The Military Father: A Hands-On Guide for Deployed Dads

This book is Brott's attempt to write an all-things-to-all-servicemembers guide to deployment, and he does a fair job. The book is arranged chronologically with respect to a deployment timeline, first pre-deployment, then during, then post-deployment, and broken down further to address issues of the service member, the spouse, and the children. He includes lists of resources available to family members and his appendix includes an exceedingly helpful pre-deployment checklist. This book also addresses the issues of Reservists and civilian contractors. Anyone facing their first deployment (with or without children) would benefit from reading this book. The writing and style is typical Brott, with corny jokes and copious entreaties for the service member to buy his wife flowers. The book has lots of cartoons from military contributors which add to its appeal and a fair number of boxed paragraphs which are generally helpful but often are unfortunately placed with regard to the rest of the book's layout. There are a few drawbacks to this book. The biggest issue I see, as a Navy spouse, is that naval deployments are a lot different from land-based deployments, which this book primarily focuses on. Space is at such a premium on naval vessels that your sailor will probably not have room to store all the art projects or baby outfits Brott suggests you send to him. Also, communications aboard ship are considerably different. Ships are generally subject to severe bandwidth limitations and often there is considerable restriction as to the types of websites ship computers can access, or even whether email attachments may be sent to a ship or received from there. There are workarounds to this, of course (ever heard of the US Mail?), but if you follow Brott's advice and buy a webcam and plan for regular video conferences while underway, you will be sorely disappointed. Also completely glossed over is the issue of domestic violence which occurs far too often following a deployment. Brott devotes a chapter to PTSD and physical injury, and this chapter could probably have been augmented by the issue of domestic violence or how to handle the inevitable post-deployment (and frankly, pre-deployment) tensions. Sometimes the solution is more than just flowers.