By David Strom, American Red Cross

When a veteran retires, most don’t think about making their home on a military base, but that’s exactly what Jill Eaves and her family did at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

The Army base is home to the Sixth Infantry Division and is one of four major training centers. Over the past 80 years, hundreds of thousands of members of all four branches of the armed forces have been trained there for active duty and reserve service, including specialized engineer training.

Eaves and her husband both served in the Air Force for ten years, and when they retired, they decided to return to a military base because, with over 63,000 acres, there’s plenty of space.

“It’s also a great place to raise my two children,” she said.

For the past two years, Jill has served as the Armed Forces Mobile Regional Program Manager for the American Red Cross Missouri-Arkansas Region.

SAF provides six core services, including emergency notification, military and veterans hospital programs, family resilience building, and other support services to active and reserve members of all branches of the military.

The Red Cross has long worked with the military to help families connect with soldiers in times of need.

As part of her duties, she is sent to interesting places all over the world due to her “mobile” nature. Last autumn and winter, she was site manager of the Bemowo Piskie military training area in north-eastern Poland, which is also home to a NATO training base.

Their mission was to support the U.S. troops stationed in the area, which included a wide range of social programs designed to improve welfare and morale.

“We have social workers who check with the soldiers’ families to see how they are doing and whether they need further support.”

In one case, Jill was involved in conveying to a soldier in Poland the information from a family back home that a child was on the way.

“We got the person out that morning so they could get to the airport and back home in time, but it was a close call,” she recalls.

Some of her efforts were more creative in nature, such as hosting karaoke or movie nights or starting a book club, which she did in Poland.

“One of our choices was to read Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages ​​- but of course we used the military edition. People from the States donated books to us. One soldier was on his way back home. He was having problems with his marriage and got his wife a copy. He told me that before the book club he had no place to go home. But the book helped improve their communication and now he was looking forward to returning to his wife,” she said.

Jill retired from the Air Force, where she worked as an aircraft maintenance technician, repairing aircraft at various locations across the United States, as well as in Italy and Afghanistan.

During these missions, her paths crossed with those of her future husband five times around the world, but it wasn’t until they were both stationed in Las Vegas that something clicked between them.

There she supported military personnel who honed their skills by leading civilian mountain rescue missions and later became paramedics and flew overseas missions.

One of her clients was a soldier who was having trouble adjusting to military life.

“They told me their work environment was so toxic and they were struggling with this deployment. But we helped provide a safe place for this person and they said our programs gave their lives meaning and made them feel like they belonged, which was very satisfying to hear,” she said.