By Jim Hinton - Special Guest Contributor

“This We’ll Defend.” “Honor, Courage, Commitment.” “Semper Fidelis.” “Aim High.”

These are the mottos our military service members all follow as they fight for our nation. They deploy to the hotspots of our world. They head out to exercises and drills. They step out the front door in the morning and engage in the day to day tasks needed to maintain their readiness for the fight.

As a military spouse you, too, are engaged in readiness training as well. You may not be maintaining the engine of a tank, or standing watch in the engine room, or out on the runway refueling fast-movers, but you are still a part of the military team. When your spouse steps out that doorway, whether for a day, a week, or a year, you are the one maintaining the home front, and keeping it in readiness for their return.

Unfortunately not all of those returns find your spouse hardy and hale, ready to go back to the business of defending our nation tomorrow morning. In thirteen years of fighting approximately 2.5 million of our soldiers, sailors, and airmen have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of those, somewhere around 675,000 have some form of disability. For many of these injured soldiers a disability is a sudden career ender.

I’m one of them. An Army Aviation trooper, I earned my Stetson and Spurs in Afghanistan. I came home from my third combat deployment expecting to continue on towards my twenty year letter after a little bit of post deployment leave. Instead, a doctor at Darnell Army Medical Center informed me that my career was over. The lingering cold I had brought back from Kandahar was no mere cough. It was permanent lung damage, and the exhaustion my difficult breathing was causing would never go away. Within a short time I was out-processed, enrolled with the VA, and receiving a monthly stipend as compensation.

This unfortunate experience quickly brought me to the awareness of something neither I nor my wife had ever had occasion to worry about. We, like so many other military families, had never made plans for a career ending injury. We were confident that we would go all the way to twenty, or maybe even thirty, and enjoy a well-deserved retirement. Instead, we found ourselves suddenly thrust into the civilian world without any plans or preparation and living on a fraction of what we had become accustomed to.

We did make it in the end. I used the many excellent opportunities offered to me, such as my GI Bill benefits and the VR&E program. I was able to get a decent job where my lung damage was not a significant impediment, and now I and my family live comfortably, settled into our civilian life. But it took three years to get there, and those were three long, hard, and avoidable years.

It’s not something talked about much, but stories like this do happen with far greater frequency than anyone cares to admit. The important thing is that they do not have to happen. As the military spouse you have the opportunity and power to be the Plan B that takes over should your service member’s career come to a sudden end thanks to an injury.

As the spouse you often find yourself responsible for handling the day to day finances so that your service member can focus on the deployment or exercise at hand. As such you have the opportunity to prepare a buffer. Set aside a set amount every month. We all have USAA banking available, use it to set up a savings account with an automatic transfer, then sit on it.

If you were to save $200 a month, in five years you could have almost $5,000 in the bank. Added to disability payments that could give you three months of padding towards reestablishing your family in the civilian world. After ten years and with interest? $12,000. That’s a comfortable half of a year. And if you go career and never have to face injury? Imagine starting your retirement with somewhere around $40,000 in the bank.

Stocking funds away into a bank account makes for a nice buffer zone. Unfortunately, buffer zones aren’t unlimited, and there’s the chance that, like happened with me, the injury can last longer than the buffer zone. Unfortunately you could find yourself out of funds before your veteran can become fully established in a job sufficient to provide for the family.

Part of family readiness that you can provide as the military spouse is the ability to take over as the primary income if it becomes necessary. There are a number of programs out there available to military spouses that will allow you to obtain certifications and degrees you can utilize to find work sufficient to support you, your service member, and your family for as long as it takes. The military may not give briefings about these programs for you, but they exist.

Just a few examples of the programs you can utilize include STAP and MyCAA. Both are readily available to provide funding to help you, as a spouse, obtain your degree while your service member is still in and healthy, allowing you to prepare to be Plan B. Salute to Spouses has a page listing and describing a number of these programs, as well as offering its own scholarship to help out.

Of course, being a military spouse you have to worry about a PCS every two to three years. This may seem to be an obstacle to obtaining the education you need even with the funds from the above programs. Will your credits transfer to an institution near your new station? Are you going to have to move during a semester?

Fortunately, these days many accredited institutions offer full degrees online. Salute to Spouse’s scholarship is useful for the online program at Bryant & Stratton, for example allowing you to get a BA in Accounting, Business Admin, or Health Services Admin.

The important thing is that you have multiple options to receive the education you need to be able to be Plan B. As much as we hope your spouse comes home safe and sound, the chance that they could return home with a career ending injury is quite real. Just as your soldier, sailor, or airman needs to be focused on operational readiness you need to be focused on family readiness. Pray for the best, but prepare for the worst. To paraphrase Chaplain Forgy, “Praise the Lord and pass the education.” It’s one of the most important things you can do as a military spouse.