What is it like being a parent in the military?

Joe “Doc” Worley can give you both dates without looking them up.

“I got to see my daughter for the first time on the 22nd. I got hurt on the 17th.”

Hear it at 10:54

Worley was a U.S. Navy corpsman with a Marine infantry battalion. He holds a Bronze Star with valor and a Purple Heart. On the 17th he had just been blown up and was reaching into his cargo pocket for the tourniquet he had carried since training. In the same pocket was a pin with a baby’s face on it.

“She’d been born while I was deployed and I’d never even met her.”

Hear it at 8:01

He did not pull it out and gaze at it. That is for the movie, he says. He felt it, and that was enough to get his hands moving.

Most military parents have a smaller version of that story. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, nine Veterans and one Marine still in uniform talked about their kids. Nobody claims to have gotten it right.

Seven months old and no idea who you are

The Department of Defense counted 869,007 children of active duty service members in 2024. About four in ten were five or younger. Those are the years with the first steps in them.

Randall Parkes, a Marine Corps Veteran, drill instructor and founding MARSOC Raider, had a son a month before his third deployment.

“So I come back and I got this, you know, seven-month-old running around. He has no idea who I am.”

Hear it at 28:10

His whole commentary on the matter is five words: “such is life in the military.”

It is not only deployments. Jason Brooks, a medically retired Marine who became a Recon and SERE instructor, remembers the phone calls home from a regular week at work.

“She’s like, ‘Why don’t you let me know?’ I’m like, ‘Cuz I didn’t know.’”

Hear it at 18:51

They said a week in the field, so it was a week in the field.

The part nobody briefs is what the absence teaches the child. In our interview with Jo MT, talk turned to the birthdays and the first jiu-jitsu win you hear about afterward, and somebody at the table said this. The captions do not tell us who, so we will not guess.

“It’s like they get used to you not being there and then it’s not a big deal if you’re not there anymore.”

Hear it at 18:17

The one question

Jo MT, a 20 year Air Force bomb loader who now does stand-up, could have stayed in longer. He got out because of a question he used to put to every chief and master sergeant who had stayed 25 or 30 years: what do you wish you had done more of? He says they all gave the same answer. Time with their families, when the kids were young.

So he left with the family he had. Two of his children are not his by birth, and what he is proudest of is that it does not seem to matter.

“I’m happy that my kids know me because two of my kids are not biologically mine.”

Hear it at 18:29

His son wants to be legally adopted when he turns 18. He asked his daughter if she wanted the same.

“She goes, ‘No, because I don’t want to relearn how to spell my last name.’”

Hear it at 19:02

That is a comedian’s kid.

He is honest about who carried the house while he was gone. His wife of 15 years ran last Christmas start to finish, presents for the kids, for him and for herself.

“It’s really hard that way, to sit there and be away from it all and expect my spouse to just know everything.”

Hear it at 19:21

Making it up, or trying

Not everyone agrees you can. Dean Goble Jr., a retired Army Green Beret, has two kids, 18 and 16, and a calendar in his head.

“I spent a lot of time away from my kiddos when I was younger and so I’m trying to some degree make up for all that.”

Hear it at 5:55

“To some degree” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, and he knows it. The window, he says, is shrinking fast.

Jamie Waterberry, a Veteran married to another Veteran, did the math earlier. Her husband left on his fourth deployment when their son was one. She was holding a civilian job and a Reserve slot at a unit that kept asking for more. She let her time run out and separated.

SSgt Nicholas Milsap is not a Veteran. He is an active duty Marine Corps recruiter, and he has five kids in two states. The two who live with him have had California, North Carolina and Nevada.

“My youngest daughter stood up in a crowd of people and was like, ‘I want to be a Marine like my dad.’”

Hear it at 41:55

The three in Mississippi get the other version.

“My other kids just get to visit. So they only see a glimpse.”

Hear it at 42:22

He tells high school classes it is his one regret.

And the job does not get lighter when the uniform comes off. Evelyn Pacheco, a U.S. Army Veteran and Nevada’s first Black female union plumber, raised her kids alone through a five-year apprenticeship: school two nights a week, six-day weeks, second and third shifts.

“It was all on me and it was hard. I’m not going to say that it’s easy.”

Hear it at 7:48

What they hand down

Tommy Nutzmann, a retired U.S. Navy Chief and creator of After the Uniform, retired in 2022 after 20 years and says he did not know who he was anymore. We asked what finally turned him around.

“Honestly, it was when my daughter was born.”

Hear it at 35:27

She was six months old the week we talked. In that same interview, one of the fathers at the table described making his kids say out loud that they are smart and strong, until they believe it. He does not coddle, he says, and he pranks them constantly. Again the captions do not say which father, so the line belongs to the room.

“They need to feel that, especially from dad.”

Hear it at 25:39

Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy Veteran, actress and firefighter EMT, once set a trap for her son. Who do you treat better, she asked, the janitor or the principal?

“He was like, ‘You treat them the same. They’re both people.’”

Hear it at 17:31

She calls it one of her proudest moments as a mom.

Which brings us back to the girl on the pin. Worley came home badly hurt. He credits a service dog with getting him walking again, and with more than that. He says the dog “made me a better father, run around in the backyard with my kids.”

He never met her before the 17th. He has been making up the difference in the backyard ever since.