Families say goodbye as troops sail to faraway shores

Blake Parker’s eyes filled with tears Saturday as he watched his father, Navy munitions specialist Jason Parker, sail away on yet another deployment into the unknown.

“Daddy, daddy,” the 4-year-old sobbed as his grandmother Jackie Parker, a high school English teacher from Yuma, Ariz., scooped him into her arms.

She held the boy and continued to wave an American flag as the amphibious assault ship Peleliu pulled away from the 32nd Street Naval Station in San Diego. Jason Parker, 32, is making his fourth overseas deployment.

Up and down the pier, parents tried to comfort children.

“Daddy will be fine,” Chafaril Jimenez, 29, told her daughters Ariana, 2, and Jasmine, 5, as their father, machinist mate Herman Jimenez, left on his fifth deployment. “He can e-mail us as often as he can. And we can e-mail him back.”

A study presented last week at the Navy and Marine Corps Combat & Operational Stress Control Conference in San Diego suggested that many children retain a sense of anxiety and uncertainty long after the return of a deployed parent.

The Peleliu was the last of three ships to depart for the six-month training mission with allied nations in the Western Pacific. The docking ships Pearl Harbor and Dubuque left last week; the three ships carry more than 3,000 sailors and Marines.

If ordered, the ships will put their combat troops — from Camp Pendleton’s 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit — ashore, possibly for transit to Afghanistan.

Haley Hubbard, 24, learned Friday that she is pregnant. As her fiance, Marine Lance Cpl. Cory Scott-Willardson, 20, a helicopter mechanic, waved goodbye from the Peleliu’s flight deck, she talked of the difference between military families and civilian families since Sept. 11, 2001.

“We have kids, lives, families, just like they do,” she said. “But we have to deal with a parent being gone for months at a time. Civilian families can’t imagine what that’s like.”

Ivy Yeoman, 25, whose husband made three deployments to Iraq, is hoping this deployment will be less stressful for her and their children, Mason, 3, and Taylor, 6. When Sgt. Clifford Yeoman, 26, was in Iraq, she worried constantly about him being injured or worse.

“Every time the doorbell rang, or somebody knocked on the door, I thought, ‘Please God, don’t let it be that,’ ” she said as the Peleliu slipped from view.

tony.perry@latimes.com