People sometimes ask me whether there was ever a time during my military career when I felt completely overwhelmed. When the stress became almost unbearable. When I seriously considered giving up.
After 24 years in the Navy and Marine Corps and three combat tours, I’ve had plenty of difficult experiences to choose from.
Was it SERE survival school? Spending days in the wilderness with no food, followed by the physical and psychological challenges of a simulated prisoner-of-war camp?
Nope.
Was it going through the Marine Division Tactics Course (MDTC) in Yuma, Arizona, the Marine Corps’ version of Top Gun? Five of the most demanding weeks I ever experienced in military aviation?
Not that either.
Maybe it was Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy, or the forced marches at The Basic School, carrying a heavy pack for miles while making sure I moved fast enough. Or the six-mile timed endurance course.
Or night carrier landings, one of the most demanding and dangerous things we do in naval aviation.
Or perhaps it was flying combat missions over Iraq, sometimes two or three a day, while living in tents in the Middle East during spring and summer when the heat was almost unbearable.
No. None of those.
But I know exactly when I came closest to walking away from the military.
It was when I couldn’t find daycare for my son.
Seriously.
My husband and I were both active-duty military officers. Between us, we had roughly 30 years of service, including multiple combat deployments. We had spent much of our adult lives doing what the military asked of us. We moved when we were told to move. We deployed when we were told to deploy. We missed holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and countless other moments most families take for granted.
And we had one child. Our son Teddy, who wasn’t quite two years old.
The military ordered us to move to Annapolis, Maryland, where I would be stationed as an instructor at the Naval Academy.
There was just one problem.
The daycare center at the Naval Academy was full.
Every local civilian daycare option that would take a child that young was full, too.
There was no backup plan. No reasonable alternative. No solution.
We were expected to report to our new duty station and do our jobs. But apparently, figuring out what to do with our toddler was entirely our problem.
Eventually, we had to keep Teddy enrolled at the daycare center at the Pentagon, where we had previously been stationed. We did this for months.
Think about that for a minute.
We had moved to Annapolis, but our child was still going to daycare at the Pentagon, more than an hour away in the wrong direction. Two roughly two-hour round trips every day.
It was absurd.
And I remember thinking, Are you kidding me?
Here was a military institution that had invested millions of dollars training my husband and me. An institution with some of the most sophisticated aircraft, weapons, and technology on the planet. An institution capable of moving enormous numbers of people and equipment halfway around the world to fight a war.
But it couldn’t figure out how to provide daycare for the child of two experienced officers it had ordered to move.
I was furious. I was exhausted. And for the first time in my military career, I genuinely wanted to quit.
Not because I couldn’t handle the demands of military service.
But because I couldn’t figure out how to keep serving and take care of my family at the same time.
That experience taught me something about leadership that has stayed with me ever since.
What leaders choose to prioritize matters. A lot.
And I’ve been thinking about that lately as I watch the Pentagon’s seemingly endless publicity campaign surrounding Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Just this week, a Pentagon communications official posted an old video of Hegseth doing a workout and announced that this was a big reason why the troops love him so much. She also pointed to recruiting numbers as evidence of his leadership.
Give me a break.
In all my years in uniform, and in the years since I retired, I cannot remember seeing anything quite like this. Civilian officials at the Pentagon spending so much time promoting the personal image of the Secretary of Defense. One self-promotional video after another. One carefully crafted image of toughness after another. And then having the audacity to tell the rest of us what the troops supposedly think of him.
It’s one thing to promote your boss. It’s quite another to claim to speak for hundreds of thousands of service members who face significant restrictions on publicly criticizing their own leadership.
And that’s what bothers me most.
This isn’t about whether Hegseth can do pull-ups. Good for him. (Although, as the women officers in my Signal chat would tell you, his form sucks.) Physical fitness matters in the military, and there’s nothing wrong with a senior leader getting out there and doing PT with the troops.
But let’s stop pretending this is what leadership at the highest levels of our military is about.
The Secretary of Defense has enormous responsibilities. National security strategy. Military readiness. The development and retention of experienced personnel. Advising the president on the use of military force. Making decisions that can put American lives on the line.
And yet we’re being treated to another round of Pentagon officials telling us how tough their boss is.
It’s performative leadership. Empty of any real substance.
And I don’t think the real audience for all this publicity is the troops themselves. I think it’s the American public.
The message isn’t simply that Hegseth is tough. It’s that the men and women serving under him supposedly adore him. That he’s earned their respect. That his leadership is universally admired.
But those are claims being made by his own political communications team. It’s ridiculous.
Here’s what I wish those Pentagon communications officials would spend a little more time talking about.
What are we actually doing for the people who serve?
Can military families find reliable childcare?
Can military spouses pursue meaningful careers without starting over every few years?
Are we providing decent schools, housing, and healthcare?
And for God’s sake, if we’re going to send them to war, do we have a coherent strategy, clear objectives, and an achievable end state? Have we maintained the alliances we might need when things go wrong? Are we making decisions based on actual military necessity rather than political considerations?
These are the things that matter to service members and their families.
And there’s something else that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in all this talk about military strength.
Retention.
Military leaders love to celebrate recruiting numbers. And recruiting matters. Of course it does. We need talented young Americans willing to raise their right hands and serve their country.
But recruiting is only half the equation.
Who will train those new recruits?
Who’s going to mentor them, develop them, and eventually lead them into combat?
Experienced sergeants, staff noncommissioned officers, officers, pilots, maintainers, and technical experts have spent years learning their professions.
Those people are enormously valuable. You cannot simply replace a seasoned Marine staff sergeant or an experienced fighter pilot with someone who walked into a recruiting station yesterday.
And when those people leave, the military loses far more than a number on a personnel spreadsheet.
It loses experience. Judgment. Leadership. Institutional knowledge. Talent that took years, and often millions of taxpayer dollars, to develop.
Are we keeping our best people? Are we retaining the experienced leaders and specialists we need most? Are we listening when talented service members explain why they’re considering leaving?
And are we doing anything meaningful about the problems they identify?
Because I can tell you from personal experience that sometimes the difference between keeping an experienced officer and losing one comes down to something as seemingly mundane as daycare.
For years, I saw my experience as a problem caused by too many men in leadership positions who simply didn’t understand the challenges working mothers face. I still think having more women in authority at the highest ranks would have helped, but I’ve come to understand that the problem is bigger than gender. It’s also about whether leaders understand the lives of the people they’re responsible for. Whether they listen. Whether they recognize that taking care of families isn’t some “woke” peripheral issue unrelated to military readiness.
Taking care of people IS military readiness.
And that means more than childcare and family support.
It also means making serious decisions about war and peace. It means refusing to treat service members as political props. It means understanding that military personnel are not expendable pieces on a chessboard.
It means focusing on the actual problems facing our military instead of constantly manufacturing new culture-war battles.
And as we approach Veterans Day, I think that’s worth remembering.
Every year, politicians give speeches about how much they love our troops. They thank veterans for their service. They talk about sacrifice, courage, and patriotism.
And that’s fine. Those things deserve recognition.
But if we really want to honor the men and women who serve, perhaps we should spend a little less time celebrating how tough our leaders look and a little more time asking whether they’re doing the hard work of actually leading.
I think back to that period in Annapolis, when my husband and I were trying desperately to figure out how to get our little boy to daycare at the Pentagon while fulfilling our responsibilities as military officers.
We weren’t asking the military to make our lives easy. We understood the sacrifices that came with serving. We’d made plenty of them already.
We were simply asking for a way to do our jobs and take care of our child.
And after all those years of training, deployments, and combat missions, that was the moment I almost walked away.
Not because I didn’t love being a Marine. I did.
But because I wasn’t sure I could keep being a Marine and be the mother I needed to be.
I wonder how many other talented service members have reached that same point. How many good Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and guardians have looked at the demands of military life and decided they just couldn’t do it anymore?
And how many of them might have stayed if someone in leadership had understood what really mattered?
That’s the kind of question our military leaders should be asking themselves this Veterans Day.
Because honoring those who serve isn’t about telling them how much you love them.
It’s about making decisions that show them you understand what their service actually costs.
-Amy
