Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Mercedes Patterson, 16, helped Tango Jackson, 17, with his R.O.T.C. uniform tie in the hallway at Fort Campbell High School at the Army post in Kentucky. More Photos »
FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Signs of the season have been everywhere at Fort Campbell High School over the last couple of weeks: a student soloist sang the Carpenters’ “Merry Christmas, Darling” at the annual holiday concert, a big tree sparkled in the cafeteria under the Screaming Eagle emblem of the 101st Airborne Division, and thousands of parents were deployed yet again in Afghanistan.
It is nothing unusual for Alexandra Alfield, a 17-year-old senior whose father, a Special Forces soldier, has been gone since August and for six of the last nine years. “I do miss him,” she said, “but I’m just so accustomed to it.”
As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 66,000 American troops from Afghanistan, the parents of Fort Campbell students are still going off to war.
Nearly 10,000 men and women from the 101st Airborne, a third of the active-duty troops based here, are either in Afghanistan or getting ready to go. Still more parents here have been deployed with units like the Fifth Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, whose members piloted the helicopters in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
That has made the high school, which is run by the Defense Department and is one of only four secondary schools on military bases in the United States, something of a window into the pain, pride and resentment felt by the families of the all-volunteer military force, which has borne the burdens of 11 years of war.
The high school, which has about 700 students and is open to any 9th to 12th grader who lives on the 100,000-acre post along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, is by definition physically and psychologically cut off from the world outside the gates. But at no time is that sense of isolation more acute than now, when many of the students’ parents are deployed while the rest of the country’s interest in Afghanistan has moved on.
“No one really cares,” Tyisha Smith, a 19-year-old senior, said of the outside world. “Your father goes, gets deployed. War — it’s normal. It’s not like a big deal that we’re still at war.”
But Ms. Smith said she was struggling to manage the pressures of her final year in high school while her father was away and she was living with her stepmother. The reality of his deployment with the 101st Airborne is never far away. “It’s starting to hit me that there’s a possibility that he could die,” she said. “I just hope he comes home.”
School administrators point to a bright spot: not as many parents are gone this year as there were at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when nearly everyone in the school had a parent deployed and the post was a virtual ghost town. But that hardly makes the modest one-story school typical.
A strict dress code bans jeans and T-shirts, so students wear tucked-in collared shirts with khakis or dark pants. Presidents turn up a lot: Mr. Obama spoke at the post in May 2011, and George W. Bush visited three times while he was president. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met earlier in 2011 with the Fort Campbell High School football team. And the death of a parent is something to be mourned but overcome.
Only months after his father was killed in Afghanistan in June 2008, Josh Carter, a starting linebacker, helped lead the Falcons to their second of three straight state championships.
“My dad would want me to keep going,” Mr. Carter, now a student at Western Kentucky University, said in an interview over the summer. Administrators say that perhaps five other students have lost parents in the wars in recent years. Many other parents have been wounded or have received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The students readily call their school a “bubble,” both comforting and claustrophobic, because of the dangers their parents face. “If you went to off-post schools, you couldn’t exactly talk to a teenager because they wouldn’t understand what you’re going through,” said Larissa Massie, a 17-year-old senior whose father is home but has had two deployments to Iraq.
With a Parent at War, a Holiday of Pain and Pride
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With a Parent at War, a Holiday of Pain and Pride
