Q&A with Mrs. Bonnie Amos
Military Spouse Champion
WINTER 2018
ThanksUSA Board Member Bonnie Amos was born and raised in Pensacola, Florida, where she met her Marine Corps fighter pilot husband, General James F. Amos, USMC (Ret). During his 45-year career, their family, including a son and daughter, relocated 30 times to 20 different locations. During this time, she held a career in banking and real estate investment. She served as the First Lady of the Marine Corps from 2010 until her husband retired in 2014. She is a strong supporter of military family advocacy, serves as an advisor to Hiring our Heroes and Charlotte BridgeHome, and also serves on the board of the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund/America’s Fund. Q: How did you prepare your children and household for your 30 relocations? Moving often means upheaval and uncertainty for everyone in the household, most especially the children and the family pets. Jim and I tried to make moving cross country or overseas an adventure, planting seeds of the unknown and its excitement. Q: What do you believe are the greatest challenges faced by our military families? Military families live with the reality that on any given normal day their lives could suddenly be very abnormal. An unscheduled deployment, a training accident, a natural disaster in some part of the world that requires our military’s assistance, can turn lives upside down in the blink of an eye. For some, being a long way from home is a difficult transition that can cause a lot of turmoil in families. Money, or lack of it, can cause so many stressors that put pressures on families that lead to unplanned consequences. The varied challenges can “grow one up” or just as easily break one down. Q: Tell us how you became involved in military family advocacy. My husband was a lieutenant colonel at the time. He had taken command of an F18 squadron that received the mission for a six-month cruise on an aircraft carrier. Prior to that, my involvement was limited in command activities. However, during this command I invited spouses over for taco salad and margaritas, and we discussed issues and solutions, broke into call groups, and tackled the need for information flow and assistance. It was during this time, that I stopped thinking about how could I make this easier on me and started thinking about how could I make this easier on our families. In other words, I fell in love with our spouses, which was something I’d never felt before. That love and the need to provide information to families is what propelled me for the remainder of Jim’s career in the Marine Corps. Q: During your time as the First Lady of the Marine Corps, what common strengths and attributes did you find in military families? While I must have known it intuitively, it became clear when meeting so many spouses from all ranks and all services that WE ARE AN AWESOME GROUP OF PEOPLE. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons, entrepreneurial, creative, educated, determined NOT to fail, not taking NO for an answer, a sense of adventure, a drive to succeed, fire in the belly for LIFE, for love of their family, and for their country… I so admire military families and especially military spouses. They are the unsung heroes of the successes of our active-duty members! Q: In your opinion, what measures should be taken to close the education and employment gaps faced by military spouses? I think it will take congressional mandates and perhaps a change in laws. Just as companies receive tax benefits for hiring Veterans, companies will pay much greater attention to the military spouse population when that employer can benefit directly to their bottom line. There’s no one more loyal, more committed and more grateful when given an opportunity to succeed than our military families. Q: Tell us about your advisory role in Hiring Our Heroes. Hiring Our Heroes has afforded me the opportunity to advocate in a more public and sustaining way for military spouses. In this role, I am able to educate employers about their many positive attributes and contributions to our country, and to discuss the lack of sustainable, portable, and viable employment for so many spouses. I am able to speak with military spouses from all over, offer them hope, and be their voice of opportunity. Q: As a Board Member for ThanksUSA, what would you like to help accomplish? Being a ThanksUSA Board Member is truly an honor for me. At the risk of sounding lofty, I’d like to bring more awareness to the services that ThanksUSA is offering to military families. In raising awareness for more scholarship offerings comes the need to increase the donor base. The Pathways for Patriots program is visionary in its focus and offers educational and employment opportunities in high demand, huge industry growth areas. All of which lead to success for our military spouses and children. 
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