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by Rob Carter
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When I deployed to Afghanistan in February of 2005, there were long stretches of time when I couldn’t talk to my family back home. Sometimes it was because I wasn’t near a major U.S. base, other times because I didn’t have a phone card with enough minutes to call home, or because I was in some remote location where only satellite phones worked. Having only one sat phone on our team meant it went out on missions, so we didn’t always have access to it. As a father with a wife and two children back home in St. Louis, Missouri, not being able to communicate regularly meant being forced to accept that my ability to share in the responsibilities of parenting and the joys of watching my kids grow up was severely limited. Over the course of my mobilization I missed stretches when the girls were sick, when they mastered new skills in school, and the whole host of celebrations we have each year as a family. The thought of being pulled from seminary to serve as an embedded trainer in the Afghan National Army was nowhere on our family’s radar when I left teaching high school and we moved from Connecticut to Missouri where I began my studies to become a pastor at the seminary.
I began my service in the Army National Guard in February of 1990, starting as a simultaneous membership ROTC Cadet then serving as an infantry officer in the Illinois, Maryland, and Connecticut National Guard until 1997. Then I moved over to the Army Reserve, where I served as a medical service officer, working back through the ranks from Lieutenant to Major, until 2009 and serving as a chaplain from 2009 until 2021, finishing my service as a Chaplain (Colonel).
A challenge across all of my years of military service has been communications: how we get messages from higher to lower commands, how we reach out from an area of operations, both within and outside of the United States, to speak with family and those outside of our units. During my lifetime communications technology has changed drastically, moving from landlines and cassette tape answering machines, to cell phones, to the whole suite of digital options for receiving messages and making video calls. The radios we used and the methods we used to encrypt communications have also evolved. But even in the early years, when comms were at their most basic, I was still infinitely more connected to the home front and to my fellow soldiers than my forebears who served before satellites, internet, and cell phones. These days, social media allows me to keep tabs on my old units while they’re in the field which has led me to reflect on whether increased connectivity has made communication with family and the chain of command easier or more difficult—whether it is, perhaps, harder to be expected to stay in touch than to be able to essentially go away and be truly gone until the job was done.
On my deployment to Afghanistan, I often thought about my father-in-law, who was a U.S. Navy submariner at a time when going to sea meant being almost entirely cut-off from the folks back home for three months at a stretch, three months at sea, three months in port, apart from his family for six months each year. Spending most of his time deep beneath the ocean’s surface, he could only send and receive three familygrams from home per month, and each message had to be limited to just fifteen words. In actuality, it was only thirteen words, because the first word was the recipient’s last name, and the last word was the sender’s. Thirteen measly words were all he had—three times each month—to hear updates about his kids, his house, how things were going at home while he was at sea. It makes the 280 characters of the average tweet seem long-winded. For my father-in-law and mother-in-law, communication while he was at sea became an art form and a puzzle, and it caused more than a little confusion. I imagined how my father-in-law and his fellow sailors’ imaginations must have run wild trying to interpret the thirteen words of an especially cryptic communication as their imagination worked through the message to determine: Is the house okay? Is my wife going to leave me? Will I still have a family to come home to when this is over? If the submarine was maintaining total radio silence, there would be no communication at all until it pulled back into port. The silence must have been excruciating sometimes. Then again, it might have been a blessing, allowing the family back home to accept that dad was truly away, that he couldn’t be there on a daily basis, and allowing the sailor to settle into the important job at hand without feeling the pull of home so painfully.
When I was a soldier, I was never cut off from communications for more than a few weeks. Mobilizations for the Mississippi River flooding in 1993 and COVID in 2020 did not impact phone use for the first and cell or computer use at all for the second. The longest breaks in communications happened during my reserve unit’s annual two-week training or a three-week extended combat training when we were “in the box” for a wartime skills evaluation and during my deployment to Afghanistan. Back before cell phones, our primary radio was a AN/PRC-77—a nearly fourteen-pound brick that could be carried on a soldier’s back, mounted in a vehicle, or installed in the command tent and hooked to a large antenna. It had its share of problems, but it was adequate for communicating with other troops in the field, but suffice to say, it wasn’t a direct connection to the family back home. Phones back then were either in a box on the corner, mounted to the wall or in our homes and places of work. All relied on wires for connection. Going to the field during monthly drill weekends and annual training meant a break from our day jobs in the civilian world and from the demands of family life. We could communicate with each other to complete our missions, but we were pretty much unplugged from the rest of the world. It was possible in theory that we could be reached if there was a family emergency via a clunky transfer mechanism going from UHF radio to landline through the command center, but it was rare that it was set up and working. More likely a member of the local Red Cross would be sent out to physically get the message to the installation or training area, and we would hear about it through them, often past the time when the soldier could have gotten home to do anything more than mourn and grieve, or help with putting the pieces back together for a member of their family. Our loved ones could also leave important messages on cassette answering machines back at the armory, but there was no way to check them regularly when we were in the field. We may not have been 800-plus feet underwater like my father-in-law had been when he was at sea in the submarine fleet, but when we were in the field, getting in touch with us was like trying to get a message to the moon. I’ll be honest: We wanted it that way. It was a welcome break from the demands of the other twenty-eight days of the month, and it made the training environment seem more real.
When I was a young lieutenant in the Guard, I worked full-time as a school teacher. I was dedicated to my job and often had a hard time keeping my work within the school day window of 7 AM to 3:30 PM. In fact, my wife would at times have to call me at school to remind me it was time to come home, because I’d lose track of time grading papers, planning lessons or working on a project on the school’s webpage server. The break that came from being disconnected from phones when I headed into the field for training on drill weekends was part of the self-care process that I did unconsciously but has become such a prominent theme for personal mental health care today. During that time I could expect to be left undisturbed by phone calls from colleagues or reminders about meetings coming up or all of the papers that I had to grade and the lessons I needed to plan. Field time had its intrinsic inconveniences as well, we did not get as much rest, outside regardless of the temperatures or weather conditions. The meals were what I pulled out of the field kitchen or from the slim pickings I was willing to consume from the Meals-Ready-to-Eat that I found palatable. Normal life would still be waiting for me when I got home, but so long as I was in the field, I could concentrate on training. I could compartmentalize my mind. In the days before cell phones, I didn’t even have to go to the field to have a measure of disconnection. Even on the drill weekends when we stayed at the armory, no one would answer the office phones after the close of the business day. Drill time was drill time; the rest of the world would have to wait.
Being out of contact occasionally created difficult moments for me, as I’m sure it did for everyone I served with from time to time. In 2003, I was at drill and out of reach when my three year-old daughter had a febrile seizure and had to go to the emergency room. My wife called and called the reserve center but could not get an answer. She even called the police, who came to the reserve center to find me, but the gates were closed and locked and they could not find me where I was sleeping in a camper trailer behind the motor pool. Staying over so I had more time to work through the change of command inventory before signing for all the property and sub-handreciepiting so I was not on the hook for what was not on hand when it was turned over to the next commander. If I’d had a cell phone, she would’ve been able to get ahold of me instantaneously, and it would’ve been a huge relief to both of us. I would’ve been able to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. Still, except in the case of emergencies, my sense is that we were all better off when we could be selectively disconnected. While she ended up recovering and growing out of that condition, it contributed to my anxiety later when I was in Afghanistan and the girls had medical situations that I could not keep track of easily with the extreme time difference and the constant connection difficulties. It was painful for my wife and for me.
The lack of sophisticated—even functional—communications technology wasn’t limited to the devices we used to call home. Our comms equipment in the unit was also spotty and prone to failure, riddled with work from gremlins as well as the parts and pieces that were broken or forgotten in the unit commo cages. I remember one time, when I was in an anti-armor platoon, when I had to go to Radio Shack to buy handheld CB radios to distribute to the guys because our actual, Army-issued comms had broken down and there were none available for our platoon to draw. Sometimes the limited communications capability meant that we could hide out during training when we didn’t want to be bothered by the higher-ups. We could always just say that our radios weren’t working and we didn’t receive the messages they were trying to send. Some operators were not able to plug in the Vinson or KYK-13 so we could communicate on the net, challenges that still existed when syncing the SINCGARS then SATCOM radios we upgraded to next. The days of being able to disappear ended when our vehicles were upgraded with PLGR and DAGR GPS-capable “blue force trackers,” which showed all of the units in the area on a large screen mounted on the passenger side. The days of constantly updated acetate map boards in the operations center and battle captains furiously erasing positions and remarking them with a dry erase marker were gone; now everything was monitored in real-time on a series of screens. No more hiding. The advantage, of course, was that it was much harder to get lost and much easier to stay in contact when we were actually deployed in a war zone. In Afghanistan, our GPS capabilities were a critical advantage—a lifesaver when troops came in contact or we were linking up with another unit.
How quaint it seems now to think of the days when the commo platoon would run wires out to our positions from the command tent whenever we stopped somewhere for more than twelve hours, so that they’d have immediate, wired contact with us via handheld field phones, which aren’t subject to the radio disturbances caused by competing frequencies or terrain features. To respond on the TA-312 field phones, we had to hear the ring, then spin the crank and pick it up to hear what the switchboard operator was saying. There was no chatter, only efficient and terse dispatches. The radio telephone operator, or RTO, was the only person on the line, ready to receive and respond to messages. Everyone else was free to focus on their jobs.
Sometimes the messages our families tried to deliver to us or left for us on the answering machines at the armory were less important than they seemed. By the time we got home from drill, the problem had often passed, the event we were invited to was over, what seemed urgent was not so urgent, someone else was able to step in and help instead of us. The world moved on just fine in our absence, and we were often none the wiser for it. Sometimes those messages, by the time they got out to us in the field or by the time we were able to listen to them, were so garbled or mangled by the effort to pass them on that they were unintelligible. They were often as inscrutable as the thirteen-word familygrams my father-in-law received on his submarine.
Cellular technology, of course, changed everything. I still remember the first time I saw an officer with a cell phone. He walked with it everywhere, hugging it close to his body like a cherished possession. He carried it in what looked like a large black lunchbox with an antenna sticking out one side. That brick phone seemed to validate the officer’s importance even more than the rank on his collar. Back then, none of us imagined that we’d all be carrying cell phones in a few years’ time, small enough to fit in our pockets, not too many years later connected to the internet and with all the power of full-size computers.
When I deployed to Afghanistan in 2005, during Operation Enduring Freedom III/IV, I had to line up outside a phone trailer whenever I wanted to call home or I depended on phone cards with precious, limited minutes that I could pick up along streets we drove through to use with the Afghan cell phone I purchased from another soldier who was rotating home. Even when I had plenty of minutes loaded into the cell, it was only reliable in some areas.
Usually, I made my calls in a call center, a building with phones mounted in rows of plywood cubbies. Over time each cubby became covered in doodles and graffiti. Sometimes those scrawls bore traces of arguments with someone back home, things the soldier wanted to say but didn’t, snippets of complicated feelings better left unsaid but desperate to get out somehow. I can remember more than one time hearing a soldier slam the phone on the hook and storm out, probably after hearing some unwanted news from back home. Lots of the phones got broken this way, so even if a call center had twenty phones, maybe half would be operational at any given time. As more phones went down, the lines to use them got longer.
By the time I arrived in Afghanistan to serve as an embedded trainer to a unit of Afghan National Army soldiers in 2005, we had plenty of communication options. I was stationed initially at Camp Julien, Kabul, where we had regular access to the Task Force Phoenix and the International Stabilization Force compounds, where we could take advantage of the morale tents with satellite phones, internet cafes, and a Green Beans coffee shop with computers that we could use to make video calls to the folks back home. We could even buy local cell phones which worked almost everywhere to receive calls from home, and we could buy minutes to use on the Thuraya satellite phone in areas with poor cell reception. The improvements in technology for calling home were matched by improvements in our tactical communications equipment. We had satellite radios, computers in our vehicles with big screens where we could see roads, towns, and terrain features, as well as the locations of all of the other friendly vehicles in the area. I could scroll across the area on the screen and find the vehicles of people who I needed to talk to and send them a text message, just like we all do on our phones now. It was such a novelty that I often sent messages for no particular reason, but just because I could.
Now, nearly two decades later, we’ve made yet another massive leap in communications technology, accelerated by the necessities of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Webex, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Live, and numerous other platforms, we can catch up with anyone anywhere in the world so long as they have internet access. Reaching people has become so quick and easy, it’s almost impossible to be unreachable, no matter what age you are or where you live. You have to make a real effort to be detached from electronic communications to become unreachable—you have to be one of those rebels who decides to carry a flip-phone or turn off the internet in your house.
In our intensely connected era, the ability to go off into the woods—to put distance between ourselves and the numerous responsibilities and obligations of our daily lives—has been lost. Now, when the Army-issued communications malfunction, we’re able to reach leaders on their personal phones. We can even send out a mass text to everyone in the unit so that the most current change in time, location, or uniform can be disseminated. The days when a single person stood out because they had a big cell phone are long gone. Now, it’s strange to find a person without a cell phone.
We are all in the here and now, all the time, wherever we are. Our watches can be synced to phones so that with a glance we can see who is calling, texting, or emailing us. The reflective quiet of waiting and not knowing has been broken as those we know, and those we do not through social media feeds are able to break in and interrupt our thoughts. We’re no longer able to step away to focus on perfecting our warfighting skills. Even when we’re at war, we’re expected to have one foot at home. We’re always available, always expected to be able to answer the phone, to respond to a text or email, about things urgent and mundane alike.
Our tether keeps us always available, but does it keep us present? Wasn’t there something important about being able to say: I am here now, doing this now, with these people, and that means I’m not there, doing that, with those people? I’ll admit that I miss the days when I could move from my life at home to my military life and create a temporary barrier that allowed me to be fully present, fully tuned-in to the mission and to my fellow soldiers. I might not want to go back to the era of confusing and inadequate familygrams, but neither do I want to be always online, always available. I crave that space I once knew out there in the field, looking up at the night sky and knowing that wherever I was, it was the only place I needed to be.
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Chaplain Rob Carter serves as the Director of Pastoral Care at Montefiore Nyack Hospital and leads Lutheran Worship at the Old Cadet Chapel, United States Military Academy. He and his wife Deborah have two daughters. He completed his more than thirty-one years of military service in September 2022, having served as an infantry officer and chaplain with numerous deployments.
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