March 25, 2011 
By Jacey Eckhart
Coming Home on Lifetime could be the most educational show on TV. Have you caught this thing yet? It follows four or five military families a week as they set up a surprise deployment homecoming for a child at school, a group of relatives at home. The service member walks in. The surprised person’s face crumples with love and joy and pain. Everyone falls into each other’s arms. The audience sobs.
Here is Love served brimming on the half shell.
And my military girlfriends hate it. They think it is exploiting military families. They think that it is putting even more pressure on Homecoming Day to be more than it already is. They think it is like watching
Platoon and thinking you understand the Vietnam War. Or watching the first half hour of
Saving Private Ryan and thinking that you know what it was like at Normandy on D Day.
I know what they mean. No one can understands deployment by watching one minute of a Homecoming on TV.
Yet I love this show. Not only because I have a Homecoming of my own to look forward to soon. I love this show because my husband is deployed. I want viewers to see a fourth grader clutch her chest, barely able to move when she sees her father. I want viewers to see a high school football player cry in front of the whole school when his dad shows up in uniform on signing day. I want viewers to see the physical pain in a Homecoming—because it is always there. That feeling of your heart leaving your body. This isn’t a return from a business trip. This isn’t the surprise of a new car. The joy of Homecoming involves the real pain of months spent profoundly apart.
I’m hoping the viewer will watch these moments then ask themselves what these soldiers and Marines and sailors and airmen and Coasties are coming home
from.
How I would love it if every social studies teacher in America, every AP World Geography class, every sixth period American history class would take a few minutes to unpack one of these shows. Watch it first for the pathos. Watch it again for the reality.
We are a country ostensibly at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. We participate in humanitarian missions in Haiti, Pakistan, Japan. Yet less than one percent of our population serves in our all-volunteer military. What does that mean? What does that mean for this group of people to continually deploy? To continually come home?
A lot of the answers are right here on TV. Here he is a dad who feels like he isn’t much of a father because he is gone all the time. Here is a high school football player raised in the military who chooses to go to the Naval Academy because he thinks that will set him up best for life. Here is a soldier who has already moved his family weeks after the show, another who is already gone on a training.
Maya Lin, the creator of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, once said that the cost of that war was the cost of the 58,000 American lives lost there then listed by name on the memorial. I wonder if the cost of these wars is caught in the faces of these children, these mothers, these
Coming Home soldiers. The hand clutching a chest. This crumpled face.