Life of a military spouse and military mom presents unique challenges
BY JOHN CLARK HERALD CORRESPONDENT
Janie Freed says being a military spouse can be a tremendous challenge, especially when raising a family at the same time but becoming a military mom when the kids grow up and join that same lifestyle is an even more difficult assignment.
“It’s funny … so our oldest daughter swore up and down that after her dad being in the military, she was not going to end up with a military guy,” said Janie, whose husband, Jason, served 14 years in the U.S. Army before being medically retired. “Now, she’s married to one, and she’s going through her deployments and duty stations.
“She and our grandbaby came home for nine months while her husband was gone, and now they’re back in Georgia, and will be PCS-ing to El Paso. Our second oldest is also dating a soldier. I was, like, ‘Did y’all not learn anything?’
“It’s really hard because they’re not coming and going. They are gone for three years, six years, nine years at a time. When you’re a military spouse, he’s gone for nine months and he’s coming back, or he’s gone for 12 months and he’s coming back. He’s home for however long, and then he’s gone for short periods of time, and he comes back.”
Janie was born in El Campo, graduated high school in 1997,
and headed off to Wharton County Junior College. Soon, however, she decided she wanted more out of life, so she packed her bags and headed north to Dallas. She was 18 years old.
“That was huge,” Freed said.
“From little bitty ol’ town to big ol’ Dallas. I didn’t want to be in that little town anymore. It just wasn’t for me. I called my uncle and asked if I could come to Dallas, and he said, ‘come on,’ so
I went and stayed with him and his family.
“We were sitting at Denny’s one night and I was looking through the paper, thinking, ‘OK, what am I going to do with myself here?’ The waiter says, ‘I’m not trying to be nosy, but I see you’re reading the paper.’
“I said, ‘Yep, I’m looking for a school, a job … something to do with myself. I just moved here.’
“He said, ‘Well, have you ever
heard of Job Corps?’
“I said, ‘What is that?’
“So he told me about Job Corps. He said sometimes kids get court-ordered to go there, but not all the time, and you can go there and get a trade. I looked into it, and because I already had my high school diploma, they had me take some entry tests (and) I passed reading, math, and one more that I can’t remember. They said, ‘OK, you get to take a look around and pick your trade.’
“So I picked security, and that’s where I met my husband.”
Jason was also in the Job Corps, and he was attending the security training when she arrived. Their meeting was not exactly love at first sight — at least not for Janie.
“He was captain in the security academy, so he got to tell me what to do,” she said, laughing.
“I didn’t know until years later, but he had threatened all the boys, ‘If you talk to her, I will hurt you.’ I had no interest … in anyone. I was there to get my trade, get out, and go on my way. But we ended up talking and ended up together. We were together for years, and then we finally got married in 2007.
“I’ve known him since I was 19, almost 20 years old, and I am now 45.”
The couple separated for a while after their second child was born, and when they started talking about getting back together, Jason announced he was
going to join the Army.
“We weren’t married at that time,” Janie said. “Our first daughter was born in 2000; our second daughter was born in 2002. I went back home to Wharton with my two girls, and he was in Fort Worth with his mom and dad. Then, his mom passed away and life hit him pretty hard.
“He wanted the girls and I back, and so he decided to join the Army. I wasn’t surprised because when we first met, he was considering going into the Army. He went Army Reserve at first; because of how many kids he had — two from his first marriage and then the two we had together — he had to get an exemption in order to become active duty because of how many dependents he had. He got the exemption done and got out of the Reserve and went active duty. He went to basic training, did all the things he had to do, and then he said, ‘I’ll be back for y’all.’
“I said, ‘okay, we’ll see.’ I wanted us to get back together. He was the love of my life. When we first got together, he was it. He was my first true love.
“So he graduated basic training and came home on R and R, (and) we got married. They told him he was going to be going to Oklahoma, and as soon as he got there, he was going to be deployed within 30 to 60 days. So PLEASE SEE SPOUSE, E5
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Janie and Jason Freed are pictured at his promotion to sergeant in 2011.
Cove woman spent two-plus years in uniform, 20-plus years as military spouse
BY JOHN CLARK HERALD CORRESPONDENT
COPPERAS COVE — Donna
Eosze and her husband, Laszlo, were high school classmates before they got married, did a 1,500-mile bicycle tour of Europe, and then joined the U.S. Army together.
Born in Cisco, Texas, halfway between Dallas and Abilene Donna moved to San Angelo when she was a baby, and graduated from Reagan High School in Austin in 1970. She was a National Merit Scholar and headed to Trinity University in San Antonio to study engineering.
“I was one of three females taking engineering,” Donna, a Copperas Cove resident, said. “Eventually, during that year … the summer before my senior year in high school, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and she was in the hospital for six weeks. Of course, things weren’t what they are now — there were no MRIs and all of that good stuff — and she wound up having a brain hemorrhage, which is a stroke, and for my senior year in high school, she was emotionally like a young teenager. So I ended up doing most of the cooking and grocery shopping and things
“When I was 14 or 15, my father had set me up with a checking account. He gave me $15 a month for clothes (and) he said to go spend whatever you need to at the grocery store, and I will make sure it’s covered.
“So I went one year to Trinity and by that time, I was so burnt out that I quit college. The thought of going to school was just more than I could wrap my head around at that point.”
Donna moved out on her own, at first renting a room, and then moving into a $50-a-month mobile home her father helped her find. She was working in the Department of Public Safety’s teletype section when a breakup with her boyfriend brought her together with Laszlo.
“My husband went to Reagan (High), also. He was a year ahead of me,” Donna said. “I dated a good friend of his, and the first time we went over to his house, I said hello when we got there
and goodbye when we left, and he heard neither
“I am OK talking to people one on one, but more or less until I had children or whatever, I was painfully shy. One of my teachers in seventh grade made me take speech therapy to speak louder, because you could never hear me when I answered a question or whatever. I don’t know that it helped, but I did learn to project better when I really had to.
“Eventually, I split up with the guy I was dating, and I was still friends with his parents. My (future) husband was still friends with them, as well, and they said, ‘Have you talked to Laszlo lately?’ and speak of the devil, he shows up.
“We didn’t go on a whole lot of official dates. He was living in his car – which was why he was visiting the parents — so he ended up moving in with me in my trailer (1972). We got married common-law in ’74. No, actually it was ’72, I think. We went down to the county office and declared ourselves married.”
By 1976, the young couple decided that the best opportunity for them to build the life they wanted would be joining the military. So that’s what they did.
“The reason we joined is … because of his European background, he wanted to go live in Europe. We weren’t finding any jobs in Austin that we were all that interested in.
“I hadn’t really thought about it that much. I have an uncle who was in the Air Force, and another uncle who was in the Army band. My father served in the Korean War. He didn’t actually get deployed to Korea, but he was in the military.”
Laszlo became a linguist and interrogator for the U.S. Army, while Donna trained to repair teletypewriters. She went to basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and AIT at Fort Gordon, Georgia (now Fort Eisenhower).
“It was OK,” Donna said, of her introduction to military life. “I had no problems with it. I was 24 and one of the oldest ones there We had one girl that went off the deep end. They put her on valium or something.
“From there, I went straight to Europe. My husband got sent to Europe first (and) it turned out he had an NCO who was willing to help us get me stationed in Heidelberg, where he already was. My husband (a chief warrant officer 4) served 24 years, and I got out after two-and-a-half years because I was pregnant. They didn’t make you get out (because of pregnancy), but the shop had changed to 12-hour shifts and being pregnant, I was just too tired to do a 12-hour shift.
“It was interesting getting out. I put in my paperwork and my unit dragged its feet and dragged its feet. So I went in and said, ‘If you don’t want me out, I will wait until after I use up my six weeks’ maternity leave after the baby’s born, and then I’ll get out.’
“The next week, all of the paperwork was taken care of and I was out (1978).”
After hanging up her uniform, Donna stepped into her new role as a military spouse. She and Laszlo spent a total of 11 years together in Europe, and he retired from the service in 2000.
“It was interesting at times. We had some interesting assignments,” Donna said. “For example, when REFORGER exercises were going on, my husband got to be an escort for the observing Hungarian generals from the Warsaw Pact.
“A lot of the time, I just raised kids. I only started working when
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Donna Eosze and her husband, Laszlo, were high school classmates before they got married, did a 1,500-mile bicycle tour of Europe, then joined the U.S. Army together.
Military spouse was initially wary of men in uniform, now devoted to soldiers’ mental health
BY JOHN CLARK HERALD CORRESPONDENT
TEMPLE — Despite growing up in a Navy family and vowing that she would never, ever marry a man in unifor m, Melissa Megoulloa has been the wife of a Marine tur ned Army noncommissioned officer for 22 years now, and although she still dislikes a lot of things about the military system, she says she loves the life she and her husband have built together.
“I hate being an Army wife,” Megoulloa said. “I love my country, and I love and support everything my husband does. We have four kids; I’m still madly in love with him after all these years I love the experiences and the friends we’ve made (but) I hate being an Army wife. I hate it so much.”
Melissa grew up in southern California and met her husband, Josue, when he was a young Marine stationed at Seal Beach. She told him early on that she had no interest in getting involved with a member of the ar med forces, and by the time she figured out that he was in the service, it was too late.
“We’re both from souther n Califor nia, and most people in L.A. either come from somewhere else and they’re stuck there, or they’ve been there forever. If you’re from L.A. and you don’t have money, you don’t travel. So our first conversation when we met, he was speaking about being out in North Carolina. I told him I’d lived out in South Carolina (when) my daddy was in the Navy.
“He said, ‘Oh, what was that like?’ I said, ‘Oh, I hated it. My mother was an immigrant (and) they treated her horribly. My dad was deployed, and I saw my mom struggle. She was basically a single mom with four kids, and they treated her horribly.
“He said, ‘What do you think about military men?’
“I said, ‘I will never date a military man.’
“So, he hid it from me for five months. It wasn’t until he had gotten really sick and I was telling him, ‘You’ve got to call in to work. You can’t go in.’
“He said, ‘I can’t.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean? I’ll call in for you.’
“He said, ‘I can’t call in. I have to go.’
“Every time I tell this story, I get goosebumps. The way he looked at me and locked eyes, I knew. I said, ‘Why can’t you call in?’
“He was, like, ‘You know why.’
“I was, like, ‘No, no …’ but I was already in love at that point.” She was 18 years old and in college when they met, and her re-introduction to the military lifestyle was not a good one.
“I was in college in L.A. at the time and if you got married, you lost your parents’ benefits for school,” Megoulloa recalled. “I ended up getting pregnant, and he wanted to get married, but I said, no. My daddy fought for this and I was the only one of his four children to go to college. So at that time, I was basically just a baby mama, and the Marine wives treated me so horribly.
“I was in school and already working as a (mental health) counselor. My husband was in recon, which basically means they go do their mission and then come back. We didn’t have cell phones so even if he was around, he wasn’t able to really tell me he was leaving. He would just kind of have to go
“There would be times he was late for dinner, and I didn’t know if he was stuck in traffic or in another country.
“I would call and try to get connected with the support team over there and some of them would say, ‘Oh, we can’t tell you anything. Sorry, you’ll have to hear from him.’ Some of his leadership was really cool about it. Yes, you can’t say anything, but some of them would be like, ‘Oh, he should be getting home soon.’ That let me know he was in country. If he was on a mission, they’d be, like, ‘I’m sure he’ll call you as soon as he can.’ That was basically letting me know not to wait up for him.
“Sometimes, you’d come home from the grocery store, a kid in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other, and you could hear him on the answering machine. I’m trying to get inside to answer the phone, and he hangs up before I can get there. It was really tough.”
After a while, the strain of multiple separations got to be too much, and so Josue left the Marine Corps after six years. Melissa enjoyed having him at home, but Josue was growing increasingly unhappy.
“He wanted a bunch of kids, and I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m barely holding it down with this one kid. You have to get out,” she said. “I said, ‘I cannot live like this; I cannot have a family like this.’ So he got out, and more kids ended up coming. But after the second one, he really – really – struggled with transitioning into the civilian life. I saw this god of a man wither, and it broke my heart.
“I thought, okay, I’m educated; I have options; I can go work anywhere. So I told him, ‘If you go back into the military, you cannot do anything infantry and you have to go somewhere more family-friendly. You have to enlist in the Army.’”
Josue re-enlisted and this time he was assigned to a medical supply unit. He soon missed the action he saw in the Marines, and transferred to the infantry
“You just couldn’t take the Marine out of him,” Melissa said. “You couldn’t take the leadership out of him. They reduced
Melissa Megoulloa and husband, Josue a former Marine and now a U.S. Army first sergeant, have been married for more than 22 years.
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his rank … he was an E-6 promotable in the Marines, and when he came in the Army, he came in as an E-3, but he still had all those leadership qualities and he had been in combat. He struggled, so he went back into the infantry as a motorman.”
Josue, a first sergeant, was in Korea when his wife spoke to the Herald, and Melissa is here in Central Texas, working as a mental health advocate and specializing in military mental health issues. She also is heavily involved in Soldier and Family Readiness Groups, organizations that “provide stability to unit members during field exercises, deployment and other mission related separations and offer vital infor mation to those newly assigned to the unit.”
Melissa says both efforts are not only important, but near and dear to her heart.
“When the Soldier and Family Readiness Group leader position came up, I saw my opportunity,” she said. “I made sure I included everybody — not just the spouses but also the baby mamas and
whoever is important to the soldier. At that point, I said, all right, the lack of a legitimate support system is becoming a matter of national security. People are getting out or they don’t want to enlist because they know it’s not an ideal situation for their family.
“Whoever is important to the soldier I will include to the extent that I legally can do so, and to the extent that they want me to. It didn’t matter if it was a roommate, longtime girlfriend. We started an amazing SFRG group. A great support system.
“You have some (spouses) who don’t know how to use a (clothes) washer. They don’t know about changing filters. Sure, it will say that on the lease, but they really don’t know. You’re bringing in teenagers, and their soldier is taught to do everything that they’re supposed to do while they’re in unifor m in front of their leadership, but they’re getting counseled and reprimanded for things they’re doing at home
“So we started working on things like that … helping them lear n to budget, eat healthy and lose weight on a budget. Finances were one of the biggest thing we saw not only getting soldiers in trouble, but causing stress within the family units. All of a sudden, they have access to credit and they want all these nice things — a new car and a big TV.
“We work on things like how to communicate and have a healthy relationship, and know how to advocate for yourself. When to know it’s acceptable (to speak up) and when to know, I’m sorry, this is part of the job and you need to realize you’re either in for this or not. There is a time when you need to be that Karen and call the first sergeant or the commander, and there is a time that you don’t.”
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he went to Oklahoma (Fort Sill) and me and the girls stayed with my family
“I had never been in military life, and I was terrified. I didn’t want to go through our first deployment with him being gone, and me and the girls in Oklahoma, not knowing anyone. So we stayed home (and) he did his first deployment; he came back after 15 months and I loaded up me and the girls and we met him in Oklahoma. We were there for a year and then he deployed again. But by that time, we had already been there and we had established friends; I was part of an FRG (Family Readiness Group) and so the girls and I stayed during his second deployment, which was 12 months “He came back and we found out we were going to Hawaii. So we went to Schofield (Barracks) and we were stationed there for three years. We came back early because I was pregnant with our
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fifth
child. He came the night I was going to be induced into labor and we had our fifth child.
Then we were in Wharton for a couple of months, and we came to Fort Hood (Cavazos).”
Jason, who was a sergeant when he left the service, deployed twice to Iraq and once to Africa. Janie remembers sending him off to war the first time in 2007 was “very scary.”
“The worst part about sending your husband off is when you have children,” said the mother of seven and grandmother of one. “You face the reality of you being responsible for your babies — and everything — fulltime while he’s gone. The last thing you want is for your soldier to get a call that something has happened back home.”
Although he was not ready to hang up his uniform, Jason suffered injuries overseas that led to him being medically discharged in 2018. That led to a big transition into civilian life, not only for him but for the rest of the family, as well.
“It was a huge adjustment for everyone,” Janie said. “It was
my kids were in sixth grade and ninth grade. I did go back to school when they were younger. We were stationed here at Fort Hood (Cavazos) and I went to CTC (Central Texas College). I also went to City Colleges in Chicago, and to Cochise College at Fort Huachuca.
“I worked for a while at Project Pass
an adjustment for him because he wasn’t ready to get out. It was an adjustment for me … you know, you wouldn’t think it would affect the spouse so much, but it does because the military becomes all you know. You don’t realize how different military life is from a regular life – especially when you lived a regular life and then you join the military life.
“I’m a Girl Scouts leader, and our troops are 100 percent (from) military (families), whether it’s active-duty or retired. Having to sit here over the years and saying goodbye to the girls, and to the parents you’ve grown close to, or the people who have become a leader with you and become close friends and now it’s time for them to PCS … it’s, like hey, wait a minute, I thought this kind of life was over.
“There is adjusting to the military member being there constantly now. There is no leaving. It becomes, hey, this is the house structure and this is the way it’s going to stay forever now. There’s no, well, we’re adjusting for a few months and then he’s coming back, or we’re
at CTC, a tutoring program. I tutored everything from basic math all the way up to college algebra. I did that for four or five years, and then I was a music aide at Mae Stevens Elementary School from ’97 to 2005.”
These days, Donna volunteers twice a week at the library, and is an active member of the local Catholic church, where she and Laszlo play music for the 12:30 p.m. mass. He plays guitar and she plays flute.
Looking back over the years, Donna says
adjusting for a year and then he’s coming back.
“The kids are getting adjusted to having both parents there fulltime. Having two parents there that you can depend on, and not just the one anymore. He’s not going anywhere. For the longest, it seems like they built this wall, so it’s not too hard. Then it’s, like, oh yeah, he’s not going anywhere
“Our four oldest kids — his two sons from his first marriage and then our two girls together — he was constantly gone. Missed a lot. And then our fifth oldest was born into the military life, so he (Jason) was there for the first birthday, but then had to leave and pretty much missed all of him being a year old. He came back and we were stationed in Hawaii, where he was constantly gone on field exercises. Going here; going there. With the last two (children) … our sixth child was five or six when he retired, and the baby was three years old, so he didn’t miss a lot there.”
Over the years, Janie has spent a lot of time being a stay-at-home mom, but she also
she is proud of her military service and has some good memories from those days. She and Laszlo have two children and two grandchildren, and life is better than ever
“We still get along and we agree on most things,” she said, laughing.
“When I was in sixth grade, one of the things the girls were doing was whatever initials you liked scribbling on the edges of the paper in your notebook, that was the initial of the person you were going to marry. I was always doing ‘Ls.’ I would connect them all the way down the page. I
worked for Clem Mikeska BarB-Q, and as a registrar for St. Joseph Catholic School. She also volunteers with Girl Scouts as a troop leader and a service unit team leader.
Looking back over the years, all the ups and downs, twists and turns, good times and bad, Janie says she would not do anything different.
“It was all worth it,” she said. “Wouldn’t change it for the world — even the painful parts. We are blessed. I don’t think my husband and I would have done all the growing up we have if it weren’t for that pain. We’ve gone through the hardest times together … military families struggle in many ways, and we’ve been there
“I think it’s important to be willing to take the help that’s out there and offered to you. If there was a marriage retreat, my husband and I went to the marriage retreat. You pay for your gas to go there and back, (and) the military covers everything else. They pay for the hotel; they pay for your meals; they offer daycare while you’re there.”
was thinking what that could be — Lynn or something — and it turned out to be Laszlo.
“Joining the Army was probably good for me. I managed to shock a lot of people that I could handle it, I guess. One of my good memories of being active duty (is) we had a sergeant come into the repair shop I was a Spec 4 and I took him out to one of the sites where we maintained machines, and when we came back, they were doing deliveries and had almost blocked the road.”
