haven’t left our best years behind, and gently place them in our hearts.

One July, I pulled a trailer stuffed with a Harley, toys and bedding behind my old Cherokee. Early into the trip, my wife, Tina, cruised by as I limped up a mountain at a whopping 20 mph while the temperature gauge hovered near “meltdown.” For five days, I drove with the heat on high and windows down — vacillating perilously close to heat exhaustion and hypothermia. Still, benefits exist in this life we’ve chosen.

Last year, two international officers walked into my yard at Fort Leavenworth to thank me when our daughter, Annie, shared brownies from her lemonade stand and then to explain how enlightening their time in America had been. I replied: “Want to see America? Follow me.”

I revealed our backyard, full of children laughing and smiling. “Those two boys on the trampoline are Muslim. The red-haired girl is Jewish. The other girl, Leah, is mine. The boys on the tire swing (black and white) are my son and his best friend, Isaac. We’re Catholic, Isaac’s Protestant. Over there are Timmy Zamora and Emma Durant. Our neighbors span the globe. Daily, these children come together and see past religion and color. You want to see America? You’re looking at it.”

The gentlemen nodded, smiled and left, enjoying their brownies. When we moved, I left behind the tire swing.

Thomas Wolfe’s “You can never go home again” rings true. For years, I planned to return to a Mayberry-like town where everything would be just as I left it — but time changes things.

I believed home was where I grew up, but that’s not enough. Home is where people cultivate friendships during difficult times and a family tree with limbs and branches budding with special friends. I’m pretty sure home involves waking to the sound of little feet dancing their way to find comfort in your arms after a long absence.

We are strengthened through quiet tears running down cheeks while driving away from schools and friends fading in our taillights. This journey remains uncharted, but the hometown I left years ago has grown and changed, and so have we.

That sign I resisted for so long now hangs in our foyer. Home is where the military sends us.

Lt. Col. Zoltan Krompecher is a graduate of Northeastern High School, a Green Beret and intelligence officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He now lives in Kalamazoo, Mich., where he is a professor of military science at Western Michigan University.

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