U.S. service members ordinarily have to say goodbye to their family as they head out for deployments, but one recent deployment allowed a brother and sister to reunite after 10 years of separation.
Air Force Tech. Sgt. Mary Jane Palumbo and her brother, Army Staff Sgt. Quincy Mora, met outside a military air terminal in Southwest Asia for a couple of hours when Mora was on his way to a location closer to the fight.
Both brother and sister are currently deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Palumbo, an aviation resource manager with the Vermont Air National Guard’s 134th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, last saw her brother when he was on his way home from his first tour in Iraq.
She was vacationing in Hawaii when he stopped for a layover en route to their hometown of Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia.
Palumbo and Mora, an AH-64 Apache mechanic deployed from Fort Lewis, Washington, were born and raised in Micronesia along with their nine other brothers and sisters.
Close Family
The family was big, but they were close, Palumbo said. They all lived in one house with her grandmother growing up, and although there were separate rooms for the adults, the children would spread out in the living room with sheets and blankets at night.
“For most Americans when you’re 18, you’re an adult, you move out,” she said. “For us it doesn’t matter. We can still live together even if you are married with kids; we still are really close.”
Growing up in such a close family added to the difficulty of leaving for basic training, but Palumbo said she wanted to test herself and see if could succeed in the military.
That is why she joined the Army directly after high school.
Although it was hard to leave her family, she said it was an exciting new experience. But she knew she had to make a change when she decided to start a family of her own.
“I had my oldest son and I didn’t really want to move around that much with the baby, so that is why I got out [of the active-duty military],” Palumbo said. “Then, I moved to Vermont, and that’s when I joined the Vermont Air National Guard.”
The Air National Guard gave Palumbo the stability she felt she needed to raise a family and the kind of support structure she had growing up in Pohnpei.
“The guard, they take care of you and your family,” she said.
Even though she decided to plant new roots in Vermont, Palumbo said keeping in touch with her extended family is important to her.
That is why she called up her brother last summer to make plans to meet for Christmas. Unfortunately, he was tasked to deploy.
It was not until November 2015, when Palumbo herself was tasked for deployment that she realized this set of unlikely circumstances was destined to reunite brother and sister after ten years apart.