Molly’s husband is one of 4,700 military medical personnel who have deployed for COVID-relief purposes since March 2020 (another 5,100 have deployed to aid vaccination efforts). They are doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and administrative workers, and they’ve shown up at 81 hospitals in 60 cities, in 19 states and the Navajo Nation. My husband is training to join them. As an internal-medicine resident at a Navy facility, he won’t be eligible to deploy until 2023 at the earliest, but these days he is frequently in close contact with contagious COVID patients. His colleagues are similarly exposed, especially the hospital nurses and attending physicians. We’ve spent the past 18 months watching our friends work impossibly hard at home, only to see many of them sent far away as the coronavirus spirals out of control in areas with low vaccination rates. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that, by refusing to do something as simple as getting a shot, people are taking advantage of the military community’s altruism. Families like Molly’s, and mine, want to serve our country and care for people in need. But deployments to help people who have decided not to help themselves or their communities—and who simultaneously claim to be patriots—can leave us feeling conflicted…

“I remember the vivid moment he told me” he was redeploying, says Jennifer, a former Army spouse, of her husband’s COVID mission. He’d been home from his previous deployment for only 18 months, and she had just started to get their daughter to trust that he was going to come home after taking a run. “Of course, I got upset and cried,” she told me. But she also felt confident that he was the perfect person for the job. Their family had already been sick with the virus, and his specialty as a nephrologist made him a valuable asset for treating this particular disease. Still, the goodbye was hard, and the deployment had no clear end date. It was early in the pandemic, and Jennifer had two children at home, but without the typical support systems. No family visits or babysitters or special activities. The kids got clingier, “which is fair,” she said, “but not being able to take a shower by yourself … My escape was putting [them] to bed and then just watching Netflix.” When she looks back on that time, “I definitely do not feel like I was a victim,” she said. “I definitely supported all of his deployments. But I can’t lie … It’s a sacrifice for the family.” Earlier this year, Jennifer’s husband left the military. “No deployments was a perk,” she said.