FRG: Part 1

I have alluded, in previous blog posts, to the Family Readiness Group and how much I believe in the purpose and mission of the FRG (feel free to insert your branch equivalent here).

The FRG is such a powerful, useful resource for so many different aspects of military life, but I fear that we’re forgetting why this organization is so important in our military spouse life.

Remembering its history, where it came from, and what spouses did in our relatively recent past to make sure we enjoy as many benefits as dependents as we do today can be easy to overlook.

The spouses and families of service members are the front lines of the “home front” and help make it possible for service members to do what they do. We keep the home fires burning and hold down the fort, leaving the service member with the ability to focus on the mission at hand.

Ideas of the FRG as an organization that provided a basic support system can be found all the way back to the American Revolution, when spouses were left while their husbands went to fight, and they bonded over their shared situations.

Military pay and benefits were, for all intents and purposes, non-existent, so it was up to the families and local communities to provide food, extra clothing, and medical support to both the spouses left behind and wounded service members returning home. General Custer’s wife could have been called the “first FRG Leader” as she took the responsibility to console grieving widows after the Battle of Little Big Horn.

The FRG was finally recognized as a military-sanctioned organization in the early 1980s and continued to evolve as our country moved from a peace-time culture to the longest conflict in American history.

What you probably didn’t realize, however, is that while traces of the FRG mission and goals have been around for almost 250 years, rights and benefits for spouses are relatively new concepts.

In her book, Waiting Wives, Donna Moreau writes about her experience as the child of a wife of Shilling Manor. You see, Shilling Manor was established as the only installation in 1964 set aside for the spouses and families of deployed service members.

Maybe you didn’t hear me correctly. Until 1964, there were no installations where spouses could live if their service member was deployed.

Yep, the idea of “on-post” housing and all the benefits associated with a military installation that we have come to enjoy have only been around for about 50 years. Before that, if your service member deployed, you moved yourself and your family back home—wherever that happened to be—and you waited for inconsistent letters to hear from your partner. In some cases, you waited for a death notice to arrive or your partner’s pay to continue to know whether or not they were still alive.

I don’t tell you this to bring you down but to share that we are given so many things as military spouses that the those in generations past could have never dreamed of getting.

The wives of Shilling Manor were the spouses who, at that time, were forced to endure the longest combat mission in American history. Shilling Manor was an old Air Force base in Kansas and housed 7,000 military families. It was also the first community of families within the military, as we know it now.

It was while I was reading this book, which describes in beautiful and sometimes tragic detail the time period of this last generation of hat and glove spouses, that I realized how desperately important the role of FRG is and should be within military communities.

Former Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Raymond Odierno stated it best (and often) when he said, “The strength of our nation is our Army. The strength of the Army is our soldiers. The strength of our soldiers is our Families. This is what makes us Army strong.”

FRGs aren’t just important for the deploying service members. They’re important as a resource for the deployments, but also the TDYs, long training events, live-fire ranges, or the 24-hour FTX events. The FRG should be an organization that provides a sense of belonging in this ever-changing PCSing world.

It’s where you can develop friendships as well as get information for the unit and community where you live.

As spouses, the FRG can help you problem solve some of these weird situations we find ourselves in within military life, and it can help you cope with separations and the ever-present adjustment to military life.

For more information about your local FRG you can contact your service member’s unit for specific FRG information.