This is a real story. Young Canadian soldier, serving overseas. Never mind the bad guys over the hill: Things are falling apart on the home front.

“I was deployed for seven months. Our only son at the time was three years old. In the middle of winter, the car broke down constantly, despite being a brand new car. My wife was sick herself, and our son has asthma, and was in and out of the hospital.” That situation would tax a family where dad was home every night. In this case, the mother was not only trying to cope with everything on her own, she was doing it in a place where she didn’t know anybody, while she was worrying about who might be trying to kill her husband.

Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier read the e-mail at Calgary’s Military Museums recently, while talking up the Military Families Fund. It’s a charity he founded last year to address exactly that kind of situation.

It’s not that the Armed Forces don’t look after their people. In many ways, they do a great job. The pay is OK, the benefits are good. When you leave, Veterans Affairs has a job placement service to ease you back into civvy street. Even if you live long enough to be a problem to your kids, Veterans Affairs won’t desert you. They still pay to cut the grass for my aged mother-in-law, whose late husband was in the RCAF during the war.

But government agencies have their limits, and their rules.

And they don’t provide for a situation such as this soldier’s wife ran into.

Try and put yourself in her shoes.

You’re feeling rough, but you still have to get groceries. It’s 20 below, you bundle up the kid, get him into the car, and then the bloody thing won’t start. Maybe one of the other wives on the base will bail you out. You get the car to the shop.

But that’s the night you have to get His Worship The Baby to the hospital, because he’s having an attack. Can’t ask the girl next door to get up in the middle of the night. That’s when you find getting a cab at two in the morning is not so easy, and it takes a long time to get there, and you’ve been screaming at dispatch because baby’s not looking so good. . . . Then it’s take a number, wait, somebody has a look, settles him down, you wait some more. . . . Finally the night is done, you’re home, and with profound gratitude you lay down your aching, sleep-deprived head. At which baby, who had been sleeping peacefully until the moment you nodded off, wakes up. He’s ready to go, needs changing, his breakfast, your approval . . .

They also serve, who only sit and wait.

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