The Family Impact

A huge part of this story that grows over time is your family. This experience will be unique for everyone. I will try to highlight some adjacent points and considerations that may not have directly applied/affected me, but I will certainly miss on areas that will be more valuable to you.

The Overview

In 2015, I signed the HPSP contract, commissioned in the US Army, and started medical school. I had a girlfriend of four years at that time who was fully supportive of me following this goal. In 2017, the girlfriend became a fiance, and in 2018 the fiance became the wife. In 2019, I graduated med school and we moved to Hawaii for residency. In 2020, we welcomed our first child, and in 2022 we got another! Also in 2022, we PCS'd to Georgia for my first duty station. In 2025 I started (and will complete) my first and only deployment. In 2026, I will have completed my Active-Duty Service Obligation (ADSO) and will separate from the Army. 

Along the Way

The transition from medical school to residency was fairly uneventful. My wife was working as a teacher at the time and was not expecting to make a career at that location. She was also able to secure a teaching position on-post where we were living during residency, so she was able to walk to work. The Army provided a few thousand dollars in dislocation allowance for my wife, which was helpful. I can see the Army PCS move cycle being hard on dependents who are highly specialized in their fields and do not have flexibility in their career paths. As a result, you will find a large number of military spouses become real estate agents (which is particularly helpful if you stick around the Army and move frequently) or run businesses out of their homes. My wife transitioned into the latter of these options later on. 

Life on post was really great. I hear your experience will vary wildly based on where exactly you end up, so I consider us lucky. The way the houses were positioned on the blocks, there was a shared backyard space for a few dozen quad homes with a playground in the middle. My wife and my first kiddo spent hours a day socializing in this communal space. Living on post includes armed security by default, so my wife felt comfortable going for walks throughout the installation at any time of day. The commissary and exchange were less than a 5 minute drive away. If the hospital had been on post, I could have gone the whole three years without leaving if I wanted to!

The PCS from Hawaii to Georgia was rough. We thought we would be smart/proactive and have our household goods picked up over a month before we left and planned to stay with family for several weeks between duty stations. However, it took 84 days from pick-up to drop-off of our household goods, so we were left in an empty house for a month on both ends of this move. 

The biggest impact ended up being on our kiddo who was about 18 months old at that time. She had normal progression of developmental milestones, but for whatever reason, she stopped speaking for several months after we moved. She got back on track and all has been well since, but it was clear that that was a rough transition for her. 

Georgia has definitely been a step-down from Hawaii. We had heard not-great things about the on-post housing and the surrounding neighborhood, so we opted to live off-post. We now live in a new development 40-minutes away from post (I hate long commutes). We lost that great community and we do not vibe well with the deep south lifestyle. This is definitely an "us" problem as I know a doc who bought his forever house a few blocks away and they plan on staying in this area forever - more power to them! We are very much looking forward to getting out of Georgia and not looking back.

The day-to-day life as a doc embedded in a unit has been fantastic. I go on about this more in other pages, but I have loved it. When I was a Battalion doc, I was home before 1500 most days and as the Brigade doc, I make my own schedule and can bring my daughter to pre-K or pick her up some days and all such flexible options. Some people in my residency class have had a different experience in line units with much more rigid schedules (including daily formation PT - *shudders*). On the other hand, I have had significantly more field experience than they have had - field trainings, NTC, JMRC, and this deployment. It was kinda nice building up to this deployment over time - I would be in the field for three days, then five, then seven, then the month for NTC, all leading up to this potentially 9-month deployment. It gave us the chance to try out various coping strategies for us to try on the kids. It never gets easy - it just gets less hard or hard in a different way...

This deployment has been the most emotionally difficult thing I have ever done by a longshot. Seeing my wife and kids struggle through a phone screen secured my decision to separate after my ADSO is complete and to not even consider the reserves. Some people/families deal with this better than others and again, more power to them. I have a newfound, monumental level of respect for families that do this more than once. We are grateful to be in the position where we don't need to continue this life; we aren't bound by a contract and we don't need the financial stability that comes with military life. 

The Long-Term Perspective

I would say that overall, this was a net-positive experience for my family. There were several major pros for our marriage: moving to/exploring new places we wouldn't have otherwise seen, three months of paternity leave (at least for the second kid), we had a great on-post housing experience, and a few others. The negatives center almost exclusively on the children. The oldest did not cope with the big move too well - it took several months to get over that, and neither have been doing great with the deployment, now five months in, although they have settled into this "new normal." 

I signed up for this life over five and a half years before the first was born. Had I known who they would be and how this would affect them ... this thought gives me pause on if I would have gone through with this decision, however, had it not been for this life, I likely would not have had this exact amazing kiddo to begin with. 

There will be more to this story and as we settle into civilian life, I feel confident that the kids will rebound and we, as parents, will not regret the impact this life has had on our children and from this perspective will look back on our time in the Army more fondly.

One major impact I expect, but haven't yet seen, is a better appreciation for what we have as a family. This idea was already in our heads as a manner of traveling - a motif of our lives - a mindulness perspective my wife and I have practiced for years before kids. It is always a practice - we can always get better about being in the moment at the right times, and thinking ahead or elsewhere in others, but I already feel a renewed drive to work towards being completely present in every moment I get to spend with my family from the moment I get back from this deployment. 

Who knows? Maybe we will be better off in the long-run having had this deployment to reinforce this lesson.