By David Strom, American Red Cross

When a veteran retires, most don’t think of setting up their homes on a military base, but that is what Jill Eaves and her family did at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood. 

The Army post is home to the Sixth Infantry Division and one of four major training centers. For the past 80 years has seen hundreds of thousands of members of all four branches of the armed forces train for active and reserve duty, including specialized engineering training. 

Eaves and her husband of 10 years both served in the Air Force, and when the time came for retirement, they decided to move back on a military installation. After all, with more than 63,000 acres, there is plenty of room. 

“It is a great place to raise my two children, too,” she said. 

For the past two years, Jill has been the Service to the Armed Forces mobile regional program manager for the American Red Cross Missouri-Arkansas Region. 

SAF has six core services including emergency notification messages, programs for military and veterans hospitals, family resiliency building, and other support services for active and reserve members of any military service branch. 

The Red Cross long has worked with the military to help families connect with service members in times of emergencies. 

As part of her duties, the “mobile” designation means she gets deployed to some interesting locations around the world. Last fall and winter, she was the site lead for the Bemowo Piskie training area in northeast Poland, home to a NATO training base in that community. 

Her job was to support the deployed U.S. Army troops deployed to that area, which spanned a large series of social services programs that help improve wellness and morale.

“We have caseworkers who follow up with Army families to see how they are doing, inquire if they need any further assistance.” 

In one instance, Jill was involved in getting information from a family back home to a service member in Poland about the upcoming birth of a child. 

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

Some of her efforts have been a bit creative, such as hosting karaoke or movie nights or starting a book club, the latter of which she did in Poland.

“One of our selections was reading 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 headed back home. He was having some trouble with his marriage and got his wife a copy. He told me that before the book club, he didn’t have a place to go home to. But the book helped improved their communication and now he was looking forward to going back to his wife,” she said. 

Jill retired from the Air Force where she was an aircraft maintenance technician, repairing aircraft in various locations in the U.S. and also Italy and Afghanistan.

During these tours of duty, she crossed paths with her future husband five times around the world, but things didn’t start to click until they were both stationed in Las Vegas.

There she supported military members who were honing their skills by running civilian mountain rescue operations who would eventually become combat medics and fly overseas missions. 

One of her clients was a soldier that was having problems adjusting to military life. 

“They told me that their work environment was so toxic and was struggling on this deployment. But we helped give this person a safe place and they said that our programs gave their life purpose and made them feel and belonged, which was very rewarding to hear,” she said.